The problem is that news needs to be critical information, and not just entertainment, in order for democracy to work. Even a truly free market requires critical analysis of products, because it only functions if consumers are making informed decisions.
Let's say we just let the chips fall where they may and cable news becomes the de facto standard for journalism. When you have a handful of corporations whose job is to sell advertising to another handful of corporations, the amount of self-censorship would skyrocket. Common sense tells you that outing your highest paid advertiser for having a sweatshop or poisoning a creek that's giving children cancer is a bad business move.
Imagine this scenario: two journalists approach their editor with a story. One is a fluff piece about a local sports star getting arrested for hiring a prostitute. The other is an investigation into alleged union busting at a major local employer, who also happens to be one of their biggest advertisers. In a purely capitalist model, which journalist gets the green light? Does the editor who cranks out huge profits for less money get the promotion?
A book was written about the subject, with a nice summary on Wikipedia:
According to the book, the pressure to create a stable, profitable business invariably distorts the kinds of news items reported, as well as the manner and emphasis in which they are reported. This occurs not as a result of conscious design but simply as a consequence of market selection: those businesses who happen to favor profits over news quality survive, while those that present a more accurate picture of the world tend to become marginalized. Manufacturing Consent, by Herman and Chomsky
Basically, if you let market forces totally control news media in any form, you will end up with entertainment that distributes what is popular but not what is true. It's the difference between the BBC and Fox News. Both are biased, but as far as the quality of news they provide, Fox isn't even in the same dimension.
Many people believe that any radioactive event will render an area lifeless for tens of thousands of years. Similarly, the fear of a "dirty bomb" persists, despite the fact that surviving the initial blast represents less increased risk of cancer than smoking cigarettes or having a poor diet. There would be possibly huge cleanup costs, but probably cheaper than a few weeks in Iraq.
The UN typically pushes for due process. America typically avoids it, at least in international situations.
Plus, murder is a relative term. Every president since WWII has ordered military strikes that have killed innocent people, including Obama. Is that murder? Or do you prefer the term "collateral damage"? It's a stupefying moral perspective when killing one innocent man is murder, but killing tens of thousands is not.
Any student of Latin American history automatically thinks of the CIA whenever a leftist leader is being taken down. Especially since the last leftist leader of Guatemala was ousted by a CIA coup in 1954 in Operation PBFORTUNE, which is now declassified.
According to Kate Doyle, director of the Mexico Project of National Security Archives and a regular contributor to Americas Program of the Interhemispheric Resource Center, most historians now agree that the military coup in 1954 was the definitive blow to Guatemala's young democracy. Over the next four decades, the succession of military rulers would wage counter-insurgency warfare, destabilizing Guatemalan society. The violence caused the deaths and disappearances of more than 140,000 Guatemalans, and some human rights activists put the death toll as high as 250,000.[15] At the later stages of this conflict the CIA tried with some success to lessen the human rights violations and in 1993 stopped a coup and helped restore the democratic government.
Prepare for some hilarious hypocrisy in the US media. When an enemy of US interests is on the chopping block, outlandish conspiracies are taken at face value. When US allies are accused of such crimes, there are calls for calm and due process. An investigation, a trial, and a fair sentencing are vitally important, at least when it's convenient for us. He may or may not be guilty of these crimes, but the only way to find out is to have a trial. I'll bet I can count on one hand how many news pundits ask for a trial.
It's the magic of propaganda. Saddam never shredded anyone (though he did use American biological weapons to kill Kurds). Iraqi troops never placed babies on the hospital floor during their invasion of Kuwait. Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11. But to someone who just watches the news, these are all accepted as fact.
If the world economy collapsed, we would have no choice but to have less of a carbon footprint. Industrial society began when we started using oil as fuel, and once that supply is disrupted, it's unlikely to come back for some time. America will be lucky, since we leave near a lot of arable land.
Cuba is the only society that's survived a disruption, and they did it while under US embargo. Their oil imports dropped by 70% after the Soviet Union collapsed. Electricity no longer lasted through the day. Food supplies vanished, transport halted. If you research it, you'll discover that our entire society depends on oil. Plastics, fertilizers, roads, tires, electronics, pesticides... and for every calorie of food you consume, three thousand oil calories were spent to get it to your mouth. Going to Iraq was a lie, but not a mistake in the minds of the people who did it. Whoever controls what's left of the oil controls the world. There's not a single military force on earth that could operate without a huge supply of oil.
And the point is to have an effect, a massive effect, in reducing use of finite resources such as oil, especially those that destroy the only life-sustaining rock we can get to right now.
The only problem is that technology has brought great efficiency, but efficiency means less profit. Efficiency is the arch enemy of our current economic system, which depends on growth of consumption. Our survival depends on the opposite - reduction of consumption. Until there is an economic incentive to consume far less, we are not in control of when we make the switch. And if we're not slowly choosing to make the switch, the chance the world can survive an oil disruption without a world wide war is, in my opinion, almost impossible.
Batteries are made of nasty toxic and in many cases rare materials. The disposal problem would be far worse than that for nuclear energy.
Many modern batteries can be almost completely recycled. America has enough electricity being wasted right now in off-peak hours to power tens of millions of vehicles for their daily commute. But electric vehicles are too reliable and efficient to be politically possible, because you're asking corporations to accept 15 cents per mile in fuel and maintenance costs instead of 50. No spark plugs, oil changes, belts, transmissions... electric motors will probably last decades with very little maintenance. Batteries have lasted 180,000 miles, and that's on current technology.
Why else do you think GM killed their EV and sold the patents to Exxon Mobil? It's the classic story of the cobbler who makes his shoes too well, and manufactures himself out of a job.
...when confronted with a choice, you choose money over the only known planet that sustains human life in the entire universe.
I'm not sure I can get on board with that. And something tells me that using less energy to do everyday tasks will lead to more technology, not less. Sticking with the status quo is the choice that provides no technology, and possibly spends finite resources on luxuries that could be used later for needs.
But fuck it. Hop in your hummer, crank the AC, and rush to sit in traffic. Buy the house tens of miles away from work so you can have a library and basement bar that get used about twice a decade. Terraform your yard with nice looking weeds, so the neighbors can enjoy it the whole 30 seconds they spend outside their front door.
Enjoy these pinnacles of human achievement, while they last.
I haven't had time to check every point in this article, but it fits with everything I've read about the subject.
Either way, you're either totally ignorant, or completely full of shit. According to the GAO, approximately 25% of "defense" spending is unaccounted for. This is probably by design to allow for the operational budget of the CIA, which is unconstitutionally hidden from the eyes of the public.
Once in Iraq, there was virtually no accountability over how the money was spent. There was also considerable money "off the books," including as much as $4 billion from illegal oil exports. The CPA and the Iraqi State Oil Marketing Board, which it controlled, made a deliberate decision not to record or "meter" oil exports, an invitation to wholesale fraud and black marketeering.
Thus the country was awash in unaccountable money. British sources report that the CPA contracts that were not handed out to cronies were sold to the highest bidder, with bribes as high as $300,000 being demanded for particularly lucrative reconstruction contracts.
The contracts were especially attractive because no work or results were necessarily expected in return. It became popular to cancel contracts without penalty, claiming that security costs were making it too difficult to do the work. A $500 million power-plant contract was reportedly awarded to a bidder based on a proposal one page long. After a joint commission rejected the proposal, its members were replaced by the minister, and approval was duly obtained. But no plant has been built.
Where contracts are actually performed, their nominal cost is inflated sufficiently to provide handsome bribes for everyone involved in the process. Bribes paid to government ministers reportedly exceed $10 million.
Money also disappeared in truckloads and by helicopter. The CPA reportedly distributed funds to contractors in bags off the back of a truck. In one notorious incident in April 2004, $1.5 billion in cash that had just been delivered by three Blackhawk helicopters was handed over to a courier in Erbil, in the Kurdish region, never to be seen again. Afterwards, no one was able to recall the courier's name or provide a good description of him.
It hasn't been totally privatized yet. But if a private contractor pays a truck driver $300,000 a year to drive a route that the US Army also runs, but only pays their driver $40,000, it doesn't take too much math to figure out who's getting fucked over.
Additionally, authorizing private mercenaries to kill outside of the chain of American military command is totally immoral. It's already led to major conflicts with the Iraqi government, who are understandably upset when non-uniformed men shoot up a public square for no reason, killing women and children, and then speed off without concern.
I'm all for opening up completely the books of any government subcontractor. If you don't like transparency, then don't take government contracts. It may be tough to police, with companies trying to cheat with subsidiaries, but I think the payoff would be enormous.
On 9/10/2001, Rumsfeld gave a speech about wasteful military spending. Check it out in print, or a small piece on CBS. There was a link to his whole speech years ago - I don't know where that went. In it he states that up to 2.3 trillion dollars is "unaccounted" for, whatever that means. If you read between the lines, he is pushing for privatization of the military. We all know how well that worked out.
I always thought it was funny that they raised their prices to such astronomical levels. An ex of mine would always buy her books used, save 60-70% per book, and then sell them again at the end of the semester.
If you can make it convenient for a person to pay for the book they have to have anyway, at a price they'll gladly pay, sales would skyrocket. If a new book was $50 instead of $250, came with a PDF on CD-ROM and reprintable forms instead of some lame workbook, you could update it every year with correction, and who wouldn't pay that? The difference between $25 for a used copy and $50 for a new one would eliminate the second hand market. No one would wait around with cash at the bookstore for that difference, but they would if it was the difference between $250 and $70.
Not to mention the sales you get from kids losing their books, spilling bongwater on them, or throwing them away before they realize they've failed the class.
It's like music CDs. I see $5 DVDs all the time, even at grocery stores. Are you telling me they can't sell a regular CD for $3.99, and one with a Bonus DVD and high quality mp3s for 7.99? For $10 I can get many of my favorite bands on vinyl with an mp3 download coupon in the sleeve.
Is God willing to prevent evil, but not able? Then He is not omnipotent. Is He able, but not willing? Then He is malevolent. Is He both able and willing? Then whence cometh evil? Is He neither able nor willing? Then why call Him God?
-Epicurus, 300 BCE
The refrain from fundamentalists, Christian and Muslim and Jew alike, is because he is God, and he said so, according to this really old book. Which is usually the inerrant word of God - they just can't agree on which version is the "perfect" word. Once you try to engage someone who firmly believes that they know what God thinks, there's no use in trying to apply logic.
One of my favorite David Cross bits is where he's asking out loud for the name of the television show where there's this guy on stage, and everyone in the television audience believes he can talk to the dead. The crowd in front of David keeps shouting out "Crossing Over!"
And then David says, "Oh no, it was church, it was church."
Just so you know, big business corporations are run by ordinary people like the old monarchies were run by ordinary people. There is no difference between kings and CEOs, archdukes and VPs, and the boardroom and the royal court, except that passing of the crown isn't automatically done from father to son. The King appoints people, based on connections instead of merit. They all vote themselves raises, work their serfs as hard as they can, and every once in a while a new fiefdom is formed that turns into pretty much the same structure. It's more just than a straight monarchy, but it's really not that different.
I hope that we shall crush in its birth the aristocracy of our monied corporations, which dare already to challenge our government to a trial of strength, and bid defiance to the laws of our country. -Thomas Jefferson, Bedwetting Liberal
The same thing has been true since the beginning of time. When people pass on wealth to their descendants, you end up with a bunch of rich, clueless, greedy idiots running the show, who never serve but send people to war, who never starve but lobby for the destruction of welfare, and who never work but demand the end of Social Security.
Inevitably, the disparity of wealth and the skewed use of a nations resources to attend to the "needs" of these Hapsburg inbreds leads to a revolution, and then whole process is repeated. Corporations just allow us to pretend there isn't a monarchy. The fact that they are run by people doesn't prove anything.
From what I've read, they are cleaning up the code and optimizing it for the Intel platform. Supposedly it will take up less hard drive space and memory, but I'll believe that when I see it. Even if they fail, I'm glad they attempted this cleanup, even if it just inspires Microsoft to do some similar scrubbing with Windows 8. It's about time someone stopped and said, "Hey, instead of shiny feature 837, can we make sure that our web browser isn't leaking memory like a paper boat?"
It's not really for your mom - it's so she doesn't call you as often.
I'm usually a pretty big Mac fan-boy but I just can't seem to get excited about this one. Hell, I'm even thinking (seriously) about ditching my iPhone and getting a Palm Pre. sigh...how the world is changing. Has Apple lost it's Mojo?
I had the same thought. Apple is getting too greedy with their hardware prices, and they continue to screw customers over with their overpriced parts for repair. Plus, the computer world is changing, and they don't seem to understand what's happening.
Try remotely controlling a Mac with VNC over a cellular broadband connection. It's like sucking a watermelon through a straw. Try creating a virtual network of virtual machines for testing before deployment, which is illegal under Apple's TOS except for their server software. You'll be dragging your toaster into the bathtub by the end of the day.
Netbooks are evidence that people want computers for convenient access to information, usually located on the internet, and to have something to sync their iPod to. I'm not sure how much longer Apple can charge twice what their competitors are charging and get away with it. And they still have no chance of entering the enterprise market with their hardware costs and licensing restrictions.
I'm due for a laptop upgrade, and given the choice of a Dell Precision, RGBLED screen, and a dock that supports legacy ports and dual 30" displays, or a slower MacBook Pro with a crappier display for the same price, they're really making the decision for me. I'll continue recommending Macs for friends and family that may call me with technical questions, but if Windows 7 offers the same kind of robustness for half the price, what's the point?
I think this is more of a civil disobedience act than anything else, if it's even part of their plan.
For instance, if a credit card company screwed you out of $125, you could send them 500 checks for $0.25 in one UPS package. (You'll want preprinted checks and a signature stamp. And a Bank of America account.) When it's the only way to hassle people who are hassling you, I don't have a problem with it.
These companies are suing children and the elderly, and some companies blatantly prey on the poor and senile. When law enforcement is on the wrong side of morality, what else should a person do?
You can have it both ways. Do your Flux/Ribbon thing, but leave a standard mapping shortcut for those of us who don't like to spend 10 seconds mousing around when we can perform the same command in three keystrokes. Allow us to turn off the ribbon doodads, show both at once, or just the legacy menu.
That was not far from the truth. One overhead shot of a dude in agony per movie is acceptable, if a bit old hat.
But three? One when the main character is 12?
It's like the director watched the last Star Wars, and thought it had a good ending. Then he had his eureka moment, "Let's do that three times, and it'll be three times awesomer!"
Compared to what is spent on roads, mass transit is an afterthought. This, of course, explains sensibly why some areas have great mass transit, and others do not, though I don't think rail is a viable option for much of the country, especially in the "new" West were suburbs span tens of miles.
It will have to be a combination of short route buses to rail systems probably installed above the middle divider of highways, with stops at each exit. The combination of both will probably take as long as sitting in traffic in a car, at far less expense.
During the day, when there are less commuters, half of the trains could drop their commuter cars and pick up freight from outer city points, and deliver them at longer intervals close to commercial areas. This would reduce congestion on highways and wear and tear on bridges and city centers, and probably fund much of the cost of operation.
Read the original post, which mocked someone for watching a comedy show for news. The reality is that someone who watches the Daily Show or the Colbert Report will be far more informed than someone watching Fox News, unless they only watch the O'Reilly Factor.
You introduced the partisan game, I just illustrated what the current score is. For more information on what Americans actually think instead of what is portrayed in the media, you can read polls here. Which is a nice intro for my earlier Colbert quip that he delivered personally to G.W. Bush. (edited for clarity)
Most of all, I believe in this president. Now, I know there are some polls out there saying that this man has a 32% approval rating. But guys like us, we don't pay attention to the polls. We know that polls are just a collection of statistics that reflect what people are thinking in "reality." And reality has a well-known liberal bias. So, Mr. President, please, please, pay no attention to the people that say the glass is half empty, because 32% means it's 2/3 empty. There's still some liquid in that glass is my point.
But I wouldn't drink it. The last third is usually backwash.
From what you posted: Republicans and Democrats are equally likely to be represented in the high-knowledge group. But significantly fewer Republicans (26%) than Democrats (31%) fall into the third of the public that knows the least.
Side-stepping around the fact that people know far less if Fox News is their main source of information, versus NPR, Limbaugh, O'Reilly, and the top informed audience, that of the two Daily Central Comedy shows. Which is what his post was about.
Also: Internet news sources, National Public Radio, news magazines, and Rush Limbaugh's radio show have the best educated audiences, with each of these having at least 36% of their regular readers and listeners having graduated from college.
And?
"Reality has a well known liberal bias" is a well known liberal delusion.
The immediate outlook for the Republican Party is certainly bleak, with the Democratic Party maintaining significant advantages over it by almost any measure, perhaps most importantly in national party identification. Americans clearly have not reacted in a negative way to Obama's approach to governing, as he enjoys approval ratings above 60% -- better than those of most recent presidents.
The problem is that for non-technical users, Windows 7 will play their games, and will run pretty well on their new computer. Or they will keep their current machine. Why switch to Linux?
For businesses, Windows 7 may offer enough security to save them money, when they inevitably upgrade their computers. It works with the latest whiz-bang features of Office, and offers point and click management of websites, servers, email, whatever. Again, why switch to Linux?
The problem with a lot of Linux proponents is that they fail to see that businesses, especially small businesses who can't afford full-time IT staff, have no compelling reason to use Linux, because Linux has no out-of-the-box solutions for small businesses. No Quickbooks. No Sharepoint. No Adobe Suite - old versions and the GIMP don't count. The cost of them re-learning everything and dealing with the black holes in the software offered in any Linux distribution will cost a hell of a lot more then the $100 or even $200 premium they will pay for Windows, which they are sure will work with their printer scanner, and run FireFox and OpenOffice just as well as Ubuntu.
The backdoor is to make cross platform applications for all three systems - OS X, Windows, Linux. Make them work well, and provide REAL alternatives to Quickbooks and the Adobe Suite. In ten years, when Windows 9 comes out, and someone in the office notices that all of the software they use will run on Linux for free... game, set, match.
Apple has a different model that will ultimately fail for enterprise customers unless they allow 10.7 to run on commodity hardware, or if they drastically lower their hardware prices. They release dirt cheap software that only runs on Macs. But they will probably stick to media production professionals, who don't mind paying premiums for hardware and software, and who can't use Final Cut Studio 3 with virtual machines.
Plus, their server software is a dog, and remotely using a Mac is sort of like squeezing a watermelon through a straw.
Less than 100 billion of the money is being paid directly to home owners who are in danger of losing their homes. The rest are going to corporations who made a lot of stupid bets that fell apart. This is to protect the 10% of Americans who own the vast majority of stocks from losing all of their paper wealth that is now mostly worthless.
That's how it typically works though. Corporations and the people who matter are special, and receive massive amounts of welfare. Individuals must suffer to learn their lesson. Corporatism is nothing new here. Socialized risk for private profit has been the model for many, many years.
I still think the bailout was necessary, but anyone with a huge 401k should once again thank God for the working class. And in my opinion, they should think about repaying them with investments in education and policies that promote economic equity, instead of destroying it.
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The problem is that news needs to be critical information, and not just entertainment, in order for democracy to work. Even a truly free market requires critical analysis of products, because it only functions if consumers are making informed decisions.
Let's say we just let the chips fall where they may and cable news becomes the de facto standard for journalism. When you have a handful of corporations whose job is to sell advertising to another handful of corporations, the amount of self-censorship would skyrocket. Common sense tells you that outing your highest paid advertiser for having a sweatshop or poisoning a creek that's giving children cancer is a bad business move.
Imagine this scenario: two journalists approach their editor with a story. One is a fluff piece about a local sports star getting arrested for hiring a prostitute. The other is an investigation into alleged union busting at a major local employer, who also happens to be one of their biggest advertisers. In a purely capitalist model, which journalist gets the green light? Does the editor who cranks out huge profits for less money get the promotion?
A book was written about the subject, with a nice summary on Wikipedia:
According to the book, the pressure to create a stable, profitable business invariably distorts the kinds of news items reported, as well as the manner and emphasis in which they are reported. This occurs not as a result of conscious design but simply as a consequence of market selection: those businesses who happen to favor profits over news quality survive, while those that present a more accurate picture of the world tend to become marginalized.
Manufacturing Consent, by Herman and Chomsky
For a concrete example, check this out this article on the coverage of the genocide in East Timor.
Basically, if you let market forces totally control news media in any form, you will end up with entertainment that distributes what is popular but not what is true. It's the difference between the BBC and Fox News. Both are biased, but as far as the quality of news they provide, Fox isn't even in the same dimension.
Many people believe that any radioactive event will render an area lifeless for tens of thousands of years. Similarly, the fear of a "dirty bomb" persists, despite the fact that surviving the initial blast represents less increased risk of cancer than smoking cigarettes or having a poor diet. There would be possibly huge cleanup costs, but probably cheaper than a few weeks in Iraq.
The UN typically pushes for due process. America typically avoids it, at least in international situations.
Plus, murder is a relative term. Every president since WWII has ordered military strikes that have killed innocent people, including Obama. Is that murder? Or do you prefer the term "collateral damage"? It's a stupefying moral perspective when killing one innocent man is murder, but killing tens of thousands is not.
Any student of Latin American history automatically thinks of the CIA whenever a leftist leader is being taken down. Especially since the last leftist leader of Guatemala was ousted by a CIA coup in 1954 in Operation PBFORTUNE, which is now declassified.
According to Kate Doyle, director of the Mexico Project of National Security Archives and a regular contributor to Americas Program of the Interhemispheric Resource Center, most historians now agree that the military coup in 1954 was the definitive blow to Guatemala's young democracy. Over the next four decades, the succession of military rulers would wage counter-insurgency warfare, destabilizing Guatemalan society. The violence caused the deaths and disappearances of more than 140,000 Guatemalans, and some human rights activists put the death toll as high as 250,000.[15] At the later stages of this conflict the CIA tried with some success to lessen the human rights violations and in 1993 stopped a coup and helped restore the democratic government.
Prepare for some hilarious hypocrisy in the US media. When an enemy of US interests is on the chopping block, outlandish conspiracies are taken at face value. When US allies are accused of such crimes, there are calls for calm and due process. An investigation, a trial, and a fair sentencing are vitally important, at least when it's convenient for us. He may or may not be guilty of these crimes, but the only way to find out is to have a trial. I'll bet I can count on one hand how many news pundits ask for a trial.
It's the magic of propaganda. Saddam never shredded anyone (though he did use American biological weapons to kill Kurds). Iraqi troops never placed babies on the hospital floor during their invasion of Kuwait. Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11. But to someone who just watches the news, these are all accepted as fact.
If the world economy collapsed, we would have no choice but to have less of a carbon footprint. Industrial society began when we started using oil as fuel, and once that supply is disrupted, it's unlikely to come back for some time. America will be lucky, since we leave near a lot of arable land.
Cuba is the only society that's survived a disruption, and they did it while under US embargo. Their oil imports dropped by 70% after the Soviet Union collapsed. Electricity no longer lasted through the day. Food supplies vanished, transport halted. If you research it, you'll discover that our entire society depends on oil. Plastics, fertilizers, roads, tires, electronics, pesticides... and for every calorie of food you consume, three thousand oil calories were spent to get it to your mouth. Going to Iraq was a lie, but not a mistake in the minds of the people who did it. Whoever controls what's left of the oil controls the world. There's not a single military force on earth that could operate without a huge supply of oil.
And the point is to have an effect, a massive effect, in reducing use of finite resources such as oil, especially those that destroy the only life-sustaining rock we can get to right now.
The only problem is that technology has brought great efficiency, but efficiency means less profit. Efficiency is the arch enemy of our current economic system, which depends on growth of consumption. Our survival depends on the opposite - reduction of consumption. Until there is an economic incentive to consume far less, we are not in control of when we make the switch. And if we're not slowly choosing to make the switch, the chance the world can survive an oil disruption without a world wide war is, in my opinion, almost impossible.
Batteries are made of nasty toxic and in many cases rare materials. The disposal problem would be far worse than that for nuclear energy.
Many modern batteries can be almost completely recycled. America has enough electricity being wasted right now in off-peak hours to power tens of millions of vehicles for their daily commute. But electric vehicles are too reliable and efficient to be politically possible, because you're asking corporations to accept 15 cents per mile in fuel and maintenance costs instead of 50. No spark plugs, oil changes, belts, transmissions... electric motors will probably last decades with very little maintenance. Batteries have lasted 180,000 miles, and that's on current technology.
Why else do you think GM killed their EV and sold the patents to Exxon Mobil? It's the classic story of the cobbler who makes his shoes too well, and manufactures himself out of a job.
...when confronted with a choice, you choose money over the only known planet that sustains human life in the entire universe.
I'm not sure I can get on board with that. And something tells me that using less energy to do everyday tasks will lead to more technology, not less. Sticking with the status quo is the choice that provides no technology, and possibly spends finite resources on luxuries that could be used later for needs.
But fuck it. Hop in your hummer, crank the AC, and rush to sit in traffic. Buy the house tens of miles away from work so you can have a library and basement bar that get used about twice a decade. Terraform your yard with nice looking weeds, so the neighbors can enjoy it the whole 30 seconds they spend outside their front door.
Enjoy these pinnacles of human achievement, while they last.
I haven't had time to check every point in this article, but it fits with everything I've read about the subject.
Either way, you're either totally ignorant, or completely full of shit. According to the GAO, approximately 25% of "defense" spending is unaccounted for. This is probably by design to allow for the operational budget of the CIA, which is unconstitutionally hidden from the eyes of the public.
Once in Iraq, there was virtually no accountability over how the money was spent. There was also considerable money "off the books," including as much as $4 billion from illegal oil exports. The CPA and the Iraqi State Oil Marketing Board, which it controlled, made a deliberate decision not to record or "meter" oil exports, an invitation to wholesale fraud and black marketeering.
Thus the country was awash in unaccountable money. British sources report that the CPA contracts that were not handed out to cronies were sold to the highest bidder, with bribes as high as $300,000 being demanded for particularly lucrative reconstruction contracts.
The contracts were especially attractive because no work or results were necessarily expected in return. It became popular to cancel contracts without penalty, claiming that security costs were making it too difficult to do the work. A $500 million power-plant contract was reportedly awarded to a bidder based on a proposal one page long. After a joint commission rejected the proposal, its members were replaced by the minister, and approval was duly obtained. But no plant has been built.
Where contracts are actually performed, their nominal cost is inflated sufficiently to provide handsome bribes for everyone involved in the process. Bribes paid to government ministers reportedly exceed $10 million.
Money also disappeared in truckloads and by helicopter. The CPA reportedly distributed funds to contractors in bags off the back of a truck. In one notorious incident in April 2004, $1.5 billion in cash that had just been delivered by three Blackhawk helicopters was handed over to a courier in Erbil, in the Kurdish region, never to be seen again. Afterwards, no one was able to recall the courier's name or provide a good description of him.
It hasn't been totally privatized yet. But if a private contractor pays a truck driver $300,000 a year to drive a route that the US Army also runs, but only pays their driver $40,000, it doesn't take too much math to figure out who's getting fucked over.
Additionally, authorizing private mercenaries to kill outside of the chain of American military command is totally immoral. It's already led to major conflicts with the Iraqi government, who are understandably upset when non-uniformed men shoot up a public square for no reason, killing women and children, and then speed off without concern.
What technologies are you talking about? I don't know of anything that's been developed entirely since the beginning of the Iraq war.
They defend "freedom."
I'm all for opening up completely the books of any government subcontractor. If you don't like transparency, then don't take government contracts. It may be tough to police, with companies trying to cheat with subsidiaries, but I think the payoff would be enormous.
On 9/10/2001, Rumsfeld gave a speech about wasteful military spending. Check it out in print, or a small piece on CBS. There was a link to his whole speech years ago - I don't know where that went. In it he states that up to 2.3 trillion dollars is "unaccounted" for, whatever that means. If you read between the lines, he is pushing for privatization of the military. We all know how well that worked out.
I always thought it was funny that they raised their prices to such astronomical levels. An ex of mine would always buy her books used, save 60-70% per book, and then sell them again at the end of the semester.
If you can make it convenient for a person to pay for the book they have to have anyway, at a price they'll gladly pay, sales would skyrocket. If a new book was $50 instead of $250, came with a PDF on CD-ROM and reprintable forms instead of some lame workbook, you could update it every year with correction, and who wouldn't pay that? The difference between $25 for a used copy and $50 for a new one would eliminate the second hand market. No one would wait around with cash at the bookstore for that difference, but they would if it was the difference between $250 and $70.
Not to mention the sales you get from kids losing their books, spilling bongwater on them, or throwing them away before they realize they've failed the class.
It's like music CDs. I see $5 DVDs all the time, even at grocery stores. Are you telling me they can't sell a regular CD for $3.99, and one with a Bonus DVD and high quality mp3s for 7.99? For $10 I can get many of my favorite bands on vinyl with an mp3 download coupon in the sleeve.
Is God willing to prevent evil, but not able? Then He is not omnipotent. Is He able, but not willing? Then He is malevolent. Is He both able and willing? Then whence cometh evil? Is He neither able nor willing? Then why call Him God?
-Epicurus, 300 BCE
The refrain from fundamentalists, Christian and Muslim and Jew alike, is because he is God, and he said so, according to this really old book. Which is usually the inerrant word of God - they just can't agree on which version is the "perfect" word. Once you try to engage someone who firmly believes that they know what God thinks, there's no use in trying to apply logic.
One of my favorite David Cross bits is where he's asking out loud for the name of the television show where there's this guy on stage, and everyone in the television audience believes he can talk to the dead. The crowd in front of David keeps shouting out "Crossing Over!"
And then David says, "Oh no, it was church, it was church."
Just so you know, big business corporations are run by ordinary people like the old monarchies were run by ordinary people. There is no difference between kings and CEOs, archdukes and VPs, and the boardroom and the royal court, except that passing of the crown isn't automatically done from father to son. The King appoints people, based on connections instead of merit. They all vote themselves raises, work their serfs as hard as they can, and every once in a while a new fiefdom is formed that turns into pretty much the same structure. It's more just than a straight monarchy, but it's really not that different.
I hope that we shall crush in its birth the aristocracy of our monied corporations, which dare already to challenge our government to a trial of strength, and bid defiance to the laws of our country.
-Thomas Jefferson, Bedwetting Liberal
The same thing has been true since the beginning of time. When people pass on wealth to their descendants, you end up with a bunch of rich, clueless, greedy idiots running the show, who never serve but send people to war, who never starve but lobby for the destruction of welfare, and who never work but demand the end of Social Security.
Inevitably, the disparity of wealth and the skewed use of a nations resources to attend to the "needs" of these Hapsburg inbreds leads to a revolution, and then whole process is repeated. Corporations just allow us to pretend there isn't a monarchy. The fact that they are run by people doesn't prove anything.
From what I've read, they are cleaning up the code and optimizing it for the Intel platform. Supposedly it will take up less hard drive space and memory, but I'll believe that when I see it. Even if they fail, I'm glad they attempted this cleanup, even if it just inspires Microsoft to do some similar scrubbing with Windows 8. It's about time someone stopped and said, "Hey, instead of shiny feature 837, can we make sure that our web browser isn't leaking memory like a paper boat?"
It's not really for your mom - it's so she doesn't call you as often.
I'm usually a pretty big Mac fan-boy but I just can't seem to get excited about this one. Hell, I'm even thinking (seriously) about ditching my iPhone and getting a Palm Pre. sigh...how the world is changing. Has Apple lost it's Mojo?
I had the same thought. Apple is getting too greedy with their hardware prices, and they continue to screw customers over with their overpriced parts for repair. Plus, the computer world is changing, and they don't seem to understand what's happening.
Try remotely controlling a Mac with VNC over a cellular broadband connection. It's like sucking a watermelon through a straw. Try creating a virtual network of virtual machines for testing before deployment, which is illegal under Apple's TOS except for their server software. You'll be dragging your toaster into the bathtub by the end of the day.
Netbooks are evidence that people want computers for convenient access to information, usually located on the internet, and to have something to sync their iPod to. I'm not sure how much longer Apple can charge twice what their competitors are charging and get away with it. And they still have no chance of entering the enterprise market with their hardware costs and licensing restrictions.
I'm due for a laptop upgrade, and given the choice of a Dell Precision, RGBLED screen, and a dock that supports legacy ports and dual 30" displays, or a slower MacBook Pro with a crappier display for the same price, they're really making the decision for me. I'll continue recommending Macs for friends and family that may call me with technical questions, but if Windows 7 offers the same kind of robustness for half the price, what's the point?
I think this is more of a civil disobedience act than anything else, if it's even part of their plan.
For instance, if a credit card company screwed you out of $125, you could send them 500 checks for $0.25 in one UPS package. (You'll want preprinted checks and a signature stamp. And a Bank of America account.) When it's the only way to hassle people who are hassling you, I don't have a problem with it.
These companies are suing children and the elderly, and some companies blatantly prey on the poor and senile. When law enforcement is on the wrong side of morality, what else should a person do?
Okay, that link to a clip from the movie Idiocracy is apparently to a white power / neo nazi site. Don't go there.
(Did I just goatse... myself?)
Please, please, please.
You can have it both ways. Do your Flux/Ribbon thing, but leave a standard mapping shortcut for those of us who don't like to spend 10 seconds mousing around when we can perform the same command in three keystrokes. Allow us to turn off the ribbon doodads, show both at once, or just the legacy menu.
You don't want to turn us into this, now do you?
That was not far from the truth. One overhead shot of a dude in agony per movie is acceptable, if a bit old hat.
But three? One when the main character is 12?
It's like the director watched the last Star Wars, and thought it had a good ending. Then he had his eureka moment, "Let's do that three times, and it'll be three times awesomer!"
Compared to what is spent on roads, mass transit is an afterthought. This, of course, explains sensibly why some areas have great mass transit, and others do not, though I don't think rail is a viable option for much of the country, especially in the "new" West were suburbs span tens of miles.
It will have to be a combination of short route buses to rail systems probably installed above the middle divider of highways, with stops at each exit. The combination of both will probably take as long as sitting in traffic in a car, at far less expense.
During the day, when there are less commuters, half of the trains could drop their commuter cars and pick up freight from outer city points, and deliver them at longer intervals close to commercial areas. This would reduce congestion on highways and wear and tear on bridges and city centers, and probably fund much of the cost of operation.
Read the original post, which mocked someone for watching a comedy show for news. The reality is that someone who watches the Daily Show or the Colbert Report will be far more informed than someone watching Fox News, unless they only watch the O'Reilly Factor.
You introduced the partisan game, I just illustrated what the current score is. For more information on what Americans actually think instead of what is portrayed in the media, you can read polls here. Which is a nice intro for my earlier Colbert quip that he delivered personally to G.W. Bush. (edited for clarity)
Most of all, I believe in this president. Now, I know there are some polls out there saying that this man has a 32% approval rating. But guys like us, we don't pay attention to the polls. We know that polls are just a collection of statistics that reflect what people are thinking in "reality." And reality has a well-known liberal bias. So, Mr. President, please, please, pay no attention to the people that say the glass is half empty, because 32% means it's 2/3 empty. There's still some liquid in that glass is my point.
But I wouldn't drink it. The last third is usually backwash.
From what you posted: Republicans and Democrats are equally likely to be represented in the high-knowledge group. But significantly fewer Republicans (26%) than Democrats (31%) fall into the third of the public that knows the least.
Side-stepping around the fact that people know far less if Fox News is their main source of information, versus NPR, Limbaugh, O'Reilly, and the top informed audience, that of the two Daily Central Comedy shows. Which is what his post was about.
Also: Internet news sources, National Public Radio, news magazines, and Rush Limbaugh's radio show have the best educated audiences, with each of these having at least 36% of their regular readers and listeners having graduated from college.
And?
"Reality has a well known liberal bias" is a well known liberal delusion.
It's a joke. But not as funny as having only 28% of respondents self-identify as Republicans.
The immediate outlook for the Republican Party is certainly bleak, with the Democratic Party maintaining significant advantages over it by almost any measure, perhaps most importantly in national party identification. Americans clearly have not reacted in a negative way to Obama's approach to governing, as he enjoys approval ratings above 60% -- better than those of most recent presidents.
Awwwww.
See why no one uses Lynx?
Looks like both daily news comedies have more knowledgeable audiences than anyone else.
Now, go back to watching the creepy dude cry. Fox News! When the facts don't match your ideology, we'll help you cope... with more misconceptions.
Linux is already better than good enough.
The problem is that for non-technical users, Windows 7 will play their games, and will run pretty well on their new computer. Or they will keep their current machine. Why switch to Linux?
For businesses, Windows 7 may offer enough security to save them money, when they inevitably upgrade their computers. It works with the latest whiz-bang features of Office, and offers point and click management of websites, servers, email, whatever. Again, why switch to Linux?
The problem with a lot of Linux proponents is that they fail to see that businesses, especially small businesses who can't afford full-time IT staff, have no compelling reason to use Linux, because Linux has no out-of-the-box solutions for small businesses. No Quickbooks. No Sharepoint. No Adobe Suite - old versions and the GIMP don't count. The cost of them re-learning everything and dealing with the black holes in the software offered in any Linux distribution will cost a hell of a lot more then the $100 or even $200 premium they will pay for Windows, which they are sure will work with their printer scanner, and run FireFox and OpenOffice just as well as Ubuntu.
The backdoor is to make cross platform applications for all three systems - OS X, Windows, Linux. Make them work well, and provide REAL alternatives to Quickbooks and the Adobe Suite. In ten years, when Windows 9 comes out, and someone in the office notices that all of the software they use will run on Linux for free... game, set, match.
Apple has a different model that will ultimately fail for enterprise customers unless they allow 10.7 to run on commodity hardware, or if they drastically lower their hardware prices. They release dirt cheap software that only runs on Macs. But they will probably stick to media production professionals, who don't mind paying premiums for hardware and software, and who can't use Final Cut Studio 3 with virtual machines.
Plus, their server software is a dog, and remotely using a Mac is sort of like squeezing a watermelon through a straw.
Less than 100 billion of the money is being paid directly to home owners who are in danger of losing their homes. The rest are going to corporations who made a lot of stupid bets that fell apart. This is to protect the 10% of Americans who own the vast majority of stocks from losing all of their paper wealth that is now mostly worthless.
That's how it typically works though. Corporations and the people who matter are special, and receive massive amounts of welfare. Individuals must suffer to learn their lesson. Corporatism is nothing new here. Socialized risk for private profit has been the model for many, many years.
I still think the bailout was necessary, but anyone with a huge 401k should once again thank God for the working class. And in my opinion, they should think about repaying them with investments in education and policies that promote economic equity, instead of destroying it.