I bought a Dell laptop for $700 that included a business warranty. I sent two tickets complaining about a screen defect, provided a picture, and the next day a technician was sent to my location and swapped out the part in less than an hour.
If you don't want to spend the extra $100 on the business warranty, it might take a couple days to get a replacement part. But you can buy a machine with with a three year accidental replacement on-site warranty for far less than you can get a similarly specced Apple product with AppleCare. Even if you pay $350 for the AppleCare for your MacBook Pro, they don't send on-site technicians. You still have to go make a reservation at an Apple Store, talk to a purple haircut who revels in informing you that you'll have to send your $2500 laptop off for repair, and maybe it will be back in a few weeks.
Your best bet is to go to an independent Apple Repair Center. At least they give a shit, and get the part overnighted and your laptop operable within 24 hours.
You'd think that paying $1,200 for a Core 2 Duo laptop would get you some actual customer service. But you'd be wrong.
Iran's elections are a sham. Candidates are vetted and that way opposition politticians of repute, specially if they are reformists, can't compete fairly.
And that differs from the US political elections how?
And to call Iran's regime leftist frankly beggers belief.
I didn't say the current government was leftist. I was referring to the dozen or so governments we overthrew in the Western Hemisphere who had elected left leaning governments.
Saddam Hussein had a socialist state -- read the 1970 Iraqi Constitution -- but was supported because of the political situation involving Iran and Russia. Iran in 1953 had a left leaning democratic government that was trying to get a fairer shake for the oil resources under their feet. So that government was thrown out in a coup backed by the US and Britain, and the police state installed to protect American and British interests was overthrown in 1979. The new Iranian state does have some socialist elements -- national resources belonging to the people -- and many rightist revolutionary elements, like hardline Islamic hawks who do control vast parts of the political machine. In any case, it's far more legitimate than Egypt or Saudi Arabia and many other states we have backed in the past.
As if companies had incentives to lie. It's a good thing they don't, or we'd need some sort of third party to make sure they didn't rip anybody off. Where the hell would we get one of those?
Iran has elections, but doesn't pick the right person, so it's a dictatorship. Same is true for Venezuela and Gaza, and any country over the past sixty years that made the mistake of voting for left-leaning leaders in the Western Hemisphere.
And what about China, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, etc? Well, they make us a shitload of money, or they at least follow our orders, so, you know. It's different.
You heard it here first people: if bsDaemon came across documents that showed the US Military was shoveling terrorist suspects into ovens, he'd ignore it and continue to do his job. Or maybe not that... maybe if he came across documents showing that we were burning women and children to death with phosphorous weapons, he'd just ignore it and continue to do his job. Okay, maybe not that...
Of course the line is drawn somewhere. To pretend otherwise is ***FUCKING INHUMAN*** and a good way to end up doing a lot of evil shit for the paltry reward of state loyalty.
Talk about canards. Using fancy sounding words cannot change history.
Say what you will about the merits of the Iraq expedition, it was at least in the consideration stage in the Clinton administration and would have happened with or without 9/11.
I'm sure in the bizarro fantasy land where the (R) means infallible, you'll just pretend that none of that happened. Which is alright, if you're not interested in reality.
The Taliban would be ready to discuss handing over Osama bin Laden to a neutral country if the US halted the bombing of Afghanistan, a senior Taliban official said today. Afghanistan's deputy prime minister, Haji Abdul Kabir, told reporters that the Taliban would require evidence that Bin Laden was behind the September 11 terrorist attacks in the US.
"If the Taliban is given evidence that Osama bin Laden is involved" and the bombing campaign stopped, "we would be ready to hand him over to a third country", Mr Kabir added. But it would have to be a state that would never "come under pressure from the United States", he said.
Here's a note to anyone unfamiliar with how the law works: in order to prosecute a criminal and have them extradited from a foreign country, you have to present evidence to the ruling government. If you can't produce evidence, they are under no legal obligation to allow you to extradite anyone.
I guess the next time Cuba or Venezuela tries to extradite terrorists who've blown up Cuban airliners who are living in Miami, you won't mind if they drop some ordinance around Palm Beach until we capitulate.
Bit silly to say Afghanistan isn't a threat when it has been unable to stop its citizens from starting wars.
Here's a list of the 9/11 hijackers. Not a single one of them is an Afghan citizen. No Iraqis on the list, either. The vast majority were from Saudi Arabia and the UAE. As of today, nearly 9 years after 9/11, we still do not have an extradition treaty with either nation. Even if we had discovered evidence to charge someone with, we could not extradite them to face charges for their crimes.
Yeah. All of those middle class Saudi Arabians committed a horrific crime. I'm really glad we forced the Saudi government to help us bring the remaining criminals to justice, and root out and prosecute all of their enablers. Oh wait: we didn't punish Saudi Arabia at all, or even get them to sign an extradition treaty. And where did all of the money come from?
Financing of the Plot To plan and conduct their attack, the 9/11 plotters spent somewhere between $400,000 and $500,000, the vast majority of which was provided by al Qaeda. Although the origin of the funds remains unknown, extensive investigation has revealed quite a bit about the financial transactions that supported the 9/11 plot. The hijackers and their financial facilitators used the anonymity provided by the huge international and domestic financial system to move and store their money through a series of unremarkable transactions. The existing mechanisms to prevent abuse of the financial system did not fail. They were never designed to detect or disrupt transactions of the type that financed 9/11
Oh man. We totally nailed that one. It's a good thing Al Qaeda are so dumb, or they'd keep finding friendly states with zero infrastructure, and using them to launch attacks so we get stuck in intractable war after intractable war, eventually bleeding our treasury dry.
We'd never be dumb enough to fall for it, though. Right?
You'd have to make an argument that the Afghan state presents a clear and present danger to Sweden. Just imagine - a mostly tribal society, who scarcely make $500 per year per person, massing a military force and successfully overpowering the Swedish defense forces. After marching through either through Russia, or attacking via air corridors through Europe, or getting permission from Iran or Pakistan to build a naval base, and then building a navy to be stationed there.
The only people credulous enough for that argument are American voters.
The Taliban offered to try bin Laden if the US could provide evidence. We rejected the offer, and invaded instead. Operating outside of established legal precedents for the sake of revenge does not justify the war in Afghanistan.
Holding up a UN vote to legitimize a US decision is comical, to say the least. The US does not care about the UN. Without our our support, in the words of Bush, they will become "an irrelevant debating society." A crime is still a crime even if a corrupt politician drops the charges on the gangster.
We gave the Taliban 43,000,000 dollars in May of 2001. This is because of their help with the War on Drugs. Only after 9/11 did we suddenly care about the Taliban's internal policies towards their population.
That's why wherever we go, we will be fought. The local population knows we'll only be there as long as is politically necessary. As soon as they are out of the local news, we'll be back to funding dictators and kings and not caring about who they are torturing to maintain order. Historical examples include Iraq (1980-1990), Iran (1953-1979), Saudi Arabia (present), Egypt (present), and unfortunately, I could go on.
Every war of aggression is illegal according to international law. Unless you think China could have legally invaded if they disagreed with the 2000 Supreme Court decision about the election, your argument does not hold water.
I realize those quotes are about Iraq. I'm just saying our entire foreign policy over there has been operating without regard for the safety of our troops since day 1.
Let met tell you something: if there were any intelligence analysts who had any pull in DC, we certainly wouldn't have given the region to Iran on a silver platter by taking out Saddam Hussein, or held Afghanistan responsible for a Saudi Arabian terror group's actions.
1) We'd be greeted as liberators. 2) Troops levels of several hundred thousand were "way off the mark" 3) The war cost would be less than 100 billion dollars and paid for by Iraqi oil revenues.
My favorite is Rumsfeld's quote: "The Gulf War in the 1990s lasted five days on the ground. I can’t tell you if the use of force in Iraq today would last five days, or five weeks, or five months, but it certainly isn’t going to last any longer than that.”
Scapegoating Assange is the equivalent of yelling at the vet doing the necropsy on the horse.
There is a strong correlation of lower taxes and economic prosperity throughout history of USA and the world.
Reassertions are not citations. You haven't got a single study to show for it? Or are you one of the mises.org spawn who doesn't believe in math?
Government can be broke while the economy is healthy. The only thing needed is for the government to act like everybody else when they are broke: reduce spending.
At a certain point in debt per GDP ratio, this is correct. But all of the states who do tax progressively and spend on internal infrastructure, education, and technology dominate GDP per capita. That's because 10,000,000 to build a McMansion produces far less wealth for a society than sending 400 kids to college who couldn't otherwise afford it. In the libertarian model, there's no way to optimize shared resources. Everyone's going to grab all of the money and power they can grab until we have 3rd world demographics: an ultra-wealthy sliver at the top doing just fine, while the rest of society struggles for basic needs. That's the primary reason iPads aren't selling like hotcakes in places in South America where we forced the Chicago school on their economy. There's no market of people who can afford to buy them.
There is no natural limit of ~10% for unemployment in the US, it can easily go up to 20% or more like in various European countries. Keep taxing and spending and you'll see.
The true number of unemployment is already closer to 16%, perhaps as high as 20%, since America does not count the underemployed or those who have given up looking for work. We've had higher unemployment than Europe for some time now, and it's gotten worse since the Bush tax cuts have been in effect.
Spoken like someone who makes less than $160,000. Raising taxes on any income group harms everybody in the long run. What economy in recession needs the least is to reduce individuals and business ability to invest, to hire and to spend and that's exactly what higher taxes do.
Fuck me. I didn't know I was arguing with someone who had money! Never mind about all of these facts and figures I was going to give you... you win since you have the money. No, it's a solid line of reasoning. Works great for the Hiltons.
First of all, cutting taxes is generally understood to be good for the economy.
Citation needed.
Fighting wars generally isn't, so I don't know why you are bundling those two together.
If you had a drug addiction, and you were always broke, there's a very good reason to think that ending the drug addiction would solve the second problem.
Secondly, the two wars were generally supported by both parties (though in case of Iraq there were more opponents among Democrats but that was mostly posturing for political reasons). I don't think it's clear at all that the US foreign policy would have been any different under Clinton or, god forbid, Gore especially after 9/11.
Let's see: we've spent a few trillion dollars, increased recruitment to Al Qaeda, funneled money to the Taliban through the ISI, lost thousands of soldier's lives, maimed thousands more, killed a few hundred thousand muslims, displaced a few million more, given up habeas corpus, built secret prisons around the world for the purposes of rendition and torture, and we've handed the war in Afghanistan - the "good" one - over to the CIA and Task Force 373 that's busy extrajudicially executing terrorism suspects.
What could Gore, or anyone, have possibly fucked up more than that?
I don't think the recession was caused by Obama nor inherited from Bush. It's simplistic to the point of ridiculous to view something as complex as the economic cycle as determined by which president is in office even though their decisions of course have some impact.
Generally speaking, Democratic administrations have reduced military spending and increased taxes. Have a look at the results for yourself: http://zfacts.com/p/318.html
Democrats aren't inherently better or anything, but at least they have demonstrated that cutting military spending and progressive taxes reduce the national debt. If people making more than 160,000 a year are really going to quit working over a 4% increase in Federal tax income, I say good riddance. There are plenty of people who will step up to take their place. They deserve to lose money for being fair weather patriots, who apparently only care about this country when it's dumping cash into their pockets.
Sadly, only a certain segment of the population believes you can cut taxes and start two wars without harming the economy.
I'll be glad to respond to any shucking and jiving with salient quotes from some of your friends about inheriting the Clinton Recession in 2002. The most unfortunate thing that did happen under Clinton's watch, as far as the economy goes, is allowing Glass Steagall to be dismantled.
Clean energy is about harvesting it directly from the sun, instead of using one of the many intermediaries - gas, coal, oil - and further polluting the planet with the harmful byproducts involved. The vast majority of energy usage worldwide is from these three sources. In Europe as a whole, transportation only takes about a third of their energy usage as of 2009. Much of that is electric since they have a lot of rail, but I couldn't find any better breakdowns.
The point is, there's no use in putting off transitioning to direct sun energy consumption. All known quantities of fossil fuels and U-235 will be exhausted by 2150 at current rates and predicted growth patterns. We might need it for something else we can't foresee, so the smart move would be to conserve every bit of easy to use energy, and use the resources we have now to make progress in sustainable technologies.
You can always find the truth buried near the end of the article:
But a decade ago in Portugal, as in many places in the United States today, power companies owned not only power generating plants, but also transmission lines. Those companies have little incentive to welcome new sources of renewable energy, which compete with their investment in fossil fuels. So in 2000, Portugal’s first step was to separate making electricity from transporting it, through a mandatory purchase by the government of all transmission lines for electricity and gas at what were deemed fair market prices.
Fox News translation: Obama bin Laden wants steal our energy and kill your grandmother! Let freedom ring for... um... dirty coal power.
The problem is, thus far these leaks of U.S. "secrets" have revealed *NOTHING* that anyone with eyes and common sense did not already know. Except the names of those sources that are surly now on someone's "death list". In fact, nothing at all other than the possibility of these sources being murdered has come of the "leak" at all.
Oh, shit! Who are you working for these days? The same guys who did the whole "babies on the floor" thing for the first Iraq War? Oh, no, brilliant stuff. You guys are on top of your game, too, though.
When I saw that some asshole who didn't play by the rules was going to reveal the fact that the Taliban are using missiles we gave them back in the 80s to try and shoot our copters down, I was thinking "Uh oh - disaster!" And then when the documents revealed that accounts given by the military were wrong and that many more civilians died, I thought it would be a real shit storm. Don't even get me started on Task Force 373 extrajudicially executing people. Or the fact that many of the military operations are now classified and under the direct control of the CIA. You'd think in a place like the US that would generate a little buzz. Even the fact that the Taliban is growing stronger every day, despite official reports to the contrary seemed like a huge turd on top of a shit sandwich.
But you guys wrap all that up with "No Big Deal," and feed it to all the media outlets who depend on you for access to government officials? Fucking. Brilliant. They don't even have to pretend to have reported on those things before. They just say, basically, the emperor has clothes, and then Joe Sixpack nods his little beer storage unit up and down and switches back to WWE. I know, and now they're all uppity about this Australian guy possibly getting innocent people killed when we're laying civs out left and right - with secret police and secret budgets! God bless the US of Amnesia.
Anyway, I gotta get going. No, some more disinformation work with energy execs, and then later we have to pretty up the apologetics about the net neutrality crap.
Keep up the good work! See you at the Press Corps dinner.
I think those guys listen to their callers and get the "pulse" of their beliefs and then just ratchet it up while including the audience's common fears and resentments
Huh. A couple of guys playing on the fears of a largely politically ignorant populace. That's ended badly before.
Due to high rates of illiteracy at the time of the genocide, radio was an important way for the government to deliver messages to the public. Two radio stations key to inciting violence before and during the genocide were Radio Rwanda and Radio Télévision Libre des Mille Collines (RTLM). In March 1992, Radio Rwanda was first used in directly promoting the killing of Tutsi in Bugesera, south of the national capital Kigali. Radio Rwanda repeatedly broadcast a communiqué warning that Hutu in Bugesera would be attacked by Tutsi, a message used by local officials to convince Hutu that they needed to protect themselves by attacking first. Led by soldiers, Hutu civilians and members of the Interahamwe subsequently attacked and killed hundreds of Tutsi.
Microsoft has 90,000 employees. Intel has 83,000 at least. Considering that there are around 100,000 H1B recipients, you could place nearly all of them at just these two companies and they wouldn't have to pay a dime for any applications, since it would be less than 50% of their employment.
Trickle down tax policies favor monopolies, and anything that taxes a company based on allowed percentage is going to favor huge corporations. But that's entirely the point. Start a ten man company with six H1B recipients, and you're looking at 12,000 in taxes. Microsoft can hire 44,000 H1B recipients and not pay a dime for the application fee.
Every company that hires people from outside the United States should be given zero incentives to do so. Otherwise they have no incentive to train an American for the same job, or to support public education measures so America can produce better workers.
I'm just waiting for Wikileaks to do something to tick off Israel. They'll deal with Julian Assange the same way they dealt with Gerald Bull.
I'm so glad you've seen the light of democracy and law shining equally for all men, and realized that sometimes we must extinguish that light to slit the throats of those who oppose us. But don't worry. After we're done slitting throats, we'll turn the light back on. We promise.
How does turning auctions into some stupid gamble with randomized durations introduce transparency or accountability? How on earth does turning a trading platform into a casino introduce ethical considerations?
If you introduce some random element that calls a robot bluff, and the traders end up overpaying for stocks, it costs them money. This increases accountability self-evidently. It increases transparency of the market, since there are no misleading bids floating around trying to confuse people. And the ethical consideration is the fact that you are introducing rules which reduce unethical behavior, like financial DDoS schemes as a way to make money.
Slashdot Mirror
I bought a Dell laptop for $700 that included a business warranty. I sent two tickets complaining about a screen defect, provided a picture, and the next day a technician was sent to my location and swapped out the part in less than an hour.
If you don't want to spend the extra $100 on the business warranty, it might take a couple days to get a replacement part. But you can buy a machine with with a three year accidental replacement on-site warranty for far less than you can get a similarly specced Apple product with AppleCare. Even if you pay $350 for the AppleCare for your MacBook Pro, they don't send on-site technicians. You still have to go make a reservation at an Apple Store, talk to a purple haircut who revels in informing you that you'll have to send your $2500 laptop off for repair, and maybe it will be back in a few weeks.
Your best bet is to go to an independent Apple Repair Center. At least they give a shit, and get the part overnighted and your laptop operable within 24 hours.
You'd think that paying $1,200 for a Core 2 Duo laptop would get you some actual customer service. But you'd be wrong.
Iran's elections are a sham. Candidates are vetted and that way opposition politticians of repute, specially if they are reformists, can't compete fairly.
And that differs from the US political elections how?
And to call Iran's regime leftist frankly beggers belief.
I didn't say the current government was leftist. I was referring to the dozen or so governments we overthrew in the Western Hemisphere who had elected left leaning governments.
Saddam Hussein had a socialist state -- read the 1970 Iraqi Constitution -- but was supported because of the political situation involving Iran and Russia. Iran in 1953 had a left leaning democratic government that was trying to get a fairer shake for the oil resources under their feet. So that government was thrown out in a coup backed by the US and Britain, and the police state installed to protect American and British interests was overthrown in 1979. The new Iranian state does have some socialist elements -- national resources belonging to the people -- and many rightist revolutionary elements, like hardline Islamic hawks who do control vast parts of the political machine. In any case, it's far more legitimate than Egypt or Saudi Arabia and many other states we have backed in the past.
As if companies had incentives to lie. It's a good thing they don't, or we'd need some sort of third party to make sure they didn't rip anybody off. Where the hell would we get one of those?
If you wouldn't "snitch" on a rapist or a murderer or an out of control soldier, you have some serious thinking to do about morality.
Iran has elections, but doesn't pick the right person, so it's a dictatorship. Same is true for Venezuela and Gaza, and any country over the past sixty years that made the mistake of voting for left-leaning leaders in the Western Hemisphere.
And what about China, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, etc? Well, they make us a shitload of money, or they at least follow our orders, so, you know. It's different.
**IT DOES NOT MATTER** what he "leaked"
You heard it here first people: if bsDaemon came across documents that showed the US Military was shoveling terrorist suspects into ovens, he'd ignore it and continue to do his job. Or maybe not that... maybe if he came across documents showing that we were burning women and children to death with phosphorous weapons, he'd just ignore it and continue to do his job. Okay, maybe not that...
Of course the line is drawn somewhere. To pretend otherwise is ***FUCKING INHUMAN*** and a good way to end up doing a lot of evil shit for the paltry reward of state loyalty.
Talk about canards. Using fancy sounding words cannot change history.
Say what you will about the merits of the Iraq expedition, it was at least in the consideration stage in the Clinton administration and would have happened with or without 9/11.
According to some people, Iraq presented no threat to the US. Doesn't sound like preparations for invasion to me. Maybe you're confusing that policy with the policy presented by Project for a New American Century. They begged Clinton to invade Iraq, but he ignored them. Probably because, as this guy Dick Cheney once said, the US could quickly find itself in a quagmire if it invaded.
9/11 was not presented as one of the major factors in the decision by anyone worthy of attention.
SHENANIGANS.
Not only did Cheney and Bush repeatedly make the connection, they had to specifically recant their opinion years later. They made the accusation so many times, and through so many propaganda arms, that by the time the war came around, 70% of Americans believed there was a link.
I'm sure in the bizarro fantasy land where the (R) means infallible, you'll just pretend that none of that happened. Which is alright, if you're not interested in reality.
Now, go home and get your shine box.
The Taliban would be ready to discuss handing over Osama bin Laden to a neutral country if the US halted the bombing of Afghanistan, a senior Taliban official said today. Afghanistan's deputy prime minister, Haji Abdul Kabir, told reporters that the Taliban would require evidence that Bin Laden was behind the September 11 terrorist attacks in the US.
"If the Taliban is given evidence that Osama bin Laden is involved" and the bombing campaign stopped, "we would be ready to hand him over to a third country", Mr Kabir added. But it would have to be a state that would never "come under pressure from the United States", he said.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2001/oct/14/afghanistan.terrorism5
Here's the current wanted page for OBL. I guess we still don't have any evidence for 9/11:
http://www.fbi.gov/wanted/terrorists/terbinladen.htm
Here's a note to anyone unfamiliar with how the law works: in order to prosecute a criminal and have them extradited from a foreign country, you have to present evidence to the ruling government. If you can't produce evidence, they are under no legal obligation to allow you to extradite anyone.
I guess the next time Cuba or Venezuela tries to extradite terrorists who've blown up Cuban airliners who are living in Miami, you won't mind if they drop some ordinance around Palm Beach until we capitulate.
Bit silly to say Afghanistan isn't a threat when it has been unable to stop its citizens from starting wars.
Here's a list of the 9/11 hijackers. Not a single one of them is an Afghan citizen. No Iraqis on the list, either. The vast majority were from Saudi Arabia and the UAE. As of today, nearly 9 years after 9/11, we still do not have an extradition treaty with either nation. Even if we had discovered evidence to charge someone with, we could not extradite them to face charges for their crimes.
Yeah. All of those middle class Saudi Arabians committed a horrific crime. I'm really glad we forced the Saudi government to help us bring the remaining criminals to justice, and root out and prosecute all of their enablers. Oh wait: we didn't punish Saudi Arabia at all, or even get them to sign an extradition treaty. And where did all of the money come from?
Financing of the Plot
To plan and conduct their attack, the 9/11 plotters spent somewhere between $400,000 and $500,000, the vast majority of which was provided by al Qaeda. Although the origin of the funds remains unknown, extensive investigation has revealed quite a bit about the financial transactions that supported the 9/11 plot. The hijackers and their financial facilitators used the anonymity provided by the huge international and domestic financial system to move and store their money through a series of unremarkable transactions. The existing mechanisms to prevent abuse of the financial system did not fail. They were never designed to detect or disrupt transactions of the type that financed 9/11
Oh man. We totally nailed that one. It's a good thing Al Qaeda are so dumb, or they'd keep finding friendly states with zero infrastructure, and using them to launch attacks so we get stuck in intractable war after intractable war, eventually bleeding our treasury dry.
We'd never be dumb enough to fall for it, though. Right?
You'd have to make an argument that the Afghan state presents a clear and present danger to Sweden. Just imagine - a mostly tribal society, who scarcely make $500 per year per person, massing a military force and successfully overpowering the Swedish defense forces. After marching through either through Russia, or attacking via air corridors through Europe, or getting permission from Iran or Pakistan to build a naval base, and then building a navy to be stationed there.
The only people credulous enough for that argument are American voters.
http://archives.cnn.com/2001/US/10/07/ret.us.taliban/
The Taliban offered to try bin Laden if the US could provide evidence. We rejected the offer, and invaded instead. Operating outside of established legal precedents for the sake of revenge does not justify the war in Afghanistan.
Holding up a UN vote to legitimize a US decision is comical, to say the least. The US does not care about the UN. Without our our support, in the words of Bush, they will become "an irrelevant debating society." A crime is still a crime even if a corrupt politician drops the charges on the gangster.
We gave the Taliban 43,000,000 dollars in May of 2001. This is because of their help with the War on Drugs. Only after 9/11 did we suddenly care about the Taliban's internal policies towards their population.
That's why wherever we go, we will be fought. The local population knows we'll only be there as long as is politically necessary. As soon as they are out of the local news, we'll be back to funding dictators and kings and not caring about who they are torturing to maintain order. Historical examples include Iraq (1980-1990), Iran (1953-1979), Saudi Arabia (present), Egypt (present), and unfortunately, I could go on.
Every war of aggression is illegal according to international law. Unless you think China could have legally invaded if they disagreed with the 2000 Supreme Court decision about the election, your argument does not hold water.
I realize those quotes are about Iraq. I'm just saying our entire foreign policy over there has been operating without regard for the safety of our troops since day 1.
Intelligence analyst? In the US military?
Let met tell you something: if there were any intelligence analysts who had any pull in DC, we certainly wouldn't have given the region to Iran on a silver platter by taking out Saddam Hussein, or held Afghanistan responsible for a Saudi Arabian terror group's actions.
The pieces of shit who architected the war thought
1) We'd be greeted as liberators.
2) Troops levels of several hundred thousand were "way off the mark"
3) The war cost would be less than 100 billion dollars and paid for by Iraqi oil revenues.
My favorite is Rumsfeld's quote: "The Gulf War in the 1990s lasted five days on the ground. I can’t tell you if the use of force in Iraq today would last five days, or five weeks, or five months, but it certainly isn’t going to last any longer than that.”
Scapegoating Assange is the equivalent of yelling at the vet doing the necropsy on the horse.
There is a strong correlation of lower taxes and economic prosperity throughout history of USA and the world.
Reassertions are not citations. You haven't got a single study to show for it? Or are you one of the mises.org spawn who doesn't believe in math?
Government can be broke while the economy is healthy. The only thing needed is for the government to act like everybody else when they are broke: reduce spending.
At a certain point in debt per GDP ratio, this is correct. But all of the states who do tax progressively and spend on internal infrastructure, education, and technology dominate GDP per capita. That's because 10,000,000 to build a McMansion produces far less wealth for a society than sending 400 kids to college who couldn't otherwise afford it. In the libertarian model, there's no way to optimize shared resources. Everyone's going to grab all of the money and power they can grab until we have 3rd world demographics: an ultra-wealthy sliver at the top doing just fine, while the rest of society struggles for basic needs. That's the primary reason iPads aren't selling like hotcakes in places in South America where we forced the Chicago school on their economy. There's no market of people who can afford to buy them.
There is no natural limit of ~10% for unemployment in the US, it can easily go up to 20% or more like in various European countries. Keep taxing and spending and you'll see.
The true number of unemployment is already closer to 16%, perhaps as high as 20%, since America does not count the underemployed or those who have given up looking for work. We've had higher unemployment than Europe for some time now, and it's gotten worse since the Bush tax cuts have been in effect.
Spoken like someone who makes less than $160,000. Raising taxes on any income group harms everybody in the long run. What economy in recession needs the least is to reduce individuals and business ability to invest, to hire and to spend and that's exactly what higher taxes do.
Fuck me. I didn't know I was arguing with someone who had money! Never mind about all of these facts and figures I was going to give you... you win since you have the money. No, it's a solid line of reasoning. Works great for the Hiltons.
First of all, cutting taxes is generally understood to be good for the economy.
Citation needed.
Fighting wars generally isn't, so I don't know why you are bundling those two together.
If you had a drug addiction, and you were always broke, there's a very good reason to think that ending the drug addiction would solve the second problem.
Secondly, the two wars were generally supported by both parties (though in case of Iraq there were more opponents among Democrats but that was mostly posturing for political reasons). I don't think it's clear at all that the US foreign policy would have been any different under Clinton or, god forbid, Gore especially after 9/11.
Let's see: we've spent a few trillion dollars, increased recruitment to Al Qaeda, funneled money to the Taliban through the ISI, lost thousands of soldier's lives, maimed thousands more, killed a few hundred thousand muslims, displaced a few million more, given up habeas corpus, built secret prisons around the world for the purposes of rendition and torture, and we've handed the war in Afghanistan - the "good" one - over to the CIA and Task Force 373 that's busy extrajudicially executing terrorism suspects.
What could Gore, or anyone, have possibly fucked up more than that?
I don't think the recession was caused by Obama nor inherited from Bush. It's simplistic to the point of ridiculous to view something as complex as the economic cycle as determined by which president is in office even though their decisions of course have some impact.
Generally speaking, Democratic administrations have reduced military spending and increased taxes. Have a look at the results for yourself: http://zfacts.com/p/318.html
Democrats aren't inherently better or anything, but at least they have demonstrated that cutting military spending and progressive taxes reduce the national debt. If people making more than 160,000 a year are really going to quit working over a 4% increase in Federal tax income, I say good riddance. There are plenty of people who will step up to take their place. They deserve to lose money for being fair weather patriots, who apparently only care about this country when it's dumping cash into their pockets.
Sadly, only a certain segment of the population believes you can cut taxes and start two wars without harming the economy.
I'll be glad to respond to any shucking and jiving with salient quotes from some of your friends about inheriting the Clinton Recession in 2002. The most unfortunate thing that did happen under Clinton's watch, as far as the economy goes, is allowing Glass Steagall to be dismantled.
Clean energy is about harvesting it directly from the sun, instead of using one of the many intermediaries - gas, coal, oil - and further polluting the planet with the harmful byproducts involved. The vast majority of energy usage worldwide is from these three sources. In Europe as a whole, transportation only takes about a third of their energy usage as of 2009. Much of that is electric since they have a lot of rail, but I couldn't find any better breakdowns.
The point is, there's no use in putting off transitioning to direct sun energy consumption. All known quantities of fossil fuels and U-235 will be exhausted by 2150 at current rates and predicted growth patterns. We might need it for something else we can't foresee, so the smart move would be to conserve every bit of easy to use energy, and use the resources we have now to make progress in sustainable technologies.
You can always find the truth buried near the end of the article:
But a decade ago in Portugal, as in many places in the United States today, power companies owned not only power generating plants, but also transmission lines. Those companies have little incentive to welcome new sources of renewable energy, which compete with their investment in fossil fuels. So in 2000, Portugal’s first step was to separate making electricity from transporting it, through a mandatory purchase by the government of all transmission lines for electricity and gas at what were deemed fair market prices.
Fox News translation: Obama bin Laden wants steal our energy and kill your grandmother! Let freedom ring for... um... dirty coal power.
The problem is, thus far these leaks of U.S. "secrets" have revealed *NOTHING* that anyone with eyes and common sense did not already know. Except the names of those sources that are surly now on someone's "death list". In fact, nothing at all other than the possibility of these sources being murdered has come of the "leak" at all.
Oh, shit! Who are you working for these days? The same guys who did the whole "babies on the floor" thing for the first Iraq War? Oh, no, brilliant stuff. You guys are on top of your game, too, though.
When I saw that some asshole who didn't play by the rules was going to reveal the fact that the Taliban are using missiles we gave them back in the 80s to try and shoot our copters down, I was thinking "Uh oh - disaster!" And then when the documents revealed that accounts given by the military were wrong and that many more civilians died, I thought it would be a real shit storm. Don't even get me started on Task Force 373 extrajudicially executing people. Or the fact that many of the military operations are now classified and under the direct control of the CIA. You'd think in a place like the US that would generate a little buzz. Even the fact that the Taliban is growing stronger every day, despite official reports to the contrary seemed like a huge turd on top of a shit sandwich.
But you guys wrap all that up with "No Big Deal," and feed it to all the media outlets who depend on you for access to government officials? Fucking. Brilliant. They don't even have to pretend to have reported on those things before. They just say, basically, the emperor has clothes, and then Joe Sixpack nods his little beer storage unit up and down and switches back to WWE. I know, and now they're all uppity about this Australian guy possibly getting innocent people killed when we're laying civs out left and right - with secret police and secret budgets! God bless the US of Amnesia.
Anyway, I gotta get going. No, some more disinformation work with energy execs, and then later we have to pretty up the apologetics about the net neutrality crap.
Keep up the good work! See you at the Press Corps dinner.
I think those guys listen to their callers and get the "pulse" of their beliefs and then just ratchet it up while including the audience's common fears and resentments
Huh. A couple of guys playing on the fears of a largely politically ignorant populace. That's ended badly before.
Due to high rates of illiteracy at the time of the genocide, radio was an important way for the government to deliver messages to the public. Two radio stations key to inciting violence before and during the genocide were Radio Rwanda and Radio Télévision Libre des Mille Collines (RTLM). In March 1992, Radio Rwanda was first used in directly promoting the killing of Tutsi in Bugesera, south of the national capital Kigali. Radio Rwanda repeatedly broadcast a communiqué warning that Hutu in Bugesera would be attacked by Tutsi, a message used by local officials to convince Hutu that they needed to protect themselves by attacking first. Led by soldiers, Hutu civilians and members of the Interahamwe subsequently attacked and killed hundreds of Tutsi.
Microsoft has 90,000 employees. Intel has 83,000 at least. Considering that there are around 100,000 H1B recipients, you could place nearly all of them at just these two companies and they wouldn't have to pay a dime for any applications, since it would be less than 50% of their employment.
Trickle down tax policies favor monopolies, and anything that taxes a company based on allowed percentage is going to favor huge corporations. But that's entirely the point. Start a ten man company with six H1B recipients, and you're looking at 12,000 in taxes. Microsoft can hire 44,000 H1B recipients and not pay a dime for the application fee.
Every company that hires people from outside the United States should be given zero incentives to do so. Otherwise they have no incentive to train an American for the same job, or to support public education measures so America can produce better workers.
I'm just waiting for Wikileaks to do something to tick off Israel. They'll deal with Julian Assange the same way they dealt with Gerald Bull.
I'm so glad you've seen the light of democracy and law shining equally for all men, and realized that sometimes we must extinguish that light to slit the throats of those who oppose us. But don't worry. After we're done slitting throats, we'll turn the light back on. We promise.
Welcome back to the fold, Comrade!
Sincerely,
Joseph V. Stalin
How does turning auctions into some stupid gamble with randomized durations introduce transparency or accountability? How on earth does turning a trading platform into a casino introduce ethical considerations?
If you introduce some random element that calls a robot bluff, and the traders end up overpaying for stocks, it costs them money. This increases accountability self-evidently. It increases transparency of the market, since there are no misleading bids floating around trying to confuse people. And the ethical consideration is the fact that you are introducing rules which reduce unethical behavior, like financial DDoS schemes as a way to make money.