...it is absolutely vital that you instruct your kids not to talk to politicians.
Wha?
I told my kids that talking to politicians can be a good College Savings plan. They save the IM logs, and upload them to ABC news when the politician doesn't pay the blackmail money.
But we also must embrace the reality that each sovereign nation is a separate political entity with a different legal climate, economic power, culture, history, language, etc.
All of these differences tend to cause imbalances in how entities in each country trade goods or services. These imbalances can be used to give one side or another an advantage, and players on both sides can profit from that. But in most cases, the profit is unequal.
For example, in the US, there are about 10 million illegal mexican immigrants. If they went to Mexico, they would not be able to get work, and would likely starve. In America, if they work, they have an unfair advantage over American workers, BECAUSE they are illegal, and are able to work for illegally low wages. American companies exploit this difference in legal standing. The Mexican workers exploit this difference. Mexican citizens in Mexico also exploit this difference; one material example: Illegal Mexicans in America can obtain free emergency room care - which they cannot obtain in Mexico. That care is paid for by American taxpayers - who cannot CHOOSE to not pay - therefore, American taxpayers are effectively SUBSIDISING the corporate lawbreakers who illegally hire undocumented workers. These differences in America and Mexico's economies, and how they are exploited can only be resolved two ways: 1. Strong enforcement of immigration law to eliminate all illegals completely. (this is an "idealistic" example - in practice, it could never actually work). 2. America and Mexico could combine, as a single sovereign nation, with the same laws, same level of social spending and investment in public infrastructure, etc. (some anti-immigration folks would be alarmed at the "cultural effect" - when in fact, most of the American Southwest already has a strongly latin-influenced culture, and most towns in California have Spanish names anyway).
#2 would mostly eliminate the imbalance, over time - then there would be no incentive for Mexican workers to come to America (most would rather stay home with their families, if they could earn a decent living), and Corporations would be forced to pay fair wages to legal Mexicans who came for work, and American taxpayers would not be forced to subsidize them - because the Mexicans be paying their own legal tax obligations.
Tarrifs exist for a good reason. They compensate for these kinds of imbalances which can amount to the level of social spending, or public infrastructure, or at worst, amount to massive government subsidies to industry to allow "dumping" (predatory pricing) to occur. Without Tarrifs (and other trade restrictions), a country can lose it's independence and security. And this causes power-vacuums, which causes war. It's true that Tarrifs, like any government-driven regulation, can be abused. But the solution is not to limit them. The solution is to develop an accountability process that discourages abuse. Tarrifs can also do as much damage as subsidies, to an industry's competitiveness. Again, intelligent moderation of subsidy level is the solution. Not an ideologically-driven "ban all tariffs!" movement.
Finally - there's trade-sanctions as well. What happens to the global market for Oil when Iran says they want to build an Atom Bomb, and the rest of the world tries to impose trade sanctions to try to discourage that? This would seriously fuck up most advanced postindustrial and industrial economies. There goes your "free trade". (and let's face it - with the current situation that the main INPUT to all economic activity being energy, and that energy being controlled by OPEC plus an oligarchy of a few independent companies, the whole notion of a "free market" is at best, a pipe-dream).
that there are still some evil bastards there that never really got the idea that slavery is a bad idea and would like to see it again.
No, they think slavery is a bad idea.
You see - with slavery, they have to feed and house the slaves, and keep guards posted, etc.
Minimum wage, coupled with a taxpayer-funded welfare system, is MUCH more efficient than slavery. Even considering the political brib^H^H^H^Hcampaign contriubtion expense, to get tax loopholes (to make OTHER people pay for housing and educating your slav^H^H^H^Hworkers).
The only hope seems to emerge from Islamists. I don't condone their methods nor do I agree with their agenda but I do know they're the only ones who can make a change. If it's for the worse, then be it! As long as they show some resistance to Bush&co, I'll vote for them any time.
The only "change" that militant islam can make in the middle east, is to give BushCo an excuse to bomb the rest of you back to the stone age. Al Qaeda was able to eject the Soviets from Afghanistan. Was the resulting failed state (and 15 years of civil war, followed by Taliban rule) a worthwhile victory?
However, the dictatorial regime makes it impossible for them to acheive any kind of power.
Americans once lived under a dictatorial regime. They did something about it. (we're pretty much on the road to returning to that though - and I'm not sure it's possible to reverse that course, given modern military technology. The ONLY edge that gives to freedom-fighters/assymetric warfighters, is plastic explosives makes suicide bombing very effective (as opposed to the American revolution, where black-poweder didn't make for very effective suicide bombing)....but I can confidently claim that a socialist model is definitely no threat to our lives.
I have to disagree. The problem with Socialism, is that in order to ENFORCE socialism, you must give power to enforcers. And the enforcers WILL abuse the power, and you'll end up with an authoritarian state in very short order. Exceptions to this are the Scandanavian countries, who aren't really Socialist, they're "managed Capitalism". Just as America is "Managed Capitalism" leaning a tad more to the right. (the socialist aspects of America favors corporations).
Frankly, I think that the only path to success in a political system in this modern era is to have a Constitution that guarantees rights, and an educated electorate dedicated to electing officials that will uphold that Constitution. It worked in America for a very long time - but eventually, the educational system failed us, and the electorate no longer has even an elementary grasp of what those rights mean - even though we were all subject to mandatory civics classes. So now we've elected dictator after dictator, each one worse than the last.
And when Bush's successor clamps down even harder, I'm sure that there will be closet-liberals wanting to support the American version of Al Qaeda to have an Iranian-style revolution. Onward "Christian" Soldiers. . . But I'm not going to be supporting them, no matter how "effective" I think their methods are likely to be. I know the face of the devil, and I won't be fooled.
Democrats would be worlds better than Republicans. The muslim world would not love us, but they would have considerably less reason to hate us -
Unquestioning support of Israel is one issue that both Dems and Repubs believe in....So what would be more productive? Certainly not a new political party,...
Given the above, and given the seriousness of the Israeli-Palestinian issue, and its relationship with worldwide muslim opinion - (I'm not saying we need to completely drop all support of Israel - I'm saying that our support should be dependent on Israel upholding American values - like abandoning their byzantine system of apartheid.) - In any case, keeping the same two parties is not going to fix the terrorist problem either.
Yes, the Democratic approach to fighting terror would definately be more effective (it's been PROVEN effective - Ramsi Yousef is in jail, and nobody had to get tortured or dissapeared to make that happen). But 9/11 still followed from that, and that was the result of our support of Israel. If we would put conditions on our support, there would still be militant islamic fundamentalists, but they would have been far less likely to attack us (and would have focussed their anger elsewhere).
Yes, we need a new, serious, opposition party in this country, to replace the Democrats, who are occupying the position of opposition party, yet not actually opposing the key issues that are dragging our nation down.
"The Republicans may have some problems, but the Democrats are just as bad" are merely trying to rationalize 'their team's' failures.
The same thing arises in the torture/detainee-treatment debate; "Waterboarding isn't torture, at least we don't saw their heads off.".... and with regard to speech and press freedoms, and the whole range of how we define our nation's values, and compare them to others.
And then the left is accused of "moral relativism".
This guy who resigned on Friday? Foley? He was being blackmailed by Republican congressional leadership. It's come out now that several of them, including Hastert, KNEW this guy was cyber-diddling 16 year old pages, and magically, $100,000 got transferred from his campaign fund to another campagin fund.
When the Republicans talk about party discipline, nobody knew they were talking about leather masks and whips.
So if they didn't crack down on blogs, what's to stop people like Focus on the Family from paying people to crapflood liberal blogs with conservative astroturf?
(as they did with an email crapflood campaign after the Janet Jackson's tit incident at the superbowl - and the FCC said that they got hundreds of millions of complaints - turns out it was twice the number of people who actually watched the superbowl, and they traced 90% of these "complaints" to a paid shill for FotF.)
The problem with free speech, as it stands today - is people with money will find ways to use technology, whether it's broadcast or the internet, to drown out the legitimate voices of ordinary people.
I don't know if there's a legislative solution to this problem; at least not one that makes the 1st Amendment completely irrelevant.
If you have to process 1500 warrants a day through judicial oversight - then you fucking ramp-up your manpower.
Why is it we can pay $100,000 to "security consultant" (aka Truck Drivers) in Iraq, and we can't hire the appropriate staff to do good judicial oversight? (because the people who are signing the checks don't like judicial oversight - because they like to do their work unsupervised).
It takes time to drive from New York to Cincinatti, so let's get rid of speed limits so truckers can get through faster?
We pay our cops to do a job. If they can't do that job within the legal constraints placed on them, then they should be fired and replaced with people who CAN.
Clinton's DoJ busted the 1993 WTC bomber, and put his ass in jail, WITHOUT warrantless wiretapping, WITHOUT torture, and WITHOUT calling his political opponents "terror supporters" - even though they criticized him for trying to kill Osama bin Laden.
It has been CLEARLY DEMONSTRATED, that it is possible to fight terror, without shitting on the constitution, and the beliefs and values of the folks who wrote it.
You realize what you're saying? They'd have to crack down on political blogs (which could be financed by campaign supporters). They'd have to silence shows like The Daily Show - which can be a de-facto campaign ad. This is a very slippery slope to head down.
Personally, I think the answer is to remove all campaign spending limits, (and completely ban corporate financing). So much money will flood into the system, that people will be crapflooded to death with bullshit campaigning. And knowing how there are no limits, people will tune it out, or apply appropriate levels of scepticism. As it stands now, the campaign finance limits are not even remotely enforcable, (the O'Reilly's and Hannities, and Limbaughs of the world are essentially campaign advertisements, but unregulated, because the money's going to "Issues" rather than candidates). I think that most voters do not apply an appropriate level of scepticism when they hear all this "cut-n-run" crap, because they believe it's legitimately sourced, when it's just paid-for propaganda.
On the other hand, I also think that all FCC media-ownership regulations need to be rolled back to 1960's levels. GE should NOT be allowed to own NBC. (for example). Those kinds of things are easy to enforce, and are entirely reasonable. The media ownership deregulation that happened under Reagan is what started this nations' downward spiral.
But if you don't stand up now, tomorrow will be too late.
It's already far too late. It's been too late for about 30 years. This has been a bloodless revolution so far.
We're that mighty. But when the mighty fall, it's going to be very bloody. I'm not advocating civil war - but I fear that that is now the most likely outcome, and the only way this nation will ever turn back. Our government is no longer a functioning republic. But to win this power, Bush is now putting the onus of that test onto the military (who has to now execute on this legislation). We're likely going to see this play out as a schism in the military. Expect lots of resignations (and expect those to be downplayed or covered-up). I hope it doesn't get worse than that. But it surely could.
On the other hand, maybe America never will get back on track. Maybe it's all over, and there's no fixing it. We've been through darker times, and recovered, but that was before nuclear weapons, electronic surveillance, and mass-media.
I mean one party already makes those promises, but in fact does the opposite. Many voters just don't seem to notice.
1. Get elected on promises to shrink government. 2. Lie us into war. 3. Expand government like nobody else has before. 4. Blame the expansion on the war. 5. PROFIT!!!
Maybe the real solution is to launch in Kazakhastan. Where if the people protest, they can just be jailed without charges and tortured, and the govt. can spy on them to find out if they're even planning on protesting.
Oh wait - forgot. We can do that in the US now too.
but getting rid of the Pentagon will do more harm to NASA than good.
You vastly underestimate how badly the Air Force fucked NASA by crippling the Shuttle the way they did. (just one example of how NASA has been rendered almost completely worthess because of Air Force meddling).
Personally, as an American, I think most of my fellow Americans have forsaken science, logic, and reason, and modernity, and civilization, in general. I'm glad that physicists are finding a new home in Switzerland. In 20 years, when we're as backwards as every other religious fundamentalist theocracy in the world, and wonder what happened to our dominance, and you guys are over in Switzerland eating your chocolate and discovering new particles, please take a moment every first Tuesday in November to laugh at the ignorant Americans that used to be the world leaders in science. But don't piss us off too much, or Mullah Robertson will draw up a fatwah against you.
This post may sound sarcastic, but I'm dead serious.
Actually, what's needed is solar cells that have an operational life long enough that their power generation produces more money than they cost to make.
Right now, it takes tax incentives, over the 15 year expected life of current offerings, to pretty much break even on cost.
If those panels last 30 years instead of 15, even if their efficiency is less than 20%, there'll still be a payoff. Right now, the only payoff Solar has, is the absence of costs the petroleum energy very efficiently shifts to other areas (ie. pollution, and war over oil fields is a cost we all bear, but the petroleum industry does not factor into the cost at the pump). Solar doesn't involve any of these costs - but because the petroleum industry shifts these costs, petroleum seems cheaper.
Yeah, you're doing fine, because you're profitable now, wait until you have retirees to take care of like GM did." The difference though, is that, having learned from the 50's, Google isn't making those mistakes. Google will never have massive pension obligations for the very basic reason that Google does not enter into these obligations.
Yeah, but the jokes on GM's workers; GM may have entered into those obligations, but never intended to follow through. And now, some poor dumb ass class action lawyer has to prove "intent" on an agreement made decades ago by executives who are now dead.
I work in a place with almost the most rigorous processes you could imagine. I think the guys who write avionics software are the only ones who are more rigorous. And we, also, are in constant rush-mode. I don't think that has anything to do with process. I think it has to do with when the organization is tasked, scheduled and run exclusively by business-types, as opposed to engineers, who have some notion of how long things take.
California is huge, and it's also a huge political hotbutton in the rightwing's culture wars.
California was important enough for the Republicans to launch a costly out-of-state effort to get their governor recalled and replaced with an Enron corporate sock-puppet. (in order to derail the lawsuit to get out of the fraudulent electricity contracts - the first thing Arnold did was put that $9 Billion on California's credit card).
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...it is absolutely vital that you instruct your kids not to talk to politicians.
Wha?
I told my kids that talking to politicians can be a good College Savings plan. They save the IM logs, and upload them to ABC news when the politician doesn't pay the blackmail money.
and watch as I fumble through my backpack for replacement batteries or recharging cables, because of my fucking power-hog bluetooth watch and phone.
I'm all for free trade.
But we also must embrace the reality that each sovereign nation is a separate political entity with a different legal climate, economic power, culture, history, language, etc.
All of these differences tend to cause imbalances in how entities in each country trade goods or services. These imbalances can be used to give one side or another an advantage, and players on both sides can profit from that. But in most cases, the profit is unequal.
For example, in the US, there are about 10 million illegal mexican immigrants. If they went to Mexico, they would not be able to get work, and would likely starve. In America, if they work, they have an unfair advantage over American workers, BECAUSE they are illegal, and are able to work for illegally low wages. American companies exploit this difference in legal standing. The Mexican workers exploit this difference. Mexican citizens in Mexico also exploit this difference; one material example: Illegal Mexicans in America can obtain free emergency room care - which they cannot obtain in Mexico. That care is paid for by American taxpayers - who cannot CHOOSE to not pay - therefore, American taxpayers are effectively SUBSIDISING the corporate lawbreakers who illegally hire undocumented workers. These differences in America and Mexico's economies, and how they are exploited can only be resolved two ways:
1. Strong enforcement of immigration law to eliminate all illegals completely. (this is an "idealistic" example - in practice, it could never actually work).
2. America and Mexico could combine, as a single sovereign nation, with the same laws, same level of social spending and investment in public infrastructure, etc. (some anti-immigration folks would be alarmed at the "cultural effect" - when in fact, most of the American Southwest already has a strongly latin-influenced culture, and most towns in California have Spanish names anyway).
#2 would mostly eliminate the imbalance, over time - then there would be no incentive for Mexican workers to come to America (most would rather stay home with their families, if they could earn a decent living), and Corporations would be forced to pay fair wages to legal Mexicans who came for work, and American taxpayers would not be forced to subsidize them - because the Mexicans be paying their own legal tax obligations.
Tarrifs exist for a good reason. They compensate for these kinds of imbalances which can amount to the level of social spending, or public infrastructure, or at worst, amount to massive government subsidies to industry to allow "dumping" (predatory pricing) to occur. Without Tarrifs (and other trade restrictions), a country can lose it's independence and security. And this causes power-vacuums, which causes war.
It's true that Tarrifs, like any government-driven regulation, can be abused. But the solution is not to limit them. The solution is to develop an accountability process that discourages abuse. Tarrifs can also do as much damage as subsidies, to an industry's competitiveness. Again, intelligent moderation of subsidy level is the solution. Not an ideologically-driven "ban all tariffs!" movement.
Finally - there's trade-sanctions as well. What happens to the global market for Oil when Iran says they want to build an Atom Bomb, and the rest of the world tries to impose trade sanctions to try to discourage that? This would seriously fuck up most advanced postindustrial and industrial economies. There goes your "free trade". (and let's face it - with the current situation that the main INPUT to all economic activity being energy, and that energy being controlled by OPEC plus an oligarchy of a few independent companies, the whole notion of a "free market" is at best, a pipe-dream).
that there are still some evil bastards there that never really got the idea that slavery is a bad idea and would like to see it again.
No, they think slavery is a bad idea.
You see - with slavery, they have to feed and house the slaves, and keep guards posted, etc.
Minimum wage, coupled with a taxpayer-funded welfare system, is MUCH more efficient than slavery. Even considering the political brib^H^H^H^Hcampaign contriubtion expense, to get tax loopholes (to make OTHER people pay for housing and educating your slav^H^H^H^Hworkers).
The only hope seems to emerge from Islamists. I don't condone their methods nor do I agree with their agenda but I do know they're the only ones who can make a change. If it's for the worse, then be it! As long as they show some resistance to Bush&co, I'll vote for them any time.
...but I can confidently claim that a socialist model is definitely no threat to our lives.
The only "change" that militant islam can make in the middle east, is to give BushCo an excuse to bomb the rest of you back to the stone age. Al Qaeda was able to eject the Soviets from Afghanistan. Was the resulting failed state (and 15 years of civil war, followed by Taliban rule) a worthwhile victory?
However, the dictatorial regime makes it impossible for them to acheive any kind of power.
Americans once lived under a dictatorial regime. They did something about it.
(we're pretty much on the road to returning to that though - and I'm not sure it's possible to reverse that course, given modern military technology. The ONLY edge that gives to freedom-fighters/assymetric warfighters, is plastic explosives makes suicide bombing very effective (as opposed to the American revolution, where black-poweder didn't make for very effective suicide bombing).
I have to disagree. The problem with Socialism, is that in order to ENFORCE socialism, you must give power to enforcers. And the enforcers WILL abuse the power, and you'll end up with an authoritarian state in very short order. Exceptions to this are the Scandanavian countries, who aren't really Socialist, they're "managed Capitalism". Just as America is "Managed Capitalism" leaning a tad more to the right. (the socialist aspects of America favors corporations).
Frankly, I think that the only path to success in a political system in this modern era is to have a Constitution that guarantees rights, and an educated electorate dedicated to electing officials that will uphold that Constitution. It worked in America for a very long time - but eventually, the educational system failed us, and the electorate no longer has even an elementary grasp of what those rights mean - even though we were all subject to mandatory civics classes. So now we've elected dictator after dictator, each one worse than the last.
And when Bush's successor clamps down even harder, I'm sure that there will be closet-liberals wanting to support the American version of Al Qaeda to have an Iranian-style revolution. Onward "Christian" Soldiers. . .
But I'm not going to be supporting them, no matter how "effective" I think their methods are likely to be. I know the face of the devil, and I won't be fooled.
Lincoln and Grant got rid of habeas corpus for US citizens and yet we survived it.
So. . . Habeus Corpus is coming back?
When?
When we win the War on Terror?
When is that going to happen?
Please. . . tell me exactly when the WoT is over. What's the victory condition? hm?
When we're safe, we can have our Liberty back?
Democrats would be worlds better than Republicans. The muslim world would not love us, but they would have considerably less reason to hate us -
...So what would be more productive? Certainly not a new political party,...
Unquestioning support of Israel is one issue that both Dems and Repubs believe in.
Given the above, and given the seriousness of the Israeli-Palestinian issue, and its relationship with worldwide muslim opinion - (I'm not saying we need to completely drop all support of Israel - I'm saying that our support should be dependent on Israel upholding American values - like abandoning their byzantine system of apartheid.) - In any case, keeping the same two parties is not going to fix the terrorist problem either.
Yes, the Democratic approach to fighting terror would definately be more effective (it's been PROVEN effective - Ramsi Yousef is in jail, and nobody had to get tortured or dissapeared to make that happen). But 9/11 still followed from that, and that was the result of our support of Israel. If we would put conditions on our support, there would still be militant islamic fundamentalists, but they would have been far less likely to attack us (and would have focussed their anger elsewhere).
Yes, we need a new, serious, opposition party in this country, to replace the Democrats, who are occupying the position of opposition party, yet not actually opposing the key issues that are dragging our nation down.
"The Republicans may have some problems, but the Democrats are just as bad" are merely trying to rationalize 'their team's' failures.
.... and with regard to speech and press freedoms, and the whole range of how we define our nation's values, and compare them to others.
The same thing arises in the torture/detainee-treatment debate;
"Waterboarding isn't torture, at least we don't saw their heads off."
And then the left is accused of "moral relativism".
Aw hell - you don't even know the worst of it.
This guy who resigned on Friday? Foley? He was being blackmailed by Republican congressional leadership. It's come out now that several of them, including Hastert, KNEW this guy was cyber-diddling 16 year old pages, and magically, $100,000 got transferred from his campaign fund to another campagin fund.
When the Republicans talk about party discipline, nobody knew they were talking about leather masks and whips.
So if they didn't crack down on blogs, what's to stop people like Focus on the Family from paying people to crapflood liberal blogs with conservative astroturf?
(as they did with an email crapflood campaign after the Janet Jackson's tit incident at the superbowl - and the FCC said that they got hundreds of millions of complaints - turns out it was twice the number of people who actually watched the superbowl, and they traced 90% of these "complaints" to a paid shill for FotF.)
The problem with free speech, as it stands today - is people with money will find ways to use technology, whether it's broadcast or the internet, to drown out the legitimate voices of ordinary people.
I don't know if there's a legislative solution to this problem; at least not one that makes the 1st Amendment completely irrelevant.
If you have to process 1500 warrants a day through judicial oversight - then you fucking ramp-up your manpower.
Why is it we can pay $100,000 to "security consultant" (aka Truck Drivers) in Iraq, and we can't hire the appropriate staff to do good judicial oversight? (because the people who are signing the checks don't like judicial oversight - because they like to do their work unsupervised).
Duh!
It takes time to get a warrant,
wah.
It takes time to drive from New York to Cincinatti, so let's get rid of speed limits so truckers can get through faster?
We pay our cops to do a job.
If they can't do that job within the legal constraints placed on them, then they should be fired and replaced with people who CAN.
Clinton's DoJ busted the 1993 WTC bomber, and put his ass in jail, WITHOUT warrantless wiretapping, WITHOUT torture, and WITHOUT calling his political opponents "terror supporters" - even though they criticized him for trying to kill Osama bin Laden.
It has been CLEARLY DEMONSTRATED, that it is possible to fight terror, without shitting on the constitution, and the beliefs and values of the folks who wrote it.
You realize what you're saying?
They'd have to crack down on political blogs (which could be financed by campaign supporters). They'd have to silence shows like The Daily Show - which can be a de-facto campaign ad. This is a very slippery slope to head down.
Personally, I think the answer is to remove all campaign spending limits, (and completely ban corporate financing). So much money will flood into the system, that people will be crapflooded to death with bullshit campaigning. And knowing how there are no limits, people will tune it out, or apply appropriate levels of scepticism. As it stands now, the campaign finance limits are not even remotely enforcable, (the O'Reilly's and Hannities, and Limbaughs of the world are essentially campaign advertisements, but unregulated, because the money's going to "Issues" rather than candidates). I think that most voters do not apply an appropriate level of scepticism when they hear all this "cut-n-run" crap, because they believe it's legitimately sourced, when it's just paid-for propaganda.
On the other hand, I also think that all FCC media-ownership regulations need to be rolled back to 1960's levels. GE should NOT be allowed to own NBC. (for example). Those kinds of things are easy to enforce, and are entirely reasonable. The media ownership deregulation that happened under Reagan is what started this nations' downward spiral.
But if you don't stand up now, tomorrow will be too late.
It's already far too late.
It's been too late for about 30 years.
This has been a bloodless revolution so far.
We're that mighty. But when the mighty fall, it's going to be very bloody. I'm not advocating civil war - but I fear that that is now the most likely outcome, and the only way this nation will ever turn back. Our government is no longer a functioning republic. But to win this power, Bush is now putting the onus of that test onto the military (who has to now execute on this legislation). We're likely going to see this play out as a schism in the military. Expect lots of resignations (and expect those to be downplayed or covered-up). I hope it doesn't get worse than that. But it surely could.
On the other hand, maybe America never will get back on track. Maybe it's all over, and there's no fixing it. We've been through darker times, and recovered, but that was before nuclear weapons, electronic surveillance, and mass-media.
I mean one party already makes those promises, but in fact does the opposite. Many voters just don't seem to notice.
1. Get elected on promises to shrink government.
2. Lie us into war.
3. Expand government like nobody else has before.
4. Blame the expansion on the war.
5. PROFIT!!!
But what's needed is Americans who will protest.
It's got to get much worse before that will happen. Sad to say.
Holy fuck. Whatever did they need 3kW for on a satellite?
Maybe the real solution is to launch in Kazakhastan. Where if the people protest, they can just be jailed without charges and tortured, and the govt. can spy on them to find out if they're even planning on protesting.
Oh wait - forgot. We can do that in the US now too.
but getting rid of the Pentagon will do more harm to NASA than good.
You vastly underestimate how badly the Air Force fucked NASA by crippling the Shuttle the way they did. (just one example of how NASA has been rendered almost completely worthess because of Air Force meddling).
Personally, as an American, I think most of my fellow Americans have forsaken science, logic, and reason, and modernity, and civilization, in general. I'm glad that physicists are finding a new home in Switzerland. In 20 years, when we're as backwards as every other religious fundamentalist theocracy in the world, and wonder what happened to our dominance, and you guys are over in Switzerland eating your chocolate and discovering new particles, please take a moment every first Tuesday in November to laugh at the ignorant Americans that used to be the world leaders in science. But don't piss us off too much, or Mullah Robertson will draw up a fatwah against you.
This post may sound sarcastic, but I'm dead serious.
Actually, what's needed is solar cells that have an operational life long enough that their power generation produces more money than they cost to make.
Right now, it takes tax incentives, over the 15 year expected life of current offerings, to pretty much break even on cost.
If those panels last 30 years instead of 15, even if their efficiency is less than 20%, there'll still be a payoff. Right now, the only payoff Solar has, is the absence of costs the petroleum energy very efficiently shifts to other areas (ie. pollution, and war over oil fields is a cost we all bear, but the petroleum industry does not factor into the cost at the pump). Solar doesn't involve any of these costs - but because the petroleum industry shifts these costs, petroleum seems cheaper.
WRT Verizon and shoulder-chips;
At least in my neck of the woods, Verizon's service quality is great.
When I'm driving to work, on the highway.
When I'm AT work, or AT home, their service SUCKS.
Ironically, they're passing a law this year in my state making it illegal to be even holding a cell phone in your hand while driving.
But that's the only time when I get a decent signal!
Fuckers!
Yeah, you're doing fine, because you're profitable now, wait until you have retirees to take care of like GM did." The difference though, is that, having learned from the 50's, Google isn't making those mistakes. Google will never have massive pension obligations for the very basic reason that Google does not enter into these obligations.
Yeah, but the jokes on GM's workers; GM may have entered into those obligations, but never intended to follow through. And now, some poor dumb ass class action lawyer has to prove "intent" on an agreement made decades ago by executives who are now dead.
Ha ha!
I work in a place with almost the most rigorous processes you could imagine. I think the guys who write avionics software are the only ones who are more rigorous. And we, also, are in constant rush-mode. I don't think that has anything to do with process. I think it has to do with when the organization is tasked, scheduled and run exclusively by business-types, as opposed to engineers, who have some notion of how long things take.
Hawaii is a much smaller state.
California is huge, and it's also a huge political hotbutton in the rightwing's culture wars.
California was important enough for the Republicans to launch a costly out-of-state effort to get their governor recalled and replaced with an Enron corporate sock-puppet. (in order to derail the lawsuit to get out of the fraudulent electricity contracts - the first thing Arnold did was put that $9 Billion on California's credit card).
I don't think they'd let this one pass either.