and one of their rants is that global warming is part of a plot to eliminate American sovereignty
Well there are a lot of leftists that feel exactly that. That's the thing. They write about it, discuss it openly, hell, have you ever watched Star Trek?
I'm no big enviro fan, for sure, but I think the article summary takes what he's talking about completely out of context. I think the point he was making was that humans, as a group, are not making what he feels to be good decisions. He's not advocating an overthrow of democracy per se as much as he is just decrying that in a democracy radical change is just slow. It's a nuanced position, not a radical one.
I'm running for Emperor of the United States. As Emperor, I would replace both the Congress and Executive Branch, and I will have the following limited powers
a) The ability to raise or lower taxes to a maximum of 15% of GDP, such that no one will be required to work more than 15% of their lives per year to satisfy my tax. I will also be allowed to engage government workers and prison convicts in monument building to my person, as I see fit.
b) The power to spend that money as I see fit, be it entitlements, military, foreign aid, bribes, whatever. I am also allowed to accept bribes and rename various geographical features after myself.
c) I will be able to pardon anyone as I need to.
d) The power to make treaties and present them to the people
e) The power to regulate commerce between the states.
The judiciary function would remain independent.
I will expressly not be allowed to make any law that:
a) Bans guns, speech, or the possession of most private property, b) Bans certain intoxicating substances, acts of religious expression, requires the death penalty.
Nor will I be allowed to:
a) Withhold the pay of, harrass, or otherwise intimidate members of the judiciary. I will not be able to arrest, search, or electronically eavesdrop on anyone without agreement from the judiciary.
b) Make treaties, declare war, or borrow money against the credit of the United States, except by permission in a national, popular vote.
So there, I would be Emperor, you would not be allowed to vote for me, but, you would have more rights.
That, there's a ton of families out there ruined by abusive jerks with drug problems that probably should be behind bars for life or at least taken out of society. On the other hand, copying movies is entirely without physical consequence, doesn't disrupt job performance, and carries with it no social safety problems or cost.
Now sure, if you want to compare efficacy, yeah, you would be right. It's awfully hard to ban drugs when people want them. In that case, then, the argument would be that if we legalized drugs, it would do nothing to actually lower the use any more than making free material out there has lowered the volume of available songs. If anything, despite there being a legal market for music, there's more illegal music out there today than there ever was, and the legal channel just bleeds into the illegal one. Same argument goes, incidentally, for guns... if you can't ban something that is consumed once, like drugs, how will you actually ban a re-usable item like a gun?
But, it goes against the idea of the content neutrality. Essentially, I would like, if I subscribed to FIOS, to have a preferred site package where I could go to any site I wanted, for sure, but those sites with paywalls would get a cut just as cable does today. I think this would be awesome. If they had like a conservative pack, a liberal pack, then I think it would be better for everyone.
Man, back in the good old days, when kids were ten, they went into the mills and the mines. Or on the ships. They were the ones that lit the fuses and ran because they were the smallest. They helped bring back lunch and stuff and they learned how to grow up to be real and hardy men. Now look at us.
Repeal child labor laws before this present moral degradation is too late! I'm building a toy coal mine for my four year old in my backyard! We're going to play Black Lung and Cave In.
DMZ basically bought Chrysler because they Chrysler with a looming rear wheel drive and semi-luxury brand that threatened everything DMZ was trying to do with Mercedes in the middle market. Chrysler also had a ton of money in the bank and so DMZ basically took the cash and spent it. The Bush administration should have -never- approved this sale.
CCM stuck the fork in it. CCM has never had a good reputation as a firm that wanted to build anything. What CCM tried to do was basically halt Chrysler's development, which is why they have no new product out there right now, and then, sell it to someone else. It was, for them, like buying something on ebay and selling it again. If CCM were serious about Chrysler, they might have invested in new product development and they simply didn't. Look at how many stories leaked about CCM trying to unload the company. Fiat was always in play but there was also a lot of speculation and conversations with GM.
These days most private equity firms are basically vultures - I offer case in point, Chrysler Corporation. They buy out a firm, gut it, wreck it, and then try and unload a few pieces. Rarely does a private equity firm actually ever improve that which it buys.
You know I'm not exactly down with the gratuitous of a lot of the stuff in society today - either sexual or violent, but, to just go and say video games are bad is entirely wrong.
My pre-school son is autistic, and one of the most helpful things that I ever did with him was to get him to play Lego Star Wars. First, we worked on the basic controller stuff, up, down, left, and right, and jump, and from that he was able to make the verbal connection between the play and he learned to not only do the controller, but could also communicate directions. Building on that, I worked on teaching him how to describe different things in the game, like colors, sounds, and from there, characters. Cut scenes proved to be really useful in getting him to be able to relate stories as to what was taking place. He's learning to share, and to ask for help, and to ask to do things, and get this, he's even learning how to give directions himself. He can ask to go back to Mos Eisely spaceport when he doesn't like a board. He's starting to understand money and getting better with saving and counting as we spent a weekend saving up to buy the Emperor. He's solving puzzles and he can describe situations where he gets stuck, and he can respond now to verbal cues in response. I can say "you have to jump on that platform and build this thing to climb up", and he will. He's learning bonding, as we sit next each other on a big beanbag the whole time we're playing. We're even getting into some of the moral lessons in the tale. Darth Vader was first a good guy, then became a bad guy, then became a good guy, so he's kinda getting the idea that there is redemption through action, and he's understanding some of the themes of helping your friends. And, honestly, its been a great spring board for me to engage him in his activities and at his level. I can sit down with him and do toy soldiers in the sandbox for four hours and really enjoy it.
Are there downsides? Sure... he lightsabers the dog too much and he gets carried away when he has to fight the bad guys in socially inappropriate situations. But, if you take the thing as a whole, I'd say my son is infinitely better off with Lego Star Wars and Lego Indiana Jones and the XBOX 360 than he ever would have been with just traditional instruction. Video games let you learn by doing, bond by sharing, and he's doing just that, and that's helped him grow as a person. If you are willing to blow hundreds of hours playing video games with your children, it will be one of the best things that you've ever done.
as do many other people, so before you spout stuff off, you should check!
But, with that said, what would happen is that some farms would go belly up, there would be consolidation, and the price of food, particularly corn, would go up. Indeed, you haven't even considered the notion that sans federal government, farm states could form a food cartel like OPEC, and could use the cost difference to make up the difference in price for medical insurance.
Would it cause problems, sure? But I bet plenty of states, to my point, see the federal government the way some guys see their ex-wives. She was nice sometimes to have around, but pretty much a whore and likely better off without them.
Be funny if that happened. Nothing left but the Republican States with no money coming in.
Republican States have all the manufacturing, mining and food, and also local balanced budgets. Sure, there's the talk of "transfer" payments from the North to the South, but the bulk of that is in federal entitlements and the Red States do not even want them.
What - if you were familiar with economics [wikipedia.org] and macro economics [wikipedia.org] - isn't necessarily such a bad thing.
It's "merits" aren't up for debate. It's the oft made claim that the "Bush war killed the Federal Budget". The fact is, entitlements killed the Federal Budget. Even if you completely killed the US Military, all 700B of it, got rid of all of our commitments to our allies, got rid of all of it, we would still have a 300B budget deficit, due to entitlements.
It's not just the "War on Terror." It's all the wars. We face no external threats, militarily speaking. It's time for us to discard our empire.
I agree with that, but in order to do that, free trade has to go. The whole reason we have the empire is to have free trade.
Now, I happen to think free trade is stupid... at least as our government thinks "free" is when it defines trade, but, without our empire, we get stuff like pirates and rogue states attacking everywhere, not just off of africa. transatlantic air traffic would stop and maritime traffic could only be done by armed merchantman.
A big portion of our bleeding economy is flowing out the giant bullet hole labeled "War against terror." and if we just stopped a _single_ _war_ that we're involved with we'd have a ton of money to put towards all sorts of stuff.
The USA spends twice as much money on entitlements as it does on the entire US military.
What has done Obama (and late Bush as well),is the simple fact that entitlements have exploded at the same time corporate profits have eroded. Yeah, the US military is up there, and Obama does bury the war now in the DoD budget proper, but have a look at outlays for everything from student loans, to medicare, to social services.... its increased enormously. I mean, Obama actually gets a nearly 150B break from TARP repayments, and Bush actually paid out 700B to TARP, and Obama is still over a trillion in the whole, and, at the rate of growth of entitlements, even if you completely surrendered the wars and cut the military in half, we would still be 700B in hock, and more, every year.
Go ahead and have a look - how much is out there for disability, old age retirement, medicare... even student loans have gone bezerk..
At the rate we're racking up debt, it's very possible that America won't exist in a couple of decades, at least not financially, and certainly not as we know it...
Well, the states might exist, but, the United States as the compact between them might not. I mean, you might get some states that look at the debt the federal gov't imposes on them and simply find it worthwhile to leave the union to avoid the bills.
It's only a pyramid scheme if America ceases to exist.
IT's a pyramid scheme because it depends on the activity of new workers to pay for old ones. Because there are not enough new workers, social security, like many other entitlements, is imploding.
It -could- have not been a pyramid scheme had the USA not embarked on almost 50 years of free trade madness. Because of free trade, the USA had to continuously devalue the dollar to stay at least somewhat in the game, and would devalue again, if the asians weren't foolishly buying as many of them as can be printed. So... savings values face a constant erosion, people look for growth stocks to compensate, more money flows overseas, the dollar is devalued more to compensate, repeat loop, and the country gets gutted.
I sometimes wax for the simplicity and deep understanding of the machines that I grew up with, but, the fact is, today's PCs just do more. They aren't just faster and more memory, they are also that much more complex. Sure, the instruction set of AMD64 is not that much more than the instruction set of an older machine, but that's only because its suffficiently well organized between opcodes and address modes that you can learn it. But after that, there's the whole peripheral story. How many people -really- want to know the ins and outs of how a PC Express bus works. Or USB. Forget video cards - what about sound cards. Even with data sheets programming a driver is a tremendous challenge.
And that's just at a hardware level. I mean, seriously, it wasn't that uncommon for people to write line editor or field editors for 8 bit machines or even for DOS text mode, but that's because everything was fixed width and height and you controlled everything, even the cursor. Nowadays, I doubt there's but a handful of genuine home grown edit controls for GUI environments - everyone just uses the widget that comes with it, and for good reason - they are mind boggingly complex for such a seemingly simple thing. You have to know about the current font, the events with the mouse, keyboard...you could easily blow a 1000 lines of code on it.
This brings a certain irony to the cries of "socialism!" by those who oppose health care reform.
Well, its more than an irony. In order to maximize a marketplace, you have to have liquid commodities, and insurance policies are not liquid in any sense. You can't effectively compare offerings by any carriers pound for pound, you can't really shop for coverage anyway, if you are an employee, and so really, there is no market for health insurance at all.
The most sane reform that could be done would be for the government to step in and create coverage commodities, end the association between employer and employee, mandate that everyone carries insurance just as a sheer basic responsibility, put some reasonable caps on medical malpractice cases and then step in with some modest help for those people that can't afford it.
In other news, Apple successfully trademarked iAustralia, and is headed off to world court to demand that the country of Australia change its name because it infringes. Australian representatives cried fowl over Apple providing fully loaded iPods to judges and iPads for use during trial.
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and one of their rants is that global warming is part of a plot to eliminate American sovereignty
Well there are a lot of leftists that feel exactly that. That's the thing. They write about it, discuss it openly, hell, have you ever watched Star Trek?
I'm no big enviro fan, for sure, but I think the article summary takes what he's talking about completely out of context. I think the point he was making was that humans, as a group, are not making what he feels to be good decisions. He's not advocating an overthrow of democracy per se as much as he is just decrying that in a democracy radical change is just slow. It's a nuanced position, not a radical one.
I'm running for Emperor of the United States. As Emperor, I would replace both the Congress and Executive Branch, and I will have the following limited powers
a) The ability to raise or lower taxes to a maximum of 15% of GDP, such that no one will be required to work more than 15% of their lives per year to satisfy my tax. I will also be allowed to engage government workers and prison convicts in monument building to my person, as I see fit.
b) The power to spend that money as I see fit, be it entitlements, military, foreign aid, bribes, whatever. I am also allowed to accept bribes and rename various geographical features after myself.
c) I will be able to pardon anyone as I need to.
d) The power to make treaties and present them to the people
e) The power to regulate commerce between the states.
The judiciary function would remain independent.
I will expressly not be allowed to make any law that:
a) Bans guns, speech, or the possession of most private property,
b) Bans certain intoxicating substances, acts of religious expression, requires the death penalty.
Nor will I be allowed to:
a) Withhold the pay of, harrass, or otherwise intimidate members of the judiciary. I will not be able to arrest, search, or electronically eavesdrop on anyone without agreement from the judiciary.
b) Make treaties, declare war, or borrow money against the credit of the United States, except by permission in a national, popular vote.
So there, I would be Emperor, you would not be allowed to vote for me, but, you would have more rights.
That, there's a ton of families out there ruined by abusive jerks with drug problems that probably should be behind bars for life or at least taken out of society. On the other hand, copying movies is entirely without physical consequence, doesn't disrupt job performance, and carries with it no social safety problems or cost.
Now sure, if you want to compare efficacy, yeah, you would be right. It's awfully hard to ban drugs when people want them. In that case, then, the argument would be that if we legalized drugs, it would do nothing to actually lower the use any more than making free material out there has lowered the volume of available songs. If anything, despite there being a legal market for music, there's more illegal music out there today than there ever was, and the legal channel just bleeds into the illegal one. Same argument goes, incidentally, for guns... if you can't ban something that is consumed once, like drugs, how will you actually ban a re-usable item like a gun?
Look, if you want to hire me to be anti-anything, and want to write a big enough check, I'll sell out.
Software is engineering. Cryptography is research.
But, it goes against the idea of the content neutrality. Essentially, I would like, if I subscribed to FIOS, to have a preferred site package where I could go to any site I wanted, for sure, but those sites with paywalls would get a cut just as cable does today. I think this would be awesome. If they had like a conservative pack, a liberal pack, then I think it would be better for everyone.
Man, back in the good old days, when kids were ten, they went into the mills and the mines. Or on the ships. They were the ones that lit the fuses and ran because they were the smallest. They helped bring back lunch and stuff and they learned how to grow up to be real and hardy men. Now look at us.
Repeal child labor laws before this present moral degradation is too late! I'm building a toy coal mine for my four year old in my backyard! We're going to play Black Lung and Cave In.
I never said Daimler bought Chrysler to ruin it.
I did.
Yeah, DMZ bought Chrysler certainly to ruin it.
DMZ basically bought Chrysler because they Chrysler with a looming rear wheel drive and semi-luxury brand that threatened everything DMZ was trying to do with Mercedes in the middle market. Chrysler also had a ton of money in the bank and so DMZ basically took the cash and spent it. The Bush administration should have -never- approved this sale.
CCM stuck the fork in it. CCM has never had a good reputation as a firm that wanted to build anything. What CCM tried to do was basically halt Chrysler's development, which is why they have no new product out there right now, and then, sell it to someone else. It was, for them, like buying something on ebay and selling it again. If CCM were serious about Chrysler, they might have invested in new product development and they simply didn't. Look at how many stories leaked about CCM trying to unload the company. Fiat was always in play but there was also a lot of speculation and conversations with GM.
These days most private equity firms are basically vultures - I offer case in point, Chrysler Corporation. They buy out a firm, gut it, wreck it, and then try and unload a few pieces. Rarely does a private equity firm actually ever improve that which it buys.
You know I'm not exactly down with the gratuitous of a lot of the stuff in society today - either sexual or violent, but, to just go and say video games are bad is entirely wrong.
My pre-school son is autistic, and one of the most helpful things that I ever did with him was to get him to play Lego Star Wars. First, we worked on the basic controller stuff, up, down, left, and right, and jump, and from that he was able to make the verbal connection between the play and he learned to not only do the controller, but could also communicate directions. Building on that, I worked on teaching him how to describe different things in the game, like colors, sounds, and from there, characters. Cut scenes proved to be really useful in getting him to be able to relate stories as to what was taking place. He's learning to share, and to ask for help, and to ask to do things, and get this, he's even learning how to give directions himself. He can ask to go back to Mos Eisely spaceport when he doesn't like a board. He's starting to understand money and getting better with saving and counting as we spent a weekend saving up to buy the Emperor. He's solving puzzles and he can describe situations where he gets stuck, and he can respond now to verbal cues in response. I can say "you have to jump on that platform and build this thing to climb up", and he will. He's learning bonding, as we sit next each other on a big beanbag the whole time we're playing. We're even getting into some of the moral lessons in the tale. Darth Vader was first a good guy, then became a bad guy, then became a good guy, so he's kinda getting the idea that there is redemption through action, and he's understanding some of the themes of helping your friends. And, honestly, its been a great spring board for me to engage him in his activities and at his level. I can sit down with him and do toy soldiers in the sandbox for four hours and really enjoy it.
Are there downsides? Sure... he lightsabers the dog too much and he gets carried away when he has to fight the bad guys in socially inappropriate situations. But, if you take the thing as a whole, I'd say my son is infinitely better off with Lego Star Wars and Lego Indiana Jones and the XBOX 360 than he ever would have been with just traditional instruction. Video games let you learn by doing, bond by sharing, and he's doing just that, and that's helped him grow as a person. If you are willing to blow hundreds of hours playing video games with your children, it will be one of the best things that you've ever done.
I highly recommend it.
Suspend Medicare and the farm bill (far and away two of the biggest entitlements), and watch what happens
Facts, again, do not help you. The annual farm subsidy isn't anywhere close to near the size you think. Again, I have the US Budget online,
http://www.mightyware.com/federalbudget.bhs
as do many other people, so before you spout stuff off, you should check!
But, with that said, what would happen is that some farms would go belly up, there would be consolidation, and the price of food, particularly corn, would go up. Indeed, you haven't even considered the notion that sans federal government, farm states could form a food cartel like OPEC, and could use the cost difference to make up the difference in price for medical insurance.
Would it cause problems, sure? But I bet plenty of states, to my point, see the federal government the way some guys see their ex-wives. She was nice sometimes to have around, but pretty much a whore and likely better off without them.
Put in a couple of bad guys in there, add some gratuitous sex scenes, and you got yourself a best-seller!
Sounds like a good plan!
Be funny if that happened. Nothing left but the Republican States with no money coming in.
Republican States have all the manufacturing, mining and food, and also local balanced budgets. Sure, there's the talk of "transfer" payments from the North to the South, but the bulk of that is in federal entitlements and the Red States do not even want them.
What - if you were familiar with economics [wikipedia.org] and macro economics [wikipedia.org] - isn't necessarily such a bad thing.
It's "merits" aren't up for debate. It's the oft made claim that the "Bush war killed the Federal Budget". The fact is, entitlements killed the Federal Budget. Even if you completely killed the US Military, all 700B of it, got rid of all of our commitments to our allies, got rid of all of it, we would still have a 300B budget deficit, due to entitlements.
It's not just the "War on Terror." It's all the wars. We face no external threats, militarily speaking. It's time for us to discard our empire.
I agree with that, but in order to do that, free trade has to go. The whole reason we have the empire is to have free trade.
Now, I happen to think free trade is stupid... at least as our government thinks "free" is when it defines trade, but, without our empire, we get stuff like pirates and rogue states attacking everywhere, not just off of africa. transatlantic air traffic would stop and maritime traffic could only be done by armed merchantman.
A big portion of our bleeding economy is flowing out the giant bullet hole labeled "War against terror." and if we just stopped a _single_ _war_ that we're involved with we'd have a ton of money to put towards all sorts of stuff.
The USA spends twice as much money on entitlements as it does on the entire US military.
http://www.mightyware.com/federalbudget.bhs
And thanks for clearing up why you're so uninformed
I have the entire US budget down to every gory detail online at my web site.
http://www.mightyware.com/federalbudget.bhs
What has done Obama (and late Bush as well),is the simple fact that entitlements have exploded at the same time corporate profits have eroded. Yeah, the US military is up there, and Obama does bury the war now in the DoD budget proper, but have a look at outlays for everything from student loans, to medicare, to social services.... its increased enormously. I mean, Obama actually gets a nearly 150B break from TARP repayments, and Bush actually paid out 700B to TARP, and Obama is still over a trillion in the whole, and, at the rate of growth of entitlements, even if you completely surrendered the wars and cut the military in half, we would still be 700B in hock, and more, every year.
Go ahead and have a look - how much is out there for disability, old age retirement, medicare... even student loans have gone bezerk..
At the rate we're racking up debt, it's very possible that America won't exist in a couple of decades, at least not financially, and certainly not as we know it...
Well, the states might exist, but, the United States as the compact between them might not. I mean, you might get some states that look at the debt the federal gov't imposes on them and simply find it worthwhile to leave the union to avoid the bills.
It's only a pyramid scheme if America ceases to exist.
IT's a pyramid scheme because it depends on the activity of new workers to pay for old ones. Because there are not enough new workers, social security, like many other entitlements, is imploding.
It -could- have not been a pyramid scheme had the USA not embarked on almost 50 years of free trade madness. Because of free trade, the USA had to continuously devalue the dollar to stay at least somewhat in the game, and would devalue again, if the asians weren't foolishly buying as many of them as can be printed. So... savings values face a constant erosion, people look for growth stocks to compensate, more money flows overseas, the dollar is devalued more to compensate, repeat loop, and the country gets gutted.
I sometimes wax for the simplicity and deep understanding of the machines that I grew up with, but, the fact is, today's PCs just do more. They aren't just faster and more memory, they are also that much more complex. Sure, the instruction set of AMD64 is not that much more than the instruction set of an older machine, but that's only because its suffficiently well organized between opcodes and address modes that you can learn it. But after that, there's the whole peripheral story. How many people -really- want to know the ins and outs of how a PC Express bus works. Or USB. Forget video cards - what about sound cards. Even with data sheets programming a driver is a tremendous challenge.
And that's just at a hardware level. I mean, seriously, it wasn't that uncommon for people to write line editor or field editors for 8 bit machines or even for DOS text mode, but that's because everything was fixed width and height and you controlled everything, even the cursor. Nowadays, I doubt there's but a handful of genuine home grown edit controls for GUI environments - everyone just uses the widget that comes with it, and for good reason - they are mind boggingly complex for such a seemingly simple thing. You have to know about the current font, the events with the mouse, keyboard...you could easily blow a 1000 lines of code on it.
This brings a certain irony to the cries of "socialism!" by those who oppose health care reform.
Well, its more than an irony. In order to maximize a marketplace, you have to have liquid commodities, and insurance policies are not liquid in any sense. You can't effectively compare offerings by any carriers pound for pound, you can't really shop for coverage anyway, if you are an employee, and so really, there is no market for health insurance at all.
The most sane reform that could be done would be for the government to step in and create coverage commodities, end the association between employer and employee, mandate that everyone carries insurance just as a sheer basic responsibility, put some reasonable caps on medical malpractice cases and then step in with some modest help for those people that can't afford it.
Spacecraft have sensors that pick up electromagnetic signatures of nearby spacecraft.
Put in a couple of relays in there, add some emitters with a dash of a core breach, and you got yourself a TNG Trek writer!
In other news, Apple successfully trademarked iAustralia, and is headed off to world court to demand that the country of Australia change its name because it infringes. Australian representatives cried fowl over Apple providing fully loaded iPods to judges and iPads for use during trial.