This plan is just a way to spend $TRILLIONS on US military/intel crony capitalists.
If the US just spent $1T on an industrial policy, and put China's neighbors in charge of their own military defense (but shared our intel), we'd have security, peace, and $TRILLIONS more. Not to mention the increased GDP and taxes from it, with a better functioning industrial system.
But that wouldn't dedicate all our money and effort to the war business. Which is the business that controls America.
Er, we have a right to privacy. We created a government to protect our rights. The Bill of Rights does explicitly instruct the government not to violate some rights, because the new government was a new kind of government. But rights aren't selectable to whom they're violable. Rights are rights, not merely exemptions from government powers.
Which you acknowledge when you agree that people can't force you to give up your passwords. Of course they can ask you: they have the right to free speech, after all. It's the right to refuse their request that is our right to privacy. And we need to make it harder for our government to ignore its power and obligation to protect that right.
Because the people who have too much power over the government, and through it over people, have perverted government power. They've created a "conventional wisdom" that there's no right to privacy in the Constitution. Of course most of these tools insist there's no separation of church and state in the Constitution: they're liars, useful idiots backed by skilled professionals concocting these attacks on our rights. The idea that the government's power extends to only government activity would prevent the government from regulating any private activity, and that's obviously a recipe for corporate anarchy and person-to-person lawlessness that has never been part of the American way. The Constitution prescribes all kinds of powers over non-government action. Protecting the boundaries of our privacy is just one part of what we suffer the burdens of government for.
Not only does the government of the US have no legitimate power to violate that privacy right, but neither does anyone else. It's our right. And we create governments like the US Federal government to protect that right, among others. Protect it from governments, individuals and corporations.
This boundary should be the most fundamental and obvious fact in the US, but it's not, since the enemies of privacy have steadily gained so much power. We need a new Constitutional amendment that spells out the privacy right and goverment's obligation to protect it from all enemies, public and private. It must say that "to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures" is to have privacy that the government may not violate and must protect except as provided in the Constitution.
You're so demented that you're clutching two contradictory positions and insisting everyone else act as crazy as you in saying they're not contradictory.
Yes, soldiers have elected to defend the country and our freedom. But that is not what you said, and not what your argument meant. Until you were challenged, and then you spun up some alternate meaning.
Classic Republican goalpost moving. Next you'll be explaining you were "just joking" or "not intended to be factual" or some other BS down in the subreplies where few will look.
Our invasion of Iraq shot oil prices over $100 where they've stayed for going on a decade now. Meanwhile all Iraq's oil is now available to be sold at those permanently inflated prices.
Then there's the $TRILLIONS spent on the war, which gave the US government all kinds of invasive power over Americans and anyone else within reach, while undermining the ability of the government to serve a united people. Purely by coincidence, those are the core values actually practiced by every Republican who's got power for the past century.
If you don't realize that's how invading Iraq for the oil works out, you're not paying attention. Because you're a Republican. "I know nothing" is the Republican mantra.
They're not babies. Nobody's "OK" with it, but it's better than the alternatives: the actual children they'd become who'd have birth defects, rapist fathers, or just a family that was financially, emotionally or otherwise unable to give an actual child a life.
How many have you adopted? Since you've adopted none, you're just running your mouth pretending to a high ground that doesn't exist.
I'm surprised I can't get for my boat (or raft) a platform with accelerometers that operates a hydraulic piston to compensate for wave action. It might need some lateral actuator too, as wave motion is circular. But it might not, if the light floats slide along the surface as the piston pushes down on them keeping the heavy inertial payload in place.
Just accelerometers, hydraulic pistons, and DSP. Big bonus points for a device that harvests that energy moving through the site to power the hydraulics.
Really it seems this tech would be cheap by now, a commodity on floating oil platforms and the many working ships, or pleasure craft combating seasickness. If it only compensated for gentle waves in most harbors without storms, it would make aquatic platforms stable most of the time without battening/stowing everything all the time.
Most businesses do not own their offices. Most businesses grow (and sometimes shrink), and aren't in the property management business, so renting is better for them. The size of the office over time indeed is proportional to the number of employees.
If you have a $600 computer which isn't being used, it's a waste. If you give it to another new hire later, that's a $600 asset. Meanwhile these $600 assets have to be discarded every 2-3 years, and replaced.
You're also wrong about the air conditioning. Each employee heats the office with their nearly 100F body and so requires more AC. It's a trivial amount more, but it's more.
You don't pay $5 an hour to people who use $600 computers.
Look, this might all seem true to you in the abstract, but it's obvious you either don't own or do the accounting for a business, or you do but you're really bad at it. Having done the accounting and owned and managed many businesses, I can tell you that what I'm running down here is reality.
Of course the employee's computer is an employee cost. No employee, no computer.
Other costs include the square footage rented for the extra employee, extra phone, Internet and other telecom costs,extra taxes the employer pays based on payroll but not for the individual, the employer's share of insurance premiums, the increased likelihood of paying unemployment with the larger staff, the time the rest of the staff spends dealing with that new employee (n * n-1), and even more the bean counters can find.
In fact in some places some of those costs sum even higher than +50%. Midtown Manhattan rent and support services are very expensive, even compared to $200K salaries.
It's not really linear. Yes SS taxes cap at around $110K. And people making $400K a year don't typically cost an extra $200K to employ (other than perhaps bonuses, but those scale with profit - not even revenue). +50% is a good overestimate of convenience that's not really that far off.
No, the point is precisely that biblical literalists are missing the point and insisting that the bible be used instead of science. That requires pushback, especially when they protect their replacement of science with flimflam like "the bible doesn't contradict science".
Or your nonsense "the bible doesn't have a inherent theological viewpoint". Or how you call biblical literalists "they", while you're so superstitious that you won't even type the three letters in the word "god". You're preposterous.
No, it shouldn't matter that the bible contradicts science. It's a myth. But if people were rewriting education and health laws based on their faith in Sumerian myths or Shakespeare, it would suddenly matter that they contradict science.
These theocrats are real, they are a threat - and they're winning. Religious denial enigmas like you are the grease on their wheels.
Let's say my company wants to sponsor a hackathon in NYC that uses these World Bank APIs and datasets to make demo apps and recruit developers. How would I go about producing and hosting the event? Is there an NYC org that's done this before for other industries?
So Tennessee students that get bad science educations by law don't matter to you. So Arizona women who can't have abortions don't matter to you. Because you're not a Tennessee student or an Arizona woman. Or any of the other people directly affected by these new theocratic laws.
OK, that's your privilege not to care about theocracy that doesn't affect you. YET. But denying that these new theocratic laws aren't a movement towards - or rather, within - theocracy is the hallucination. The denial that it won't affect directly you soon enough (even before you need your girlfriend, sister etc to get an abortion) is a schizophrenic disconnection from reality.
The existence of churchgoers who aren't theocrats (directly) is meaningless in the undeniable theocratic laws that the people in the next pew over are forcing on some of us. Of course these theocrats won't rest until they've stopped you buying Jack Daniels, going to porn theaters or strip clubs or enjoying your cable porn. Of course they won't rest until it's your county. This is obvious - it's the theocrats' stated goal, as it always is of any brand or era theocrat.
The US does not belong on any theocracy scale, whether a 1 or a 10. The US says right up front that it's not a theocracy. Except now it is, more than it was before.
By the time the theocrats are killing people in the US for "sinning", it will be too late. They're already setting up Americans to die rather than sin, by outlawing abortions. Women have already died from these theocrats, either by continuing the pregnancy when abortion is cut off, or by getting illegal abortions that go wrong. And that's just on abortion, the most obvious example of theocratic killings.
Wake up. This should bother you. Otherwise it will soon enough, in a very real and material way, when it's too late to do anything about it.
The religious right isn't getting the US bashed for merely existing. It's getting properly defended from as it enforces its theocracy on the rest of us in the US. When the loudmouths are high profile because they're passing laws governing whole states, that's a fundamentalist shift of the country to theocracy.
The theocrats' greatest scam is convincing the rest of us that you don't exist. When someone gets stoned for blasphemy in Tennessee you'll know: you'll have cast the first stone. By legalizing it and protecting that theocracy with BS like you just shoveled here. You're on Taliban Road, believer.
The bible says that something it calls god says that it is omnipotent and demands worship by certain practices. That is a theological viewpoint. I could go on.
Trust someone who spells "god" as "G_d" to insist that the bible does not have an inherent theological viewpoint. You faithy people are crazy - especially when you expect to say things like that in public without being considered at least ridiculous, and probably more like schizophrenic.
Why pretend you're taxing businesses with a tax on technology? Just tax the businesses. Tax the things that most depend on government operations and expenses to work properly. Tax the things that actually make money that can be collected. Tax the things that cause sudden public expenses that must be bailed out.
Just put a sales tax on everything except necessities (used/homemade clothing, raw food, the cheapest 20% of shelter in each postal code and their utilities, minimum healthcare cost, public education, public transit). Then make this year's budget spend only whatever was collected last year, issuing debt only on specific budgets not paid by the cash flow (and requiring a special leglislative session passing 75% in 2 votes, followed the next year by a general election).
And tax the goddamn churches already. And stop paying the monarchy and their rich relatives - tax them the most. Those businesses have totally failed for centuries.
If you ignore the parts of the bible that aren't metaphysics, then they don't conflict. Because metaphysics is what cannot be dis/proven, while science is only what can be dis/proven. But there's a lot of myth and miracle in there. And most Christians (and Jews, and Muslims, and Hindus in their books, and Buddhists in theirs, etc) insist on the myths and miracles to insist on the metaphysics.
And then there's the parts of the bible that insist on getting others to believe the non-metaphysics by telling them myths and miracles. Those are probably the most anti-scientific parts.
But religion is faith, which is thinking that doesn't exclude completely conflicting ideas from one another. It's science (from its underlying logic) that excludes one or another contradictory idea from accepted knowledge. So I prefer religious thinking that respects and prefers science, even if it also accepts ideas that science completely rejects. Just so long as the religious fantasy world is kept personal, and not too many people make bad decisions based on the fantasy instead of the hard reality we all must share.
So someone whose boss is Rupert Murdoch, the Fox News emperor? That agenda is to pretend evil is good, for fun and profit. Everything Murdoch has ever done has been good for the rulers of the Saud family.
I have been to several Arab countries. I don't know where in these Arab countries you've gone, but your personal experience is demonstrably wrong.
Considering they're all military dictatorships, "going the extra mile" would by now have actually made every native person a Muslim. Yet many natives are Christians, Baha'i, Jews, Zorastrians, and plenty of other non-Muslims. In fact their internal Shia/Sunni conflict is a higher priority for these countries, yet they don't force all natives to be one or the other.
But you think that replying to "most Lebanese Christians are Arabs" with "they're not always Arabs" somehow debunks it. That's a very lame logical fallacy. Which doesn't earn you standing to insist someone else stop being a fucking ignorant idiot.
Several states have this year alone tried to pass laws requiring raped women to be forced to have an ultrasound probe repeat the rape if they wanted to abort the fetus. Many other states have all kinds of ways to humiliate women who were raped. These states are going this way under pressure of Christian theocrat activitsts. Not quite hanging them. But we're working on it.
And the Mideast has states where women have been voting for more than 2 generations.
The US wasn't founded on "selected Christian principles". Any more than its speaking English was a "selected Christian principle". It was founded on principles developed by people whose culture happened to be Christian, though they were explicitly far more secular than the culture they came from. The principles were not Christian; they were principles that were developed largely in spite of Christianity.
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This plan is just a way to spend $TRILLIONS on US military/intel crony capitalists.
If the US just spent $1T on an industrial policy, and put China's neighbors in charge of their own military defense (but shared our intel), we'd have security, peace, and $TRILLIONS more. Not to mention the increased GDP and taxes from it, with a better functioning industrial system.
But that wouldn't dedicate all our money and effort to the war business. Which is the business that controls America.
Er, we have a right to privacy. We created a government to protect our rights. The Bill of Rights does explicitly instruct the government not to violate some rights, because the new government was a new kind of government. But rights aren't selectable to whom they're violable. Rights are rights, not merely exemptions from government powers.
Which you acknowledge when you agree that people can't force you to give up your passwords. Of course they can ask you: they have the right to free speech, after all. It's the right to refuse their request that is our right to privacy. And we need to make it harder for our government to ignore its power and obligation to protect that right.
Because the people who have too much power over the government, and through it over people, have perverted government power. They've created a "conventional wisdom" that there's no right to privacy in the Constitution. Of course most of these tools insist there's no separation of church and state in the Constitution: they're liars, useful idiots backed by skilled professionals concocting these attacks on our rights. The idea that the government's power extends to only government activity would prevent the government from regulating any private activity, and that's obviously a recipe for corporate anarchy and person-to-person lawlessness that has never been part of the American way. The Constitution prescribes all kinds of powers over non-government action. Protecting the boundaries of our privacy is just one part of what we suffer the burdens of government for.
People have a right to privacy. The Federal government has recognized it since the Constitution created the government: "to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures" is to have privacy. Our privacy defines what is private vs what is public.
Not only does the government of the US have no legitimate power to violate that privacy right, but neither does anyone else. It's our right. And we create governments like the US Federal government to protect that right, among others. Protect it from governments, individuals and corporations.
This boundary should be the most fundamental and obvious fact in the US, but it's not, since the enemies of privacy have steadily gained so much power. We need a new Constitutional amendment that spells out the privacy right and goverment's obligation to protect it from all enemies, public and private. It must say that "to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures" is to have privacy that the government may not violate and must protect except as provided in the Constitution.
The "context" is your bullshit, liar.
You're so demented that you're clutching two contradictory positions and insisting everyone else act as crazy as you in saying they're not contradictory.
Yes, soldiers have elected to defend the country and our freedom. But that is not what you said, and not what your argument meant. Until you were challenged, and then you spun up some alternate meaning.
Classic Republican goalpost moving. Next you'll be explaining you were "just joking" or "not intended to be factual" or some other BS down in the subreplies where few will look.
You're citing TV news as a source of truth?
Our invasion of Iraq shot oil prices over $100 where they've stayed for going on a decade now. Meanwhile all Iraq's oil is now available to be sold at those permanently inflated prices.
Then there's the $TRILLIONS spent on the war, which gave the US government all kinds of invasive power over Americans and anyone else within reach, while undermining the ability of the government to serve a united people. Purely by coincidence, those are the core values actually practiced by every Republican who's got power for the past century.
If you don't realize that's how invading Iraq for the oil works out, you're not paying attention. Because you're a Republican. "I know nothing" is the Republican mantra.
The parts of you not full of shit are loaded with doubletalk.
They're not babies. Nobody's "OK" with it, but it's better than the alternatives: the actual children they'd become who'd have birth defects, rapist fathers, or just a family that was financially, emotionally or otherwise unable to give an actual child a life.
How many have you adopted? Since you've adopted none, you're just running your mouth pretending to a high ground that doesn't exist.
I'm surprised I can't get for my boat (or raft) a platform with accelerometers that operates a hydraulic piston to compensate for wave action. It might need some lateral actuator too, as wave motion is circular. But it might not, if the light floats slide along the surface as the piston pushes down on them keeping the heavy inertial payload in place.
Just accelerometers, hydraulic pistons, and DSP. Big bonus points for a device that harvests that energy moving through the site to power the hydraulics.
Really it seems this tech would be cheap by now, a commodity on floating oil platforms and the many working ships, or pleasure craft combating seasickness. If it only compensated for gentle waves in most harbors without storms, it would make aquatic platforms stable most of the time without battening/stowing everything all the time.
Most businesses do not own their offices. Most businesses grow (and sometimes shrink), and aren't in the property management business, so renting is better for them. The size of the office over time indeed is proportional to the number of employees.
If you have a $600 computer which isn't being used, it's a waste. If you give it to another new hire later, that's a $600 asset. Meanwhile these $600 assets have to be discarded every 2-3 years, and replaced.
You're also wrong about the air conditioning. Each employee heats the office with their nearly 100F body and so requires more AC. It's a trivial amount more, but it's more.
You don't pay $5 an hour to people who use $600 computers.
Look, this might all seem true to you in the abstract, but it's obvious you either don't own or do the accounting for a business, or you do but you're really bad at it. Having done the accounting and owned and managed many businesses, I can tell you that what I'm running down here is reality.
Of course the employee's computer is an employee cost. No employee, no computer.
Other costs include the square footage rented for the extra employee, extra phone, Internet and other telecom costs ,extra taxes the employer pays based on payroll but not for the individual, the employer's share of insurance premiums, the increased likelihood of paying unemployment with the larger staff, the time the rest of the staff spends dealing with that new employee (n * n-1), and even more the bean counters can find.
In fact in some places some of those costs sum even higher than +50%. Midtown Manhattan rent and support services are very expensive, even compared to $200K salaries.
It's not really linear. Yes SS taxes cap at around $110K. And people making $400K a year don't typically cost an extra $200K to employ (other than perhaps bonuses, but those scale with profit - not even revenue). +50% is a good overestimate of convenience that's not really that far off.
No, the point is precisely that biblical literalists are missing the point and insisting that the bible be used instead of science. That requires pushback, especially when they protect their replacement of science with flimflam like "the bible doesn't contradict science".
Or your nonsense "the bible doesn't have a inherent theological viewpoint". Or how you call biblical literalists "they", while you're so superstitious that you won't even type the three letters in the word "god". You're preposterous.
No, it shouldn't matter that the bible contradicts science. It's a myth. But if people were rewriting education and health laws based on their faith in Sumerian myths or Shakespeare, it would suddenly matter that they contradict science.
These theocrats are real, they are a threat - and they're winning. Religious denial enigmas like you are the grease on their wheels.
Let's say my company wants to sponsor a hackathon in NYC that uses these World Bank APIs and datasets to make demo apps and recruit developers. How would I go about producing and hosting the event? Is there an NYC org that's done this before for other industries?
So Tennessee students that get bad science educations by law don't matter to you. So Arizona women who can't have abortions don't matter to you. Because you're not a Tennessee student or an Arizona woman. Or any of the other people directly affected by these new theocratic laws.
OK, that's your privilege not to care about theocracy that doesn't affect you. YET. But denying that these new theocratic laws aren't a movement towards - or rather, within - theocracy is the hallucination. The denial that it won't affect directly you soon enough (even before you need your girlfriend, sister etc to get an abortion) is a schizophrenic disconnection from reality.
The existence of churchgoers who aren't theocrats (directly) is meaningless in the undeniable theocratic laws that the people in the next pew over are forcing on some of us. Of course these theocrats won't rest until they've stopped you buying Jack Daniels, going to porn theaters or strip clubs or enjoying your cable porn. Of course they won't rest until it's your county. This is obvious - it's the theocrats' stated goal, as it always is of any brand or era theocrat.
The US does not belong on any theocracy scale, whether a 1 or a 10. The US says right up front that it's not a theocracy. Except now it is, more than it was before.
By the time the theocrats are killing people in the US for "sinning", it will be too late. They're already setting up Americans to die rather than sin, by outlawing abortions. Women have already died from these theocrats, either by continuing the pregnancy when abortion is cut off, or by getting illegal abortions that go wrong. And that's just on abortion, the most obvious example of theocratic killings.
Wake up. This should bother you. Otherwise it will soon enough, in a very real and material way, when it's too late to do anything about it.
The religious right isn't getting the US bashed for merely existing. It's getting properly defended from as it enforces its theocracy on the rest of us in the US. When the loudmouths are high profile because they're passing laws governing whole states, that's a fundamentalist shift of the country to theocracy.
The theocrats' greatest scam is convincing the rest of us that you don't exist. When someone gets stoned for blasphemy in Tennessee you'll know: you'll have cast the first stone. By legalizing it and protecting that theocracy with BS like you just shoveled here. You're on Taliban Road, believer.
And fertilization happens long after the day Arizona inisists, which is the last menstruation day.
You faithy theocrats should shut up already. Your Wikipedia privileges are revoked until you stop lying.
The bible says that something it calls god says that it is omnipotent and demands worship by certain practices. That is a theological viewpoint. I could go on.
Trust someone who spells "god" as "G_d" to insist that the bible does not have an inherent theological viewpoint. You faithy people are crazy - especially when you expect to say things like that in public without being considered at least ridiculous, and probably more like schizophrenic.
Why pretend you're taxing businesses with a tax on technology? Just tax the businesses. Tax the things that most depend on government operations and expenses to work properly. Tax the things that actually make money that can be collected. Tax the things that cause sudden public expenses that must be bailed out.
Just put a sales tax on everything except necessities (used/homemade clothing, raw food, the cheapest 20% of shelter in each postal code and their utilities, minimum healthcare cost, public education, public transit). Then make this year's budget spend only whatever was collected last year, issuing debt only on specific budgets not paid by the cash flow (and requiring a special leglislative session passing 75% in 2 votes, followed the next year by a general election).
And tax the goddamn churches already. And stop paying the monarchy and their rich relatives - tax them the most. Those businesses have totally failed for centuries.
If you ignore the parts of the bible that aren't metaphysics, then they don't conflict. Because metaphysics is what cannot be dis/proven, while science is only what can be dis/proven. But there's a lot of myth and miracle in there. And most Christians (and Jews, and Muslims, and Hindus in their books, and Buddhists in theirs, etc) insist on the myths and miracles to insist on the metaphysics.
And then there's the parts of the bible that insist on getting others to believe the non-metaphysics by telling them myths and miracles. Those are probably the most anti-scientific parts.
But religion is faith, which is thinking that doesn't exclude completely conflicting ideas from one another. It's science (from its underlying logic) that excludes one or another contradictory idea from accepted knowledge. So I prefer religious thinking that respects and prefers science, even if it also accepts ideas that science completely rejects. Just so long as the religious fantasy world is kept personal, and not too many people make bad decisions based on the fantasy instead of the hard reality we all must share.
In more related news, Tennessee just attacked science to make it harder to teach evolution and climatology because theocrats can't handle the truth.
Yeah, that's right - liberals. Those feminazis, always pretending that Arabs treat their women equally.
You Republicans have one track minds - derailed.
So someone whose boss is Rupert Murdoch, the Fox News emperor? That agenda is to pretend evil is good, for fun and profit. Everything Murdoch has ever done has been good for the rulers of the Saud family.
I have been to several Arab countries. I don't know where in these Arab countries you've gone, but your personal experience is demonstrably wrong.
Considering they're all military dictatorships, "going the extra mile" would by now have actually made every native person a Muslim. Yet many natives are Christians, Baha'i, Jews, Zorastrians, and plenty of other non-Muslims. In fact their internal Shia/Sunni conflict is a higher priority for these countries, yet they don't force all natives to be one or the other.
But you think that replying to "most Lebanese Christians are Arabs" with "they're not always Arabs" somehow debunks it. That's a very lame logical fallacy. Which doesn't earn you standing to insist someone else stop being a fucking ignorant idiot.
Several states have this year alone tried to pass laws requiring raped women to be forced to have an ultrasound probe repeat the rape if they wanted to abort the fetus. Many other states have all kinds of ways to humiliate women who were raped. These states are going this way under pressure of Christian theocrat activitsts. Not quite hanging them. But we're working on it.
And the Mideast has states where women have been voting for more than 2 generations.
The US wasn't founded on "selected Christian principles". Any more than its speaking English was a "selected Christian principle". It was founded on principles developed by people whose culture happened to be Christian, though they were explicitly far more secular than the culture they came from. The principles were not Christian; they were principles that were developed largely in spite of Christianity.