The fact that the Unites States is not perfect is acknowledged in the preamble of the Constitution. While the preamble does not have the force of law, I have no argument with it. But we're not arguing perfection here, are we? You seem to be arguing that giving aid to a nuclear-proliferating state -- Israel -- and undermining nuclear deterrence by threatening "preemptive" nuclear war, all while having an active biological and chemical weapons program and significant amounts of said stockpile unaccounted for is a minor blemish on an otherwise clean record, as opposed to a string of highly illegal actions that citizens of a democracy should not stand for. The United States is a constitutional, democratic republic, and as such its elected officials are not above the law. My argument, which you did not bother to refute, is that the US is not within the law. Some of its transgressions consist of actions which actually undermined enforcement of 687, such as inserting spies into the inspection teams and forcing removal of inspectors prior to Desert Fox. As to kicking the US off of UNSEC, I would rather see UNSEC itself cease to be following full implementation of the NPT and bio- and chemical weapons protocols. The only excuse for having UNSEC is that its permanent members can end life on earth. When that's not true any longer, power should devolve to the General Assembly.
Although you and I disagree, you distinguish yourself by actually going back and reading 687. I've gone back a little further and read the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, to which the US is a signatory. Especially Article VI, which states:
Each of the Parties to the Treaty undertakes to pursue negotiations in good faith on effective measures relating to cessation of the nuclear arms race at an early date and to nuclear disarmament, and on a Treaty on general and complete disarmament under strict and effective international control.
Which, since treaties submitted by the President and ratified by the Senate are (along with the Constitution) the supreme law of the land, means that the US is obligated to work with the community of nations to achieve nuclear disarmament. Obviously, a nation announcing a policy of utilizing nuclear weapons in "preemptive" wars is in breach of Article VI. Meanwhile, the US develops chemical and biological weapons in violation of the spirit (and likely the letter) of the protocols on biological and chemical weapons. (Oh, and let's not forget that weapons-grade anthrax was left unsecured so that a person or persons unknown could kill two postal workers and attempt to kill the then-Senate Majority Leader and Judiciary Committee Chair.)
Iraq's breaches of these protocols which the US itself does not seem to care for were the prime mover behind the adoption of 687. Despite the fact that the US undermined implementation of 687 by inserting spies into the inspection teams, UNSCOM destroyed 90 - 95% of Iraq's WMD capability prior to the UNSCOM inspectors being forced to leave Iraq by President Clinton prior to Operation Desert Fox. Had inspections not been compromised and finally halted, Iraq would likely be disarmed by now. Unfortunately, the Clinton Administration and the Bush Junta both declared "regime change" as official policy, meaning that sanctions would likely have continued against Iraq regardless of its compliance with 687. Great motivator for Hussein to disarm -- damned if you do, damned if you don't. Outside his palace walls, of course, the populace is getting sick from water-borne diseases because the sanctions regime will not allow chlorine to be imported into Iraq for any purpose. And we haven't even mentioned yet that Israel's nuclear weapons program should be dismantled under 687 as well, since it reaffirms the goal of ridding the region of nuclear weapons, nor that US aid to Israel, a non-signatory of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, is illegal because of their nuclear weapons program. Nor should we leave out the fact that the so-called "no-fly zones" are not authorized by 687.
Now, if the US wishes to change policy and
work seriously toward nuclear disarmament;
abide by the biological and chemical weapons conventions;
repudiate "preemptive" war plans;
repudiate "regime change" doctrine;
cease interference with the inspections process;
acknowledge the Israeli nuclear program and cut off aid until it can be inspected and dismantled;
then it has true moral standing to lecture the world about 687. Otherwise, it's about oil and dollars, no matter how much you try to obscure that.
The Walter Williams you are referring to is the same Walter Williams who is the John M. Olin Distinguished Professor of Economics at George Mason University, and who has been a fellow at the Hoover Institution and at the Heritage Foundation. He apparently received funding for one of his books from the Scaife Foundation. All that makes him a rather reactionary fellow, or at least he plays one on TV;) It is not that surprising, then, to find him making apologetics for the Confederacy. It is, however, difficult for a man to call the piss upon his back rain, and for Williams to state
The South, which exported agricultural products to and imported manufactured goods from Europe...
and expect an intelligent reader to ignore that the South's agricultural products were grown and harvested by slaves is simply staggering. Further, Williams is so bold as to state
Their constitution was nearly identical to the U.S. Constitution except that it outlawed protectionist tariffs, business handouts and mandated a two-thirds majority vote for all spending measures.
(3) The Confederate States may acquire new territory; and Congress shall have power to legislate and provide governments for the inhabitants of all territory belonging to the Confederate States, lying without the limits of the several States; and may permit them, at such times, and in such manner as it may by law provide, to form States to be admitted into the Confederacy. In all such territory the institution of negro slavery, as it now exists in the Confederate States, shall be recognized and protected be Congress and by the Territorial government; and the inhabitants of the several Confederate States and Territories shall have the right to take to such Territory any slaves lawfully held by them in any of the States or Territories of the Confederate States.
History is quite complex. I have no reason to doubt your characterization of your paternal great-grandfather's rationale for taking up arms. You may find the comparison distasteful, but I have no reason to doubt John Walker Lindh's stated rationale for taking up arms, either. Neither of these rationales has much of anything to do with the fact that Robert E. Lee was a traitor to the United States. If your paternal great-grandfather was deceived by Lee, or Jefferson Davis, or any other traitor, then I do hope that deception did not cost him his life, and I further hope he lived long enough to realize that he fought under an abhorrent banner. As to Lee himself, whose former front yard is now filled with tombstones, it does not matter to me if he was occasionally kind, or if he loved puppies. He was responsible for tens of thousands of needless deaths and hundreds of thousands more maimed, all on behalf of maintaining the southern aristocracy and that aristocracy's brutal practice of slavery. My original point was that the southern aristocracy was all the counterargument anyone needs to the belief that "noblesse oblige" is something we should ever look back at longingly. Thanks for passing along the reference to the "Conquered Banner."
Furl that banner, softly, slowly!
Treat it gently--it is holy-- For it droops above the dead. Touch it not--unfold it never, Let it droop there, furled forever, For its people's hopes are dead!
its people's hopes, as Trent Lott will be happy to remind you, were to preserve the southern aristocracy and the slavery upon which it depended. And I find it staggering that a US citizen would quote approvingly a verse calling holy a treasonous banner under which over 600,000 people died between 1861 and 1865, and in whose unholy memory an apartheid regime was built in the southern US which lasted nearly one hundred years. History is complex, indeed.
Re:Frodo often seen as ``everyman''
on
David Brin On LOTR
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· Score: 2, Interesting
I've never understood why people complain of royalty and their perquisites---certainly ``lese majeste'' was balanced by ``oblesse noblige''---far more appropriate than the riches of robber and merchant ``barons''. Should we argue for taking away the wealth of the Kennedys and Rockefellers as well? I find a family who traded power into a position of responsibility far more laudable than one which went for the root of all evil instead.
Oh, dear.
The antebellum South was full of noblesse oblige, the magnolias dripping with romanticism. Fortunately, the Union, with all its faults, prevailed in the Civil War. Unimpeachable power deriving from an unaccountable basis leads to bloodshed and ruin. A lesson which Trent Lott and his fellow "Lost Cause" (what the sympathizers of the treasonous officers and terrorist yahoos who called themselves the Confederacy follow, for those not from the US) revivalists have yet to learn, apparently. Not to say romanticism doesn't have its place. It does. That place is Mardi Gras.
Re:Please, Deep Blue is not AI, chess is a limited
on
Behind Deep Blue
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· Score: 1
I'd disagree that emotions are dispensible when discussing intelligence. Emotions are what filter out the (at least recursively enumerable) infinite true statements about the world to leave the residue of true statements that we feel are important. I don't care that if I am in Paris, my left foot also is in Paris. That's an emotional response. (If my left foot is in a box in Atlanta while I am in Paris, I might have a different emotional response.) Does Deep Blue care whether or not it wins? I'd say it can't, for any definition of care that I'd find reasonable, and hence it's not intelligent, artificially or otherwise. Descartes' Error goes into this in greater depth, especially how people with very little emotional affect are almost incapable of making decisions.
It would be good indeed, if this were the actual behavior of cops on the street. In neighborhoods where there is a strong middle- to upper-class presence, significant percentage of registered voters, &c., i.e. people who can make trouble for the police, rules like this are more likely to be followed. They are less likely to be followed in a minority community, however, even if the socioeconomic and voter-registration indices are high. Go across town to a poor, largely-minority community (say, Tulia, TX) where few vote and fewer have much pull with local law enforcement, and the law is essentially whatever the cop on the street can convince the local judge (elected to 'git tuff' on crime) to wink at. Police are generally believed on the witness stand, unless the defense can put forth solid evidence to the contrary, so when the officer says that you threw something down on the ground which tests later showed to be heroin, you are headed to prison, no matter the fact that the officer actually broke the law by reaching into your jacket to see if he or she could find something incriminating.
Young nubile collegues? Your department must be, um, interesting... While still young (although rapidly approaching middle age) in Real Life (tm), in computer years I'm no longer young. Whether or not I'm nubile is none of your business;-) My recollection is that my eagerness to make money for my employers was swiftly exploited by the schemes of those who were older, and who had had a decade or two to make their strategies extra underhanded. The young and vicious only triumph over the old and vicious if the old get careless; otherwise, the young seek a mentor who will help them get old in exchange for taking out some of their mentor's old rivals. Course, if your mentor gets laid off, fired, or decides to resign to spend more time with the family, this can have a negative impact on your career track for becoming old and vicious.
According to Yahoo! Finance, Mr. Gates sold 10 million shares in June, worth a collective $500 million (give or take) at their respective times of sale. This sale, of course, did not effectively dilute his stake in MSFT or his control of the company. That means you'll have a hard time affecting the company's decision-making process as an owner "buying more shares," unless you've got cash (or equivalent) in large piles lying around and can either a) find a willing insider/institutional seller or b) happen to be standing around while MSFT pulls an Enron.
It would be nice to believe that buying 100 shares of MSFT makes you as much of an owner as Bill Gates. If corporations were democratically run, one-person-one-vote institutions, it would make sense. However, corporations are one-dollar-one-vote institutions. Your 100 shares mean squat, therefore. Many activist groups do show up at stockholder meetings for companies in which they own shares, and they make great theater. But they don't make corporate decisions.
I believe David Bowie, doing publicity for his new album and tour, said he feels that the current revenue model for music only has a few years left, and after that, if you want to make money, you'll have to play live. The revenue stream from recordings will dry up.
CEOs make 419 times as much as the average worker, and CEO pay is rising five times faster than profits. Payroll taxes mean working people don't take home much more than 20 years ago. Bill Gates's fortune is 1.4 million times larger than the median family income.
Some are getting violently richer than others, it seems. So remember: Time is time. Money is money. Try not to conflate the two.
I remember the announcements when this came out. I knew it was a big win for EDS, but I didn't realize that the boxes and OS's were all rentals. I'm trying to decide if this is a worse scam than the Air Force renting Boeing 747's for 10 years, fitting them out as tankers, then refurbishing them at the end of term as passenger planes. Every time I think the 80's are over, another one of these disgraces pops up.
From THOMAS: Gene Taylor has sponsored or co-sponsored two bills in the 107th Congress. Here they are. Looking at this, I'd push the impairing-defense-readiness angle. CBPDTA (?), by preventing DoD from procuring GNU/Linux systems offering greater transparency and security and a lower total cost of ownership, does not contribute to the goal of a leaner, more efficient military and leaves the services more exposed to 21st Century asymmetrical warfighting tactics (e.g., the enemy-du-jour 0wning the properly-licensed regimental IIS server).
Sharply limited terms and subsidies for creators
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Fair IP Laws?
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· Score: 1
Five-year copyright terms for content creators, transforming the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and the National Endowments for the Arts and Humanities into entitlements, and the demilitarization of the DARPA/ONR/RAND R&D model by shifting US R&D budgets to fund at least 60% non-military projects through NSF and new agencies to be created. Yes, more geeks (and artists, musicians, and writers) would have to get political. Yes, creators would be under pressure to produce more work, since one's exclusive window would be smaller (but, then again, ideas can get around the world much faster today). Yes, the risk would exist for a narrow-minded hypocrite (of which the world has a surplus) to attempt to suppress content which disturbs his or her sensibilities. However, such NMHs can be fought in the political arena -- and the payoff is nothing less than the rescue of the Internet from the eCommerce tarpit of the dot-com implosion and the creative arts from the AOLTWFOXDISNEYVIVENDI Borg collective.
Actually, I don't think his call for empire was satirical. William Kristol, who is co-editor of the magazine, has called for the US to be a "benevolent global hegemon" in a 1996 Foreign Affairs article. A relevant quote (emphasis added):
Conservatives will not be able to govern America over the long term if they fail to offer a more elevated vision of America's international role.
What should that role be? Benevolent global hegemony. Having defeated the "evil empire," the United States enjoys strategic and ideological predominance. The first objective of U.S. foreign policy should be to preserve and enhance that predominance by strengthening America's security, supporting its friends, advancing its interests, and standing up for its principles around the world.
While Kristol and Kagan do admit that [t]he aspiration to benevolent hegemony might strike some as either hubristic or morally suspect, they go on to make the case for it anyway. Last, in his article, says this (emphasis added):
[The Rebel Alliance's] victory over the Empire doesn't liberate the galaxy--it turns the galaxy into Somalia writ large: dominated by local warlords who are answerable to no one.
Which corresponds well with Kristol and Kagan's viewpoint (emphasis added):
American hegemony is the only reliable defense against a breakdown of peace and international order. The appropriate goal of American foreign policy, therefore, is to preserve that hegemony as far into the future as possible. To achieve this goal, the United States needs a neo-Reaganite foreign policy of military supremacy and moral confidence.
And (I'd like to believe) judges are a lot harder to buy or exert pressure on than politicians
I'd like to believe that, too, but unfortunately the Federalist Society gets in the way. The integrity of the judiciary has been undermined, with all the dangers for our system of government that that implies. (I don't wish to imply that the Federalist society, with whom I personally disagree and for whom I certainly do not speak, has a monolithic position on the Microsoft case. Orrin Hatch, as just one prominent example, takes a strong anti-Microsoft position. Here's a recent symposium they had on the subject. )
Oh, you mean you want to give out money to people who are totally unaffected by slavery? Sorry, that's a different matter.
Quite, since the Federal Government -- which benefitted greatly from slavery -- is still here, along with insurance and transportation companies which made profits on insuring slaveholders and utilizing slave labor (e.g., AIG, Aetna, Norfolk Southern), educational institutions which have money derived from the slave trade as a significant part of their endowment (e.g. Harvard, Brown), and individuals whose inheritances are based upon plantations given back to their families following the Civil War. Also, slavery did not end in 1863 -- MS utilizes slave labor today, unless you can come up with a more descriptive word for the prison labor which assembles Windows and Office shrink-wrap boxes. (Using prisoners as slave labor is legal under the 13th Amendment, if you were wondering.) Further, the attempts by the Federal Government to make former slaves whole (reparations) were undone by the end of the First Reconstruction and the rise of Jim Crow, which prevented African-Americans from building wealth due to disenfranchisement, discriminatory lending, restrictive covenants in housing, and discriminatory hiring. Former slaves lost the ability to defend their economic gains politically, then lost the ability to make economic gains. Jim Crow died between 1954 and 1965. The class of persons affected by Jim Crow contains millions of people who are very much alive. Note that I'm not talking about individual acts of racism, but a pervasive legal framework which subordinated US citizens (what we all became after the 14th Amendment) to a second-class status. Cheerleading for MS to be able to hoard $40 billion is cheerleading for all of us who are not wealthy to be second-class citizens. There is a limit, and MS has crossed it.
I guess I just feel the need to feed your karma (or else this provides an excellent diversion from actual work).
I'm wondering exactly how it is that you feel the MS cesspool, to use our term for it, was collected if not for favorable tax laws allowing its collection under the theory that it was better for the economy to allow MS to "make the pie higher," as the only President we have says. We may call MS a person in contemplation of law, but that "person" is largely defined by what the IRS will allow it to get away with.
So while I appreciate your concern about corruption and totally agree that it should be dealt with, and many times is not properly dealt with, it does not invalidate the fundamental fact that large amounts of cash DO create wealth for many totally unconnected parties in the economy.
For sufficiently small values of many. Our disagreement is not that hoarding $40 billion in a cesspool does not "create wealth" for someone -- I think we both agree it wouldn't be done if that were the case. What I have been saying throughout this thread, with consequent karma damage along the way, is that the wealth creation is concentrated, i.e. only a handful of people are actually benefitting. If you are arguing that MS is making a handful of investors and financial executives rich, then we agree. In that case, I am confused why you mentioned mortgages, which for the overwhelming majority of Americans are subsidized by tax credits and GSE's such as Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Most of us would be renting today if it were not for the tremendous goverment intervention in the housing market following WWII. We've been having this argument on "wealth creation" in the US since Reagan, and I would think that after David Stockman himself called Reaganomics BS, that this trickle-down nonsense would have died out by now. It hasn't. But I will give you credit for attempting to argue that extraordinary collections of liquid assets provide benefits to others than those who hold them.
Erm, yeah. On the topic at hand, the $40 billion is a bad thing. Depositing it with Citigroup doesn't make it a good thing. Hoping that John Ashcroft and Harvey Pitt will aggresively prosecute the abuses that the $40 billion invites is a stupid thing.
You claimed that a (what is the word? cesspool?) of liquid assets of that size feeds into wealth creation through capitalistic use of the banking system. I countered that the current economic climate, in which the same firm can both hype a stock and loan you the money to buy it, substantially complicates the ECON 101 picture you paint of this $40 billion participating in some virtuous circle which keeps all our suburban lawns green. Your belief in an aggressive criminal and civil enforcement of financial laws is unfortunately disconnected from reality. Yes, Henry Blodget should be in jail, and so should Kenneth Lay. Microsoft, similarly, should lose its corporate charter for being an illegal monopoly. But Henry and Kenny Boy will be watching CNBC and eating Chilean Sea Bass next year, just as MS will add another $3.5 billion in value to their liquid reserve. If that's wealth creation, it's working... for them. But a more proper term is wealth concentration, as I said earlier.
Oh, and thanks for your concern, but I lost nothing due to Enron other than my ability to vote for President and have it count. Don't bother sending flowers.
MS has to have their 40b deposited in banks. Those banks don't just pay interest for fun; they take that 40b and loan it to others (you, me, etc.) and we use that money to build houses, buy cars, and do other things that stimulate the economy and create more wealth.
Unless, of course, they take that money and loan it to sucker^H^H^H others to purchase shares of Enron (insert current flavor of month here) on margin while instructing the analysts in their investment division to hype the stock publicly all the while calling it a POS privately. It's a nice little system called corruption and it allows wealth to be CONCENTRATED, at least until the market collapses. Unfortunately, just as handling cost overruns on single-source no-bid cost-plus contracts is not taught in CS 101, practical tips on perpetrating multimillion-dollar market frauds aren't going to be covered in ECON 101. Instead, you'll be taught happy little myths about friction-free perfect meetings of supply and demand, which is like discussing Earth's gravitational pull while disregarding Earth's atmosphere when trying to understand aviation.
Slashdot Mirror
The fact that the Unites States is not perfect is acknowledged in the preamble of the Constitution. While the preamble does not have the force of law, I have no argument with it. But we're not arguing perfection here, are we? You seem to be arguing that giving aid to a nuclear-proliferating state -- Israel -- and undermining nuclear deterrence by threatening "preemptive" nuclear war, all while having an active biological and chemical weapons program and significant amounts of said stockpile unaccounted for is a minor blemish on an otherwise clean record, as opposed to a string of highly illegal actions that citizens of a democracy should not stand for. The United States is a constitutional, democratic republic, and as such its elected officials are not above the law. My argument, which you did not bother to refute, is that the US is not within the law. Some of its transgressions consist of actions which actually undermined enforcement of 687, such as inserting spies into the inspection teams and forcing removal of inspectors prior to Desert Fox. As to kicking the US off of UNSEC, I would rather see UNSEC itself cease to be following full implementation of the NPT and bio- and chemical weapons protocols. The only excuse for having UNSEC is that its permanent members can end life on earth. When that's not true any longer, power should devolve to the General Assembly.
Iraq's breaches of these protocols which the US itself does not seem to care for were the prime mover behind the adoption of 687. Despite the fact that the US undermined implementation of 687 by inserting spies into the inspection teams, UNSCOM destroyed 90 - 95% of Iraq's WMD capability prior to the UNSCOM inspectors being forced to leave Iraq by President Clinton prior to Operation Desert Fox. Had inspections not been compromised and finally halted, Iraq would likely be disarmed by now. Unfortunately, the Clinton Administration and the Bush Junta both declared "regime change" as official policy, meaning that sanctions would likely have continued against Iraq regardless of its compliance with 687. Great motivator for Hussein to disarm -- damned if you do, damned if you don't. Outside his palace walls, of course, the populace is getting sick from water-borne diseases because the sanctions regime will not allow chlorine to be imported into Iraq for any purpose. And we haven't even mentioned yet that Israel's
nuclear weapons program should be dismantled under 687 as well, since it reaffirms the goal of ridding the region of nuclear weapons, nor that US aid to Israel, a non-signatory of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, is illegal because of their nuclear weapons program. Nor should we leave out the fact that the so-called "no-fly zones" are not authorized by 687.
Now, if the US wishes to change policy and
- work seriously toward nuclear disarmament;
- abide by the biological and chemical weapons conventions;
- repudiate "preemptive" war plans;
- repudiate "regime change" doctrine;
- cease interference with the inspections process;
- acknowledge the Israeli nuclear program and cut off aid until it can be inspected and dismantled;
then it has true moral standing to lecture the world about 687. Otherwise, it's about oil and dollars, no matter how much you try to obscure that.and expect an intelligent reader to ignore that the South's agricultural products were grown and harvested by slaves is simply staggering. Further, Williams is so bold as to state
expecting his readers to ignore Article IV Section III(3) of the Confederate Constitution:
Adieu, M Williams.
its people's hopes, as Trent Lott will be happy to remind you, were to preserve the southern aristocracy and the slavery upon which it depended. And I find it staggering that a US citizen would quote approvingly a verse calling holy a treasonous banner under which over 600,000 people died between 1861 and 1865, and in whose unholy memory an apartheid regime was built in the southern US which lasted nearly one hundred years. History is complex, indeed.
I've never understood why people complain of royalty and their perquisites---certainly ``lese majeste'' was balanced by ``oblesse noblige''---far more appropriate than the riches of robber and merchant ``barons''. Should we argue for taking away the wealth of the Kennedys and Rockefellers as well? I find a family who traded power into a position of responsibility far more laudable than one which went for the root of all evil instead.
Oh, dear.
The antebellum South was full of noblesse oblige, the magnolias dripping with romanticism. Fortunately, the Union, with all its faults, prevailed in the Civil War. Unimpeachable power deriving from an unaccountable basis leads to bloodshed and ruin. A lesson which Trent Lott and his fellow "Lost Cause" (what the sympathizers of the treasonous officers and terrorist yahoos who called themselves the Confederacy follow, for those not from the US) revivalists have yet to learn, apparently. Not to say romanticism doesn't have its place. It does. That place is Mardi Gras.
I'd disagree that emotions are dispensible when discussing intelligence. Emotions are what filter out the (at least recursively enumerable) infinite true statements about the world to leave the residue of true statements that we feel are important. I don't care that if I am in Paris, my left foot also is in Paris. That's an emotional response. (If my left foot is in a box in Atlanta while I am in Paris, I might have a different emotional response.) Does Deep Blue care whether or not it wins? I'd say it can't, for any definition of care that I'd find reasonable, and hence it's not intelligent, artificially or otherwise. Descartes' Error goes into this in greater depth, especially how people with very little emotional affect are almost incapable of making decisions.
You probably also want to check out Hubert Dreyfus, author of What Computers Still Can't Do: A Critique of Artificial Reason. Ties Phenomenology directly to AI research.
It would be good indeed, if this were the actual behavior of cops on the street. In neighborhoods where there is a strong middle- to upper-class presence, significant percentage of registered voters, &c., i.e. people who can make trouble for the police, rules like this are more likely to be followed. They are less likely to be followed in a minority community, however, even if the socioeconomic and voter-registration indices are high. Go across town to a poor, largely-minority community (say, Tulia, TX) where few vote and fewer have much pull with local law enforcement, and the law is essentially whatever the cop on the street can convince the local judge (elected to 'git tuff' on crime) to wink at. Police are generally believed on the witness stand, unless the defense can put forth solid evidence to the contrary, so when the officer says that you threw something down on the ground which tests later showed to be heroin, you are headed to prison, no matter the fact that the officer actually broke the law by reaching into your jacket to see if he or she could find something incriminating.
Young nubile collegues? Your department must be, um, interesting... While still young (although rapidly approaching middle age) in Real Life (tm), in computer years I'm no longer young. Whether or not I'm nubile is none of your business ;-) My recollection is that my eagerness to make money for my employers was swiftly exploited by the schemes of those who were older, and who had had a decade or two to make their strategies extra underhanded. The young and vicious only triumph over the old and vicious if the old get careless; otherwise, the young seek a mentor who will help them get old in exchange for taking out some of their mentor's old rivals. Course, if your mentor gets laid off, fired, or decides to resign to spend more time with the family, this can have a negative impact on your career track for becoming old and vicious.
Worldcom -- Generation Delisted.
According to Yahoo! Finance, Mr. Gates sold 10 million shares in June, worth a collective $500 million (give or take) at their respective times of sale. This sale, of course, did not effectively dilute his stake in MSFT or his control of the company. That means you'll have a hard time affecting the company's decision-making process as an owner "buying more shares," unless you've got cash (or equivalent) in large piles lying around and can either a) find a willing insider/institutional seller or b) happen to be standing around while MSFT pulls an Enron.
It would be nice to believe that buying 100 shares of MSFT makes you as much of an owner as Bill Gates. If corporations were democratically run, one-person-one-vote institutions, it would make sense. However, corporations are one-dollar-one-vote institutions. Your 100 shares mean squat, therefore. Many activist groups do show up at stockholder meetings for companies in which they own shares, and they make great theater. But they don't make corporate decisions.
I believe David Bowie, doing publicity for his new album and tour, said he feels that the current revenue model for music only has a few years left, and after that, if you want to make money, you'll have to play live. The revenue stream from recordings will dry up.
From the wayback machine, an answer to your question: Master-master replication.
Behold the power of Google...
or:
select a,b,c,d,e
from foo join (bar join (select a, b from zee) bat
on (bar.a = bat.a and bar.b = bat.b) )
on (foo.a = bar.a)
unless I'm missing something...
For this reason, under capitalism, all transactions make everyone involved richer -- for sufficiently small values of everyone.
Quoting Bruce Reed's review of Kevin Phillips' Wealth and Democracy:
CEOs make 419 times as much as the average worker, and CEO pay is rising five times faster than profits. Payroll taxes mean working people don't take home much more than 20 years ago. Bill Gates's fortune is 1.4 million times larger than the median family income.
Some are getting violently richer than others, it seems. So remember: Time is time. Money is money. Try not to conflate the two.
I remember the announcements when this came out. I knew it was a big win for EDS, but I didn't realize that the boxes and OS's were all rentals. I'm trying to decide if this is a worse scam than the Air Force renting Boeing 747's for 10 years, fitting them out as tankers, then refurbishing them at the end of term as passenger planes. Every time I think the 80's are over, another one of these disgraces pops up.
From THOMAS: Gene Taylor has sponsored or co-sponsored two bills in the 107th Congress. Here they are.
Looking at this, I'd push the impairing-defense-readiness angle. CBPDTA (?), by preventing DoD from procuring GNU/Linux systems offering greater transparency and security and a lower total cost of ownership, does not contribute to the goal of a leaner, more efficient military and leaves the services more exposed to 21st Century asymmetrical warfighting tactics (e.g., the enemy-du-jour 0wning the properly-licensed regimental IIS server).
Five-year copyright terms for content creators, transforming the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and the National Endowments for the Arts and Humanities into entitlements, and the demilitarization of the DARPA/ONR/RAND R&D model by shifting US R&D budgets to fund at least 60% non-military projects through NSF and new agencies to be created. Yes, more geeks (and artists, musicians, and writers) would have to get political. Yes, creators would be under pressure to produce more work, since one's exclusive window would be smaller (but, then again, ideas can get around the world much faster today). Yes, the risk would exist for a narrow-minded hypocrite (of which the world has a surplus) to attempt to suppress content which disturbs his or her sensibilities. However, such NMHs can be fought in the political arena -- and the payoff is nothing less than the rescue of the Internet from the eCommerce tarpit of the dot-com implosion and the creative arts from the AOLTWFOXDISNEYVIVENDI Borg collective.
Conservatives will not be able to govern America over the long term if they fail to offer a more elevated vision of America's international role.
What should that role be? Benevolent global hegemony. Having defeated the "evil empire," the United States enjoys strategic and ideological predominance. The first objective of U.S. foreign policy should be to preserve and enhance that predominance by strengthening America's security, supporting its friends, advancing its interests, and standing up for its principles around the world.
While Kristol and Kagan do admit that [t]he aspiration to benevolent hegemony might strike some as either hubristic or morally suspect, they go on to make the case for it anyway. Last, in his article, says this (emphasis added):[The Rebel Alliance's] victory over the Empire doesn't liberate the galaxy--it turns the galaxy into Somalia writ large: dominated by local warlords who are answerable to no one.
Which corresponds well with Kristol and Kagan's viewpoint (emphasis added):American hegemony is the only reliable defense against a breakdown of peace and international order. The appropriate goal of American foreign policy, therefore, is to preserve that hegemony as far into the future as possible. To achieve this goal, the United States needs a neo-Reaganite foreign policy of military supremacy and moral confidence.
And (I'd like to believe) judges are a lot harder to buy or exert pressure on than politicians
I'd like to believe that, too, but unfortunately the Federalist Society gets in the way. The integrity of the judiciary has been undermined, with all the dangers for our system of government that that implies. (I don't wish to imply that the Federalist society, with whom I personally disagree and for whom I certainly do not speak, has a monolithic position on the Microsoft case. Orrin Hatch, as just one prominent example, takes a strong anti-Microsoft position. Here's a recent symposium they had on the subject. )
Oh, you mean you want to give out money to people who are totally unaffected by slavery? Sorry, that's a different matter.
Quite, since the Federal Government -- which benefitted greatly from slavery -- is still here, along with insurance and transportation companies which made profits on insuring slaveholders and utilizing slave labor (e.g., AIG, Aetna, Norfolk Southern), educational institutions which have money derived from the slave trade as a significant part of their endowment (e.g. Harvard, Brown), and individuals whose inheritances are based upon plantations given back to their families following the Civil War. Also, slavery did not end in 1863 -- MS utilizes slave labor today, unless you can come up with a more descriptive word for the prison labor which assembles Windows and Office shrink-wrap boxes. (Using prisoners as slave labor is legal under the 13th Amendment, if you were wondering.) Further, the attempts by the Federal Government to make former slaves whole (reparations) were undone by the end of the First Reconstruction and the rise of Jim Crow, which prevented African-Americans from building wealth due to disenfranchisement, discriminatory lending, restrictive covenants in housing, and discriminatory hiring. Former slaves lost the ability to defend their economic gains politically, then lost the ability to make economic gains. Jim Crow died between 1954 and 1965. The class of persons affected by Jim Crow contains millions of people who are very much alive. Note that I'm not talking about individual acts of racism, but a pervasive legal framework which subordinated US citizens (what we all became after the 14th Amendment) to a second-class status. Cheerleading for MS to be able to hoard $40 billion is cheerleading for all of us who are not wealthy to be second-class citizens. There is a limit, and MS has crossed it.
I guess I just feel the need to feed your karma (or else this provides an excellent diversion from actual work).
I'm wondering exactly how it is that you feel the MS cesspool, to use our term for it, was collected if not for favorable tax laws allowing its collection under the theory that it was better for the economy to allow MS to "make the pie higher," as the only President we have says. We may call MS a person in contemplation of law, but that "person" is largely defined by what the IRS will allow it to get away with.
I truly don't have the time to debate this further, for reality intrudes. Take care, and drink a toast to the debt ceiling when Congress increases it this spring.
So while I appreciate your concern about corruption and totally agree that it should be dealt with, and many times is not properly dealt with, it does not invalidate the fundamental fact that large amounts of cash DO create wealth for many totally unconnected parties in the economy.
For sufficiently small values of many. Our disagreement is not that hoarding $40 billion in a cesspool does not "create wealth" for someone -- I think we both agree it wouldn't be done if that were the case. What I have been saying throughout this thread, with consequent karma damage along the way, is that the wealth creation is concentrated, i.e. only a handful of people are actually benefitting. If you are arguing that MS is making a handful of investors and financial executives rich, then we agree. In that case, I am confused why you mentioned mortgages, which for the overwhelming majority of Americans are subsidized by tax credits and GSE's such as Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Most of us would be renting today if it were not for the tremendous goverment intervention in the housing market following WWII. We've been having this argument on "wealth creation" in the US since Reagan, and I would think that after David Stockman himself called Reaganomics BS, that this trickle-down nonsense would have died out by now. It hasn't. But I will give you credit for attempting to argue that extraordinary collections of liquid assets provide benefits to others than those who hold them.
Erm, yeah. On the topic at hand, the $40 billion is a bad thing. Depositing it with Citigroup doesn't make it a good thing. Hoping that John Ashcroft and Harvey Pitt will aggresively prosecute the abuses that the $40 billion invites is a stupid thing.
You claimed that a (what is the word? cesspool?) of liquid assets of that size feeds into wealth creation through capitalistic use of the banking system. I countered that the current economic climate, in which the same firm can both hype a stock and loan you the money to buy it, substantially complicates the ECON 101 picture you paint of this $40 billion participating in some virtuous circle which keeps all our suburban lawns green. Your belief in an aggressive criminal and civil enforcement of financial laws is unfortunately disconnected from reality. Yes, Henry Blodget should be in jail, and so should Kenneth Lay. Microsoft, similarly, should lose its corporate charter for being an illegal monopoly. But Henry and Kenny Boy will be watching CNBC and eating Chilean Sea Bass next year, just as MS will add another $3.5 billion in value to their liquid reserve. If that's wealth creation, it's working... for them. But a more proper term is wealth concentration, as I said earlier.
Oh, and thanks for your concern, but I lost nothing due to Enron other than my ability to vote for President and have it count. Don't bother sending flowers.
MS has to have their 40b deposited in banks. Those banks don't just pay interest for fun; they take that 40b and loan it to others (you, me, etc.) and we use that money to build houses, buy cars, and do other things that stimulate the economy and create more wealth.
Unless, of course, they take that money and loan it to sucker^H^H^H others to purchase shares of Enron (insert current flavor of month here) on margin while instructing the analysts in their investment division to hype the stock publicly all the while calling it a POS privately. It's a nice little system called corruption and it allows wealth to be CONCENTRATED, at least until the market collapses. Unfortunately, just as handling cost overruns on single-source no-bid cost-plus contracts is not taught in CS 101, practical tips on perpetrating multimillion-dollar market frauds aren't going to be covered in ECON 101. Instead, you'll be taught happy little myths about friction-free perfect meetings of supply and demand, which is like discussing Earth's gravitational pull while disregarding Earth's atmosphere when trying to understand aviation.