The Lords of Google have been forced pay attention because the peasants are actively resisting the annexation of the formerly free city of San Francisco by the Sovereign Realm of Google. The Realm needs to annex the city for housing for it's ever expanding noble classes. (See Lebensraum.)
The current plan is to allow the children of the peasants to gather windfall in the orchards of Google. This costs Google a tiny fraction of it's vast wealth, and makes it seem that they care about the peasants, because they are selflessly helping the children! Hopefully the stupid peasants will shut up and gratefully accept this bright trinket, so the serious project of evicting them from their land can continue unimpeded.
Yes, it's brilliant. Dark humor, and a tangibly real decaying future. I read it when it first came out and still remember it vividly. I'm sure it still has the power to make people uncomfortable after all these years. Read it if you can find a copy.
What's the tallest thing we could build right now?
Neal Stephenson and Keith Hjelmstad who is at Arizona State University have looked into this. The thought is to build a structure that reaches the stratosphere and then launch rockets from the top.
I have no idea if this is easier or harder then a fulls space elevator. I would guess not as hard. Sadly, the web site has little activity since I firsrt saw it. Still, it's interesting in the context of a space elevator.
First, I must thank you for letting me know that a Socialist had been elected to a public office in Seattle, I'll tell my Socialist friends about it and they will be very happy.
So on to your assertion that "The situation was made worse recently when we elected a socialist that is very anti-Internet.". I asked Mr. Google about it, and I could find nothing about the internet policy position of Kshama Sawant, the politician in question. It seems absurd that Socialist policy would be anti-Internet. I could see the Socialists position being to make internet access a free public utility, but that is not the same as being anti-Internet.
So if you have any "facts" you can refer to, as opposed to unsupported statements, let me know. Otherwise I'll assume that you are engaged in a typical Republican/Right Wing paranoid rant rooted in your irrational hatred of anyone with beliefs that you don't like.
From the FIRST PAGE of the web site under Networking.
BSD compatible socket layer.
Networking utilities (DHCP server and client, SMTP client, TELNET client, FTP server and client, TFTP client, HTTP server and client). Inheritable TELNET sessions (as “controlling terminal”).
NFS Client. Client side support for a Network File System (NFS, version 3, UDP).
A NuttX port of Jeff Poskanzer's THTTPD HTTP server integrated with NXFLAT to provide embedded CGI.
UDP Network Discvory, XML RPC Server.
You should stop posting stupid stuff and just hang around and lurk until you grow up.
You are so wrong. The way that corporations use the patent system is a "scam". They extort money from each other as well as suppress innovation. Just look at the patent war between Apple and Samsung. It has nothing to do with capitalism. There is no public benefit in this vast world wide litigation. They fight to become the dominant monopoly so they can maximize profit without government oversight or competition. Then they make as much as they want.
Want another example? HDMI cables. All the HD patent holders are in a consortium and they all get a cut from the licensing fee for the cable. This is a tax, enforced by the legal system and collected by the patent holders. The cost of the cable has a floor, which is pure profit. If there was competition, the cable price would drop to a market derived value. The price of a cable is set by a monopoly, no actual capitalism is involved.
Attributed to Edison when describing how many times he tried and failed to make a useful light bulb:
“I have not failed. I've just found 10,000 ways that won't work.”
In case you haven't noticed, you are not sitting around at night in a house illuminated by candles, kerosine, whale oil or burning gas. This is because inventing new useful technology is hard, and takes many trials over a extended period of time.
There are at least two startups with new technology battery systems installing units in the next year or so: Ambri and Aquion .
Anyone with $0.05 shouldn't give it to you because it would be a waste of resources. They should invest it in one of these companies (or competitors) and take a chance on making money and making the future more sustainable.
This will have the same useability as the CELL CPU. From TFA:
Second, while Knights Landing can act as a bootable CPU, many applications will demand greater single threaded performance due to Amdahl’s Law. For these workloads, the optimal configuration is a Knights Landing (which provides high throughput) coupled to a mainstream Xeon server (which provides single threaded performance). In this scenario, latency is critical for communicating results between the Xeon and Knights Landing.
So there will be a useful mainstream CPU closely coupled with a bunch of vector oriented processors that will be hard to use effectively. (Also from TFA).
The rumors also state that the KNL core will replace each of the floating point pipelines in Silvermont with a full blown 512-bit AVX3 vector unit, doubling the FLOPs/clock to 32.
So unless there is a very high compute to memory access ratio this monster will spend most of it's time waiting for memory and converting electrical energy to heat. Plus writing software that uses 72 cores is such a walk in the park...
If you want to argue about the safety of oil transport then I'll have that argument. I'd then demonstrate the statistical safety, low cost, and minimal carbon output of nuclear power.
Nuclear power has an intrinsic government subsidy that you (and all nuclear advocates) ignore:
disaster insurance
Insurance available to the operators of nuclear power plants varies by nation. The worst case nuclear accident costs are so large that it would be difficult for the private insurance industry to carry the size of the risk, and the premium cost of full insurance would make nuclear energy uneconomic.
The next paragraph says the same about installations like dams, but you made a blanket statement about nuclear power, and I'm addressing that topic.
For a real world example, what is the cost of the Fukushima disaster? I suspect that this question literally has no answer, since there are so many unknowns in dealing with the aftermath. One figure is $58 billion. I suspect this is wildly optimistic, since every evaluation to come out of official channels in Japan has been that way since the earthquake hit. Other values are $100 billion and $250 billion. Some of this variation may be due to what is considered a direct cost vs. what is being ignored.
To give some perspective of how things are being managed, consider this recent report on labor used for the cleanup
In January, October and November, Japanese gangsters were arrested on charges of infiltrating construction giant Obayashi Corp's network of decontamination subcontractors and illegally sending workers to the government-funded project.
In the October case, homeless men were rounded up at Sendai's train station by Sasa, then put to work clearing radioactive soil and debris in Fukushima City for less than minimum wage, according to police and accounts of those involved. The men reported up through a chain of three other companies to Obayashi, Japan's second-largest construction company.
Do you expect that homeless exploited workers who suffer from exposure to radiation and other environmental toxins will be accurately accounted for in the cost of the cleanup? Does this give you any confidence that the cleanup process itself is going to be done correctly, even with a multibillion dollar price tag?
And remember, the disaster isn't over yet. Of the four units that had explosions, two of them have not had a survey of reactor damage because no technology exists that can stand up to the radiation. They could be going through a process that could release more radiation and the only way we would find is is when it happens. Speaking of
which: steam of unknown origin is coming out of Unit 3.
Fresh plumes of most probably radioactive steam have been detected rising from the reactor 3 building at the crippled Fukushima nuclear plant, said the facility’s operator company.
The steam has been detected by surveillance cameras and appeared to be coming from the fifth floor of the mostly-destroyed building housing crippled reactor 3, according to Tokyo Electric Power Co (TEPCO), the plant’s operator.
This started on Dec 24, i.e. last week, and is continuing intermittently. It could be rain water contacting surfaces heated by radioactive decay, or an early warning of the damaged core or fuel pool becoming critical.
Cisco has also seen major losses, and lots of other companies big and small are hurting as well.
The US Constitution may have been put in the shredder, the courts may be rubber stamps for the US version of the STASI, and the Congress may be brain dead along with the DOJ, but now it turns out that all this useless spying has hurt the bottom line of Big Corporate American. You screw these people over, and your government funding is going to be severely impacted.
The NSA and the other alphabet soup spying agencies have hurt the only group in the US with the clout to shut them down. The are going to be backing off big time.
On the individual level, government intelligence insiders are going to discover that they will have a much harder time finding those cushy high paying civilian jobs that they expect to be handed when they leave the government. That's what happens when you bite the hand that feeds you. This could have the biggest impact of all, because the revolving door is a major motivation for the entire system in the first place.
So here's a going commercial entity, clearly not a government, and they have had a huge website failure at a critical time. So let's apply the same "logic" that has been used to slam Obamacare and the Healthcare.gov website.
1. Meyer's is doomed. It's imploding and will fail.
2. They should have never tried to do have a post Christmas online sale in the first place. It was always going to fail.
3. The website failure is 100% conclusive evidence that post Christmas online sales are wrong.
4. The people who came up with the idea are evil and want to destroy their customers, but the website failure saved people from ruin. Now they need to heed the warning and make sure that Meyers fails to protect themselves in the future.
5. Even thought other commercial websites are working (just like some state run healthcare sites) all post Christmas web sites are just as intrinsically evil and bad for users and they should all be dismantled before they ruin everything.
All these, and all the other criticisms of Healthcare.gov, all sound really crazy when applied to this similar situation, don't they? This might be a clue that this kind of hysterical reaction is equally foolish when applied to the Healthcare.gov rollout problems.
Note how much hysterical reaction this receives and you can see the full process unfolds in miniature.
The percentage depletion allowance: This lets oil companies deduct about 15% of the money generated from a well from its taxes. Eliminating it would save about $1 billion a year.
The deduction essentially lets oil companies treat oil in the ground as capital equipment. For any industry, the value of that equipment can be written down each year.
But critics say oil in the ground is not capital equipment, but a national resource that the oil companies are simply using for their own profit.
The foreign tax credit: This provision gives companies a credit for any taxes they pay to other countries. Altering this tax credit would save about $850 million a year.
Foreign governments can collect money from oil companies through royalties -- fees for depleting their national resources -- and income taxes.
A royalty would be deducted as a cost of doing business, and would likely shave about 30% off a company's tax bill. Categorized as income tax, it is 100% deductible.
Foreign governments long ago grew wise to the U.S. tax code. To reduce costs for everyone involved and attract business, they agreed to call some royalties income taxes, allowing oil companies to take the 100% deduction on a bigger slice of their bill.
Intangible drilling costs: This lets the industry write off about $780 million a year for things like wages, fuel, repairs and hauling costs.
All industries get to write off the costs of doing business, but they must take it over the life of an investment. The oil industry gets to take the drilling credit in the first year.
The oil industry has prospered over the past decade, thanks to high oil and gasoline prices. The five largest companies—BP, Chevron, ConocoPhillips, ExxonMobil, and Shell—earned more than $1 trillion. In the first nine months of 2013, these five companies earned a combined $71 billion in profits. Certainly, these companies and other large oil companies will prosper without $40 billion in special tax breaks over the next decade.
The tax subsidies for renewable energy are dwarfed by the tax subsidies for oil and gas. The oil and gas production industry is hugely profitable. When an industry has the top five companies making a trillion dollars profit over ten years why do they need any tax breaks that other businesses don't get?
The real rich bastards are the oil company executives. You know how they spend that vast profit? Stock buybacks. About 25% of big oil company profit is going into stock buy back programs, which is more then they spend on exploration and acquisitions. Because of way that executive compensation is structured with stock options and deferred payouts, this ends up being a huge multiplier payout multiplier for the executives. They get their stock at a ridiculous discount, pump up the value and realize vast personal wealth.
All the investors are happy because they see their valuation go up as well so they don't complain. It's short term gain over long term profit. According to this 2007 Bloomberg article, the big oil companies are effectively liquidating themselves over the longer term.
If Chevron Corp. keeps buying back its stock at the current rate, the com
String theory is strongly linked to supersymmetry, If supersymmetry is not found experimentally then string theory becomes much less likely. The current alternative to string theory is loop quantum gravity.
For string theory to be consistent, supersymmetry appears to be required at some level (although it may be a strongly broken symmetry). In particle theory, supersymmetry is recognized as a way to stabilize the hierarchy between the unification scale and the electroweak scale (or the Higgs boson mass), and can also provide a natural dark matter candidate. String theory also requires extra spatial dimensions which have to be compactified as in Kaluza-Klein theory.
Loop quantum gravity (LQG) predicts no additional spatial dimensions, nor anything else about particle physics. These theories can be formulated in three spatial dimensions and one dimension of time, although in some LQG theories dimensionality is an emergent property of the theory, rather than a fundamental assumption of the theory. Also, LQG is a theory of quantum gravity which does not require supersymmetry. Lee Smolin, one of the originators of LQG, has proposed that a loop quantum gravity theory incorporating either supersymmetry or extra dimensions, or both, be called "loop quantum gravity II".
A whole lot of PhD dissertations, physics publications, and academic careers are on the line over this. String theory is the current favorite and loop quantum gravity the underdog. The direction of theoretical particle physics could be radically altered if the LHC doesn't find evidence of supersymmetry.
This illustrates that anyone who thinks that the US economy is actually capitalism is delusional.
All the really big players are self serving cartels run for the benefit of the top tier insiders. The stock holders, clients and workforce are short changed and the largest profit goes to the Chief XXX Officers and the Board of Directors.
When the Feds bought GM stock it was poison. No one in the investment world would touch it. If the government didn't take a gamble then GM would have been out of business. Remember that in capitalism larger risk should reap larger rewards for success. However when it comes to bilking the government (and thus the taxpayers), suddenly basic principles of risk and reward no longer apply.
Speaking of rewards, look what happens when CEOs and the like screw everything up. No matter how horrible a job they do, they are always paid vast sums of money. Their performance has nothing to do with their payout.
Look at Mozilo, the CEO of Countrywide Financial. Time magazine him one of the "25 People to Blame for the Financial Crisis". He made hundred of millions of dollars. He settled all civil and criminal charges against him for $67.5 million, with Countrywide picking up $20 million. When Countrywide was at it's height, he made loans to all sorts of insiders at Fanny Mae and and Congress members and their families under a program called the "Friends of Angelo (FOA)" VIP program. It's all been swept under the rug.
Another example is that unlocking a smart phone under contract is a federal level felony, like interstate drug dealing or kidnapping. Even though the Obama administration said they would try and change the law, the Trans Pacific Partnership treaty has a provision making this permanent. Since it's an international treaty, there would be no way to overturn this other then renegotiating the treaty will all the other countries. The phone company cartel has their dirty hands all over this. The various carriers only compete on one thing: who gets to take more out of you wallet while delivering the minimal service they can get away with.
No real competition in the US. Move along, nothing to see...
I wish I could mod you up. This is a great insight into the dysfunctional nature of the current out of control intelligence apparatus.
The outsourcing model was also a big part of the failed Iraqi invasion. (Blackwater ring a bell?) That also wasted vast resources and had a terrible political outcome. I guess that both started right after 9/11, but we are only seeing the incompetence and bad results from the NSA types now.
The next logical question is why outsource core mission operations?. I think there are two reasons. First is ideological. Outsourcing is supposed to be more efficient. It also is a big part of right wing political theory, where efficient private companies replace wasteful government bureaucracies. Remember the expansion of intelligence and the creation of Homeland Security happened under Bush, so that's when outsourcing happened big time.
The second big reason is plausible deniability. Have contractors to do dirty work makes it much easier to avoid oversight and implement policies that are illegal/immoral/stupid/wasteful.
A very current example is the rogue operation in Iraq of CIA contractor Robert Levinson. The White House is quoted in the article as saying "was not a U.S. government employee", which they can do because he was a contractor as opposed to an employee.
This operation was screwed up that those directly responsible were forced to leave the CIA, and procedures were changed to keep this kind of event from happening again.
I never mentioned the Washington Post as an example of any kind of journalism. I did not quote the Washington Post. The Wikipedia article cited Anschutz as wanting a conservative alternative to the Washington Post. What's your point? Why bring up the Washington Post at all?
In fact, I did not quote any other news source or try to rebut the assertion that so few people signed up. I did specifically imply that the political bias of the new source should be considered. (I did this in a very snarky way, but that should be no surprise giving the name I post under.) So when you imply that the "librul" media is making biased claims, how does that effect my point that the editorial stance of the paper should be considered? Your assertion about liberal bias backs up my point that one should consider the editorial stance of the news source. Without intending to you reinforced my skeptical observation.
You tried to rebut an position that I did not, in fact, take. You did this by invoking bias on the political left. That position intrinsically invokes moral relativism, i.e. "two wrongs make a right". This is something that I learned was unacceptable back in grammar school. This form of argument should be anathema to conservatives, who in theory are moral absolutists.
Do you keep your KKK robes hung up in the closet, where they won't get wrinkled but someone might see them, or do you keep them folded in a drawer where they will get creased, but they will stay hidden?
When Anschutz started the Examiner in its daily newspaper format, he envisioned creating a conservative competitor to The Washington Post. According to Politico, "When it came to the editorial page, Anschutz’s instructions were explicit — he 'wanted nothing but conservative columns and conservative op-ed writers,' said one former employee." The Examiner's conservative writers include Byron York (National Review), Michael Barone (American Enterprise Institute, Fox News Channel), and David Freddoso (National Review, author of The Case Against Barack Obama).
The daily newspaper endorsed John McCain in the 2008 presidential election and Adrian Fenty in the Democratic primary for mayor in 2010. On December 14, 2011, it endorsed Mitt Romney for the 2012 Republican presidential nomination, saying he was the only Republican who could beat Barack Obama in the general election, releasing a series of articles critical of Obama.
Clearly a "news organ" of impeccable journalism like the Korean Central News Agency of the Democratic Republic of North Korea or Fox news.
No ideological bias here. Nothing to see, just move along...
The goal is to make every job in the US blue collar with no benefits. This is not hyperbole or metaphor.
I have friend with decades of film production experience and he is de facto unemployable. The jobs are outsourced, or filled by 1H-B holders. He can't find work outside the film industry because he is "overqualified". When he applies for retail like Target or Starbucks, they don't want him because younger workers are easier to push around and abuse.
If you think that you are immune because you are "a professional", just wait. Get 10 or 15 years of experience and watch that become the reason that you won't be hired.
Meanwhile, Wall Street hits new highs on a regular basis. There is a direct causal relationship going on here. The wealth going to the rich is being siphoned from the rest of society. If things don't change the US will have a economic/social structure like the Spanish speaking part of the Americas. Don't be surprised when this happens, you had plenty of warning.
Without blogs this kind of event will be completely ignored. It's not like we have a functioning independent press any more, so blogs pick up some of the slack. Although this is an important instance of how the legal system has been rendered non-functional, it's not the kind of stupid mindless drama that passes as "news". The lack of attention is one of the mechanisms that is used to erode basic rights and let the government get away with this crap.
Slashdot Mirror
The current plan is to allow the children of the peasants to gather windfall in the orchards of Google. This costs Google a tiny fraction of it's vast wealth, and makes it seem that they care about the peasants, because they are selflessly helping the children! Hopefully the stupid peasants will shut up and gratefully accept this bright trinket, so the serious project of evicting them from their land can continue unimpeded.
Don't (get caught) doing evil.
Yes, it's brilliant. Dark humor, and a tangibly real decaying future. I read it when it first came out and still remember it vividly. I'm sure it still has the power to make people uncomfortable after all these years. Read it if you can find a copy.
Neal Stephenson and Keith Hjelmstad who is at Arizona State University have looked into this. The thought is to build a structure that reaches the stratosphere and then launch rockets from the top.
The Tall Tower
I have no idea if this is easier or harder then a fulls space elevator. I would guess not as hard. Sadly, the web site has little activity since I firsrt saw it. Still, it's interesting in the context of a space elevator.
First, I must thank you for letting me know that a Socialist had been elected to a public office in Seattle, I'll tell my Socialist friends about it and they will be very happy.
So on to your assertion that "The situation was made worse recently when we elected a socialist that is very anti-Internet.". I asked Mr. Google about it, and I could find nothing about the internet policy position of Kshama Sawant, the politician in question. It seems absurd that Socialist policy would be anti-Internet. I could see the Socialists position being to make internet access a free public utility, but that is not the same as being anti-Internet.
So if you have any "facts" you can refer to, as opposed to unsupported statements, let me know. Otherwise I'll assume that you are engaged in a typical Republican/Right Wing paranoid rant rooted in your irrational hatred of anyone with beliefs that you don't like.
You will be talking to a Federal Law Enforcement agent very soon
From the FIRST PAGE of the web site under Networking.
You should stop posting stupid stuff and just hang around and lurk until you grow up.
You know, like dog chow or cat chow.
Just ignore the pork and campaign contributions. It's DEFENSE, so we need it.
You are so wrong. The way that corporations use the patent system is a "scam". They extort money from each other as well as suppress innovation. Just look at the patent war between Apple and Samsung. It has nothing to do with capitalism. There is no public benefit in this vast world wide litigation. They fight to become the dominant monopoly so they can maximize profit without government oversight or competition. Then they make as much as they want.
Want another example? HDMI cables. All the HD patent holders are in a consortium and they all get a cut from the licensing fee for the cable. This is a tax, enforced by the legal system and collected by the patent holders. The cost of the cable has a floor, which is pure profit. If there was competition, the cable price would drop to a market derived value. The price of a cable is set by a monopoly, no actual capitalism is involved.
In case you haven't noticed, you are not sitting around at night in a house illuminated by candles, kerosine, whale oil or burning gas. This is because inventing new useful technology is hard, and takes many trials over a extended period of time.
There are at least two startups with new technology battery systems installing units in the next year or so: Ambri and Aquion .
Anyone with $0.05 shouldn't give it to you because it would be a waste of resources. They should invest it in one of these companies (or competitors) and take a chance on making money and making the future more sustainable.
So there will be a useful mainstream CPU closely coupled with a bunch of vector oriented processors that will be hard to use effectively. (Also from TFA).
So unless there is a very high compute to memory access ratio this monster will spend most of it's time waiting for memory and converting electrical energy to heat. Plus writing software that uses 72 cores is such a walk in the park...
An equally useful and scientifically valid effort.
Nuclear power has an intrinsic government subsidy that you (and all nuclear advocates) ignore: disaster insurance
The next paragraph says the same about installations like dams, but you made a blanket statement about nuclear power, and I'm addressing that topic.
For a real world example, what is the cost of the Fukushima disaster? I suspect that this question literally has no answer, since there are so many unknowns in dealing with the aftermath. One figure is $58 billion. I suspect this is wildly optimistic, since every evaluation to come out of official channels in Japan has been that way since the earthquake hit. Other values are $100 billion and $250 billion. Some of this variation may be due to what is considered a direct cost vs. what is being ignored.
To give some perspective of how things are being managed, consider this recent report on labor used for the cleanup
Do you expect that homeless exploited workers who suffer from exposure to radiation and other environmental toxins will be accurately accounted for in the cost of the cleanup? Does this give you any confidence that the cleanup process itself is going to be done correctly, even with a multibillion dollar price tag?
And remember, the disaster isn't over yet. Of the four units that had explosions, two of them have not had a survey of reactor damage because no technology exists that can stand up to the radiation. They could be going through a process that could release more radiation and the only way we would find is is when it happens. Speaking of which: steam of unknown origin is coming out of Unit 3.
This started on Dec 24, i.e. last week, and is continuing intermittently. It could be rain water contacting surfaces heated by radioactive decay, or an early warning of the damaged core or fuel pool becoming critical.
Boeing lost a $4.5 billion fighter aircraft contract to Saab in Brazil because of the revelations about spying. http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2013-12-19/nsa-spying-blowback-continues-boeing-loses-brazil-jet-order
Cisco has also seen major losses, and lots of other companies big and small are hurting as well.
The US Constitution may have been put in the shredder, the courts may be rubber stamps for the US version of the STASI, and the Congress may be brain dead along with the DOJ, but now it turns out that all this useless spying has hurt the bottom line of Big Corporate American. You screw these people over, and your government funding is going to be severely impacted.
The NSA and the other alphabet soup spying agencies have hurt the only group in the US with the clout to shut them down. The are going to be backing off big time.
On the individual level, government intelligence insiders are going to discover that they will have a much harder time finding those cushy high paying civilian jobs that they expect to be handed when they leave the government. That's what happens when you bite the hand that feeds you. This could have the biggest impact of all, because the revolving door is a major motivation for the entire system in the first place.
1. Meyer's is doomed. It's imploding and will fail.
2. They should have never tried to do have a post Christmas online sale in the first place. It was always going to fail.
3. The website failure is 100% conclusive evidence that post Christmas online sales are wrong.
4. The people who came up with the idea are evil and want to destroy their customers, but the website failure saved people from ruin. Now they need to heed the warning and make sure that Meyers fails to protect themselves in the future.
5. Even thought other commercial websites are working (just like some state run healthcare sites) all post Christmas web sites are just as intrinsically evil and bad for users and they should all be dismantled before they ruin everything.
All these, and all the other criticisms of Healthcare.gov, all sound really crazy when applied to this similar situation, don't they? This might be a clue that this kind of hysterical reaction is equally foolish when applied to the Healthcare.gov rollout problems.
Note how much hysterical reaction this receives and you can see the full process unfolds in miniature.
Here's the practical outcome of these policies: http://www.americanprogress.org/issues/green/news/2013/12/20/81497/baucus-tax-reform-cuts-46-billion-in-oil-breaks/
The tax subsidies for renewable energy are dwarfed by the tax subsidies for oil and gas. The oil and gas production industry is hugely profitable. When an industry has the top five companies making a trillion dollars profit over ten years why do they need any tax breaks that other businesses don't get?
The real rich bastards are the oil company executives. You know how they spend that vast profit? Stock buybacks. About 25% of big oil company profit is going into stock buy back programs, which is more then they spend on exploration and acquisitions. Because of way that executive compensation is structured with stock options and deferred payouts, this ends up being a huge multiplier payout multiplier for the executives. They get their stock at a ridiculous discount, pump up the value and realize vast personal wealth.
All the investors are happy because they see their valuation go up as well so they don't complain. It's short term gain over long term profit. According to this 2007 Bloomberg article, the big oil companies are effectively liquidating themselves over the longer term.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supersymmetry
A whole lot of PhD dissertations, physics publications, and academic careers are on the line over this. String theory is the current favorite and loop quantum gravity the underdog. The direction of theoretical particle physics could be radically altered if the LHC doesn't find evidence of supersymmetry.
All the really big players are self serving cartels run for the benefit of the top tier insiders. The stock holders, clients and workforce are short changed and the largest profit goes to the Chief XXX Officers and the Board of Directors.
When the Feds bought GM stock it was poison. No one in the investment world would touch it. If the government didn't take a gamble then GM would have been out of business. Remember that in capitalism larger risk should reap larger rewards for success. However when it comes to bilking the government (and thus the taxpayers), suddenly basic principles of risk and reward no longer apply.
Speaking of rewards, look what happens when CEOs and the like screw everything up. No matter how horrible a job they do, they are always paid vast sums of money. Their performance has nothing to do with their payout.
Look at Mozilo, the CEO of Countrywide Financial. Time magazine him one of the "25 People to Blame for the Financial Crisis". He made hundred of millions of dollars. He settled all civil and criminal charges against him for $67.5 million, with Countrywide picking up $20 million. When Countrywide was at it's height, he made loans to all sorts of insiders at Fanny Mae and and Congress members and their families under a program called the "Friends of Angelo (FOA)" VIP program. It's all been swept under the rug.
Another example is that unlocking a smart phone under contract is a federal level felony, like interstate drug dealing or kidnapping. Even though the Obama administration said they would try and change the law, the Trans Pacific Partnership treaty has a provision making this permanent. Since it's an international treaty, there would be no way to overturn this other then renegotiating the treaty will all the other countries. The phone company cartel has their dirty hands all over this. The various carriers only compete on one thing: who gets to take more out of you wallet while delivering the minimal service they can get away with.
No real competition in the US. Move along, nothing to see...
1. Have international web based platform that makes money by breaking laws in other countries.
2. Use your home jurisdiction and lobbying to make you immune from lawsuits.
3. Profit!!!
The outsourcing model was also a big part of the failed Iraqi invasion. (Blackwater ring a bell?) That also wasted vast resources and had a terrible political outcome. I guess that both started right after 9/11, but we are only seeing the incompetence and bad results from the NSA types now.
The next logical question is why outsource core mission operations?. I think there are two reasons. First is ideological. Outsourcing is supposed to be more efficient. It also is a big part of right wing political theory, where efficient private companies replace wasteful government bureaucracies. Remember the expansion of intelligence and the creation of Homeland Security happened under Bush, so that's when outsourcing happened big time.
The second big reason is plausible deniability. Have contractors to do dirty work makes it much easier to avoid oversight and implement policies that are illegal/immoral/stupid/wasteful.
A very current example is the rogue operation in Iraq of CIA contractor Robert Levinson. The White House is quoted in the article as saying "was not a U.S. government employee", which they can do because he was a contractor as opposed to an employee.
This operation was screwed up that those directly responsible were forced to leave the CIA, and procedures were changed to keep this kind of event from happening again.
I never mentioned the Washington Post as an example of any kind of journalism. I did not quote the Washington Post. The Wikipedia article cited Anschutz as wanting a conservative alternative to the Washington Post. What's your point? Why bring up the Washington Post at all?
In fact, I did not quote any other news source or try to rebut the assertion that so few people signed up. I did specifically imply that the political bias of the new source should be considered. (I did this in a very snarky way, but that should be no surprise giving the name I post under.) So when you imply that the "librul" media is making biased claims, how does that effect my point that the editorial stance of the paper should be considered? Your assertion about liberal bias backs up my point that one should consider the editorial stance of the news source. Without intending to you reinforced my skeptical observation.
You tried to rebut an position that I did not, in fact, take. You did this by invoking bias on the political left. That position intrinsically invokes moral relativism, i.e. "two wrongs make a right". This is something that I learned was unacceptable back in grammar school. This form of argument should be anathema to conservatives, who in theory are moral absolutists.
Do you keep your KKK robes hung up in the closet, where they won't get wrinkled but someone might see them, or do you keep them folded in a drawer where they will get creased, but they will stay hidden?
Wikipedia Washington Examiner Political Views
Clearly a "news organ" of impeccable journalism like the Korean Central News Agency of the Democratic Republic of North Korea or Fox news.
No ideological bias here. Nothing to see, just move along...
I have friend with decades of film production experience and he is de facto unemployable. The jobs are outsourced, or filled by 1H-B holders. He can't find work outside the film industry because he is "overqualified". When he applies for retail like Target or Starbucks, they don't want him because younger workers are easier to push around and abuse.
If you think that you are immune because you are "a professional", just wait. Get 10 or 15 years of experience and watch that become the reason that you won't be hired.
Meanwhile, Wall Street hits new highs on a regular basis. There is a direct causal relationship going on here. The wealth going to the rich is being siphoned from the rest of society. If things don't change the US will have a economic/social structure like the Spanish speaking part of the Americas. Don't be surprised when this happens, you had plenty of warning.
Without blogs this kind of event will be completely ignored. It's not like we have a functioning independent press any more, so blogs pick up some of the slack. Although this is an important instance of how the legal system has been rendered non-functional, it's not the kind of stupid mindless drama that passes as "news". The lack of attention is one of the mechanisms that is used to erode basic rights and let the government get away with this crap.