If the other NetBSD founder, Theo de Raadt, hadn't retaliated for being forced out of the project by suing and otherwise interfering with the project in 1994, NetBSD would be the "Linux" we're all talking about today. The biggest turning point in the Linux rise was when Slackware delivered thousands of nearly-free working Linux installer CDs which could be freely redistributed. Right when NetBSD was technically superior (including more architectures and a package installer system), but blocked by de Raadt.
If de Raadt had stayed in the project, providing the strong leadership that pushed his OpenBSD project to eclipse NetBSD, then maybe the 1994-5 years would have seen NetBSD keep the momentum (and developers) it lost to Linux, right when the Dotcom Bubble threw so much gas on the fire. NetBSD might now be where Linux will arrive only a few years from now.
The project failure that threw de Raadt out and left NetBSD vulnerable to his retaliation is the central lesson for similar FOSS projects. Now that the dust has cleared a great deal, I'd like to see an honest dissection of the relevant project management issues that underlaid the mutually destructive split.
Merely taxcutting the rich to a rate that still pays their share, rather than preferentially over the rest, isn't supply-side. Government subsidies including taxes that favor corporations is supply-side.
When Reagan/Bush installed supply-side, they first quadrupled the size of government, and continued its expansion for 12 years, generating more debt than previously believed possible. They robbed the S&Ls of $1.5TRILLION. And funded "expansion" with junk bonds. All of which came home to roost by 1990, a collapse that lasted 4 years, corrected only by the unexpected Dotcom Bubble (managed by Clinton). Not to mention the 1982 recession, or the seeds of the one we've been in for the past 5 years: 10-11 years of documented recession out of 25, despite all the book juggling to cover it up.
Bush Jr's tax cuts haven't improved "the economy", just the sectors favored by Bush's base of rich bankers. The stock market's value has dropped compared to the value of global equity. Even Bush admits the economy is "in the tank" if you're just a regular American. Income has shrunk consistently under Reagan/Bush administrations, unless you're a bank.
If you ignore the $TRILLIONS in subsidies and crippling effects on those not already rich masked by the huge benefits to the rich, then supply-side is a success. If you're rich, it's a successful way to steal from everyone else.
Iran/Contra was Bush Sr's baby, as was the S&L heist which he deregulated. They were directly connected: the CIA robbed the Indian Springs S&L to fund missiles for Iran with a fake ID. The $1.5TRILLION S&L heist paid for the fake Reagan "boom", along with the rest of the junk bonds the S&Ls didn't buy and the huge Reagan/Bush debt. Even quadrupling+ the size of the government (while getting reelected 3x to "shrink government") didn't save the aerospace industry from the 1990-4 recession they created; Clinton's management of the Dotcom Bubble did. Bush invited Iraq to invade Kuwait after Iraq threatened to because Kuwait was drilling sideways into Iraq's oilfields.
Clinton's infotech policies fed the economy at the expense of our rights like DMCA and his attempted Clipper Chip, and he put his wife in charge of the universal health insurance boondoggle to give her power while dooming the program. And Janet Reno would have been more at home in Bush Sr's cabinet. While he did execute a "model police action" in Yugoslavia (despite the blood), he also maintained a continuous airwar over Iraq that Bush Jr just had to ramp up for our worst strategic error in our history.
But Clinton had flaws that fed his investment banking bribers^Wcontributors, without actually being a fascist. Bush Sr and his accomplices from Nixon through Jr are fascists. The degree of their fascism has increased as they and their party have pulled American political consensus far to the right. Which is why Goldwater, except for his itchy nuke finger, looks like a centrist Democrat today. I'm concerned for Canada's momentum under the influence of America's gravity, and hope that our errors are so graphic that Canada can, as usual, learn from them without our costs.
Hezbollah's website (Nasrallah's) is hosted by the royal Saudi "stables" contractor, recently a unit of giant American defense contractor UDI. These actual business "conspiracies" have always been "shadowy" mostly through the willing ignorance of the uninformed. With Google and emailable URLs, the dots are much easier to connect, for ourselves and the public.
I used to live in Canada for several years. I had to "explain America" frequently, but it was much easier under Clinton, even when dismayed/disappointed Canadians couldn't believe he'd get impeached for covering up a blowjob. Canada's still the kinder, gentler nation, and (especially with Global Warming) looks better every day.
The single feature that brought PDAs to the masses was the Palm Pilot's one-button sync. Finally people thought of their data as an independent entity, not just the condition they had left one computer or another in.
When home backups are that simple and easy, the computers will start to disappear, and we'll live in our data rather than at "the" computer.
No, it's not enough to prove more than your own limited thinking.
If I said "Jews have a lot of money", that would be a stereotype. If I said "the rich have a lot of money", that would be the truth. Just because a group's defining characteristics can be stated as a generalization doesn't make that statement a "stereotype". There is some debate, and has been much in these threads, about whether the rich contribute less to the economy than do the poor. But stating it is no stereotype.
You probably still think that I'm wrong, because you're one of those people who can't admit you're wrong when you've got no way to argue. You just post an insult and think it's enough.
Some investments are more productive than others. Yachts are less productive purchases than hammers.
Try making a fortune and automating financial systems like I have before spouting naive economics at people smarter and more experienced - and richer - than you.
Do the rich spend more money on food, or on yachts in foreign ports? Do the rest of us spend more money on food than do the rich? Aren't you just inferring a metaphor into literal economics?
Alaska, home of oil, Republicans, Internet hatred, the biggest snow jobs in the country. Maybe we could send all these Republicans there for freezedrying.
So I see you're really more a fan of Kissinger than of Nixon. Kissinger got away with crimes against humanity because the global justice system is rigged to protect the powerful even more than is the US justice system. His pet Pinochet didn't even see justice until he was too old and feeble, with his political creditors mostly dead, to push back any more.
Nixon was no "closet" racist - his racism is evident on the tapes he made. I don't see what that has to do with Kennedy's "missile gap" rhetoric, though I note that Kennedy did face down Russian missiles in Cuba successfully, a tougher Cold Warrior than Nixon. I didn't make any claim about their relative propaganda integrity, just whether Nixon just "inherited" Vietnam and tried to get out while saving face. He capitalized on Vietnam as much as he could. And I didn't say he was KKK, or anything at all about Eisenhower, just that Nixon's Southern Strategy was racist, consistent with his ignoring racism while VP, and continues to hurt the US today. I think you are indulging a desire to go too far, while I am remaining proportional.
I think "blaming" Truman for Israel's formation is completely legitimate, though I (probably) disagree with what you'd blame him for. I'd blame him for allowing the borders to be drawn in typical British postcolonial fashion, dividing tribes to set them against each other and create endless local wars to distract them from competing with the colonizers. Iran's case is one where Nixon's oil policy and his CIA's sponsorship of the tyrannical Shah put Iran into its revolutionary state. And my point was about Republicans in general, who ran their Iran/Contra resupply operation, and even put Oliver North in the desert where Carter's helicopter rescue attempt "somehow" crashed and burned, even if you don't believe Republicans colluded with Iran to release the hostages coincidentally on Reagan's inauguration day.
Since you're in Canada, and unfamiliar with Fox News, you don't have as much reason to come to an American perspective on our Republican Party. It has perpetuated terrible frauds on America, producing collusions with our enemies to keep themselves in power through fear, exploiting the easily led American media consumers as much as the foreign producers exploited by their counterparts. The central player in their acts is George Bush Sr, who was not only Nixon's first China chief, but also the Republican Party chair who cleaned up after Watergate to run in 1980 and sit in power for a dozen years (more than anyone but Nixon). I don't claim that Clinton and even Carter let China grow too powerful at our expense. But there's no comparison between their responsibility over 12 years and Republicans over 26 years. 18 of which 26 years have seen Bush Sr actually calling the shots, preceeded by more years slightly removed or just calling shots in China. Hell, Bush Sr was the only person ever to answer the question "where were you the day JFK was shot?" with "I don't know", though it turns out he was in Dallas that day, flying out that morning.
These people are awful. They are joined to the corporate media, including (especially) Fox News. They have sailed the US through several wars for their global corporate interests, including Iraq and Vietnam, even when assisted by Democrats (usually through failure of Congressional oversight or campaign criticism). Now we're discussing the Republicans shutting the people off from research libraries in a blatant move to protect corporate polluters. I don't think any of the Democrats since America became huge (191x) have tried that kind of tyranny. But it's perfectly consistent with Republicans, especially Nixon.
They might try to pass their costs to the consumer. But that's a problem with competition in the telco cartels. Which is being solved by tech innovation and legal requirements to force open access to telecom subscriber networks.
If AT&T was found liable for these exposures to probably 500K subscribers the past few years at $5K each cost for protection, that's $2.5B. They might try to pass the cost on to all their subscribers, but they'd find subscribers dropping and switching to competitors. While it probably costs maybe a few $million to upgrade their practices and SW to reduce liability.
With competition, these telcos would first see their profits shrink, then reinvest in upgrades. That's how real market economics works, especially when the market's operation is protected by competition assurance and service standards.
If the highly productive contributions of middle class production and consumption compared to upper class isn't intuitive to you, you can look into the economics. It's fairly well understood now, after massive trickle down and supply side economics experiments failed in the US and elsewhere.
Except they don't. Trickle down doesn't. It was one thing when it was a theory untested by the world. But after basing economies on it for generations, we know it doesn't work. The rich keep their money flowing among themselves - it doesn't even trickle outside their close networks. They live in places with pollution and labor standards, but outsource their production to places which don't. The luxury items are not nearly as productive in the economy as factories or schools. They lock up opportunities so entrepreneurs can't find efficiences which change systems, but at best find niches among the anticompetitive business networks.
Trickle down was a nice fantasy, like Communism. We don't believe it anymore, now that we've tried it and paid the costs of its failure.
"Don't like Bush that much" followed by "Democrats are the same" is the last refuge of the Republican voter grudgingly admitting the reality of Bush, while denying the reality of Democrats. Go look up the "real wage growth" under Republicans and Democrats and tell me again. Or just remember what your life was like under Clinton, vs now under Bush.
Oh, I'm pissed about the patrician tax system. But the rich stay rich without growing the economy as much as the rest of us who take chances. Who spend our money on business that grows production. Who start businesses to find efficiencies around the perverted economics that subsidizes the rich.
The fact is that the rich keep the benefit for themselves, while the rest of us are forced to share it more. That makes us more important to the economy.
Nixon was a Republican president with a Democratic Congress with shakesperian paranoia and a lot to be afraid of after committing unprecedented crimes of tyranny.
Nixon inherited the Democrats Vietnam by campaigning to end it, then escalating it beyond any reasonable level, in another unprecedented crime of tyranny. Twice, for two terms in office. Although he knew South Vietnam was doomed, he campaigned on supporting them just long enough to get reelected, though he planned to drop them cold as soon as he was reelected.
Nixon moved the US off the gold standard in a fashion that moved us to the petroleum standard, creating OPEC and our dependence on it.
Nixon desegregated the South by executing the Democratic Congress' laws and fulfilling the Democrats' promise, because it was too late to interfere with the nearly-won Civil Rights revolution without committing political suicide. When Nixon was Eisenhower's Vice President for 8 years, Nixon helped perpetuate racism and Jim Crow until the people took the lead in getting free, supported by Democrats. Nixon based the Republican political recovery on a "Southern Strategy" of pandering to Southern racists, which defines the Republican Party, and the US they usually control, to this day.
Nixon managed the Mideast into a series of wars with Israel, OPEC holding us hostage, Iran's revolution that might be the death of us all, and no peace until Democrat Jimmy Carter negotiated one between Israel and Egypt that lasts through today.
Nixon "leveraged detente" with China by sending George Bush Sr as his first ambassador, resulting in a China that's a more legitimate threat to us than even Soviet Russia ever was. In fact, by most measures, the modern China that Nixon helped create is beating us in practically every competition that counts, exploiting the loopholes designed to serve Nixon's Republican corporate constituency. Staking so much on a losing Vietnam War did more to strengthen China and Russia than just leaving Vietnam to go the way of Yugoslavia ever could have.
A "fair and balanced" (did you really just say that?) view of Nixon's legacy shows that American politics has moved so far to the right that Nixon's relatively moderate corporatism makes the current Republicans look fascist. That the discredit Nixon dealt to the presidency grew an entire generation of Republicans who will stop at nothing for power, discarding Democratic opposition in Congress so ruthlessly that the Republican agenda finally works unimpeded by officials or competing superpowers.
Now, Nixon wasn't the devil (that's Cheney, who worked for Nixon). And Democrats are no salvation - there is none. But looking at the current catastophic Republican inheritors of Nixon's party, including many of its star players, shows Nixon overwhelmingly bad for the US for generations, some still to come. Without Nixon, Bush couldn't have gotten the power he still has. Especially Nixon's institutionalization of so many fake "national security" violations of the Constitution, and his adoption of the CIA/NSA for Republican partisan conspiracies.
I'm glad that Nixon didn't reduce the country to smoking ruins the way Bush is working on. But that hardly balances the lasting damage Nixon did. He deserves all the scorn and spite he gets, and much more, even if there was some mercy in his awful reign.
I'd agree. I'd also say that ignoring the lower utility of rich people's incomes compared to less rich people's incomes, reducing the greater productivity of working people's capital, is economics so flawed as to be worthless. I'd call it "Republican political economics".
Athenian democrats also let Athens be destroyed by Spartan militarists - two and a half millennia ago.
If you want to go back a century and blame Democrats' recessions/panics on outside conditions, be my guest. How about talking about the entire series of Republican catastrophes that actually define our modern economy and politics?
The rich lock up their income unproductively more than the rest of us. The real estate value increase doesn't grow the economy, it grows the money supply, and generates even more debt, when it grows the way it has under Bush. Debt to foreign enemies like China. Rather than sink that money into producing consumer goods, it goes into real estate speculation, which makes banks (especially foreign) rich.
You are confusing making money with growing the economy that matters: production of goods and services for the benefit of consumers. The rich don't contribute to essential economy that nearly as much as do the rest of us.
I'm not against luxury goods - I own plenty myself. Nor did I ever suggest taking them away, so you can keep your fat ass buried in your La-Z-Boy chair in front of your big-screen TV. I merely debunk the Reaganomics "trickle down" BS that everyone should know by now is just a lie to subsidize rich people. Maybe if you looked into it more than into QVC for your wife's earrings, you'd understand it better. Then you might enjoy an economy that serves the people servicing it better than the people merely exploiting it at your expense, and buy nicer earrings for her.
The Republican Party has indeed been kidnapped by its neocon chickenhawks. But the rest of the party has gone along with gusto. From the Republican Congress that backs every neocon initiative, to the 50M Republicans voting for Bush whenever they get the chance, to Bush himself doing nothing but "catapulting the propaganda", the Republican Party has turned its traditional "loyalty" into rigid obedience, a zombie horde shuffling for the neocons.
By contrast, the Democrats govern themselves and the country the way it's designed to work: competition between conflicting interests, politicians in each other's way, lots of debate considering even unpopular options before decisions get made, then the full force of the country behind the execution, even while some of the country works against those efforts. Messy, but safer from government tyranny, the American Way.
I don't see just any woman any more likely to "follow the law" than any man, especially a Republican woman (*cough* Condoleeza Rice *cough*). Or any of the other values you ascribe to a woman, as anyone with a wife could tell you. Women of course have as much right to opportunity as men, especially in public and politics.
And though the Republicans have fucked up things worse than ever before, things can always get worse (eg. President Jeb Bush, or President Rudolph Giuliani...). There's still a lot of value and fight left in tattered America, and plenty of people who could run us even worse.
I really enjoyed the movie Dennis Hopper presented, called Best Sellers in the English version I saw. They present the interchangeability of art and advertising, especially after the 1980s saw so many film/art directors produce ads and vice versa.
I did notice. I'm just amplifying and extending your remarks. Because I know so many Slashdotters think it's raining when people are just pissing on them. I enjoy helping them get appropriate pissed off - better than pissed on.
Hah - Anonymous Republican Coward calls me a "political bigot", and talks about paying heed to someone, while blowing meaningless hot air in a flimsy defense of their Republican Party's endless lies.
If I hate you because you put the tyrant in power, that doesn't make me a bigot. That makes you a tyrant's subject, and me a patriot.
Sure, it's so easy for you to make the same charge about Democrats that you won't do it.
Just because you Republicans are so racist that you equate politics with White people, even when you don't realize you're blurting it out, that you think political awareness is "bigotry", doesn't mean the rest of us have do buy into your demented political totalitarianism.
More predictable lies from an Anonymous Republican Coward. These Anonymous Cowards are nearly always Republican liars. What a bunch of slackers.
Slashdot Mirror
Who's got a Bluetooth USB stick with Flash MBs on it? Or better yet, Bluetooth USB stick with a connector for Flash?
If the other NetBSD founder, Theo de Raadt, hadn't retaliated for being forced out of the project by suing and otherwise interfering with the project in 1994, NetBSD would be the "Linux" we're all talking about today. The biggest turning point in the Linux rise was when Slackware delivered thousands of nearly-free working Linux installer CDs which could be freely redistributed. Right when NetBSD was technically superior (including more architectures and a package installer system), but blocked by de Raadt.
If de Raadt had stayed in the project, providing the strong leadership that pushed his OpenBSD project to eclipse NetBSD, then maybe the 1994-5 years would have seen NetBSD keep the momentum (and developers) it lost to Linux, right when the Dotcom Bubble threw so much gas on the fire. NetBSD might now be where Linux will arrive only a few years from now.
The project failure that threw de Raadt out and left NetBSD vulnerable to his retaliation is the central lesson for similar FOSS projects. Now that the dust has cleared a great deal, I'd like to see an honest dissection of the relevant project management issues that underlaid the mutually destructive split.
Merely taxcutting the rich to a rate that still pays their share, rather than preferentially over the rest, isn't supply-side. Government subsidies including taxes that favor corporations is supply-side.
When Reagan/Bush installed supply-side, they first quadrupled the size of government, and continued its expansion for 12 years, generating more debt than previously believed possible. They robbed the S&Ls of $1.5TRILLION. And funded "expansion" with junk bonds. All of which came home to roost by 1990, a collapse that lasted 4 years, corrected only by the unexpected Dotcom Bubble (managed by Clinton). Not to mention the 1982 recession, or the seeds of the one we've been in for the past 5 years: 10-11 years of documented recession out of 25, despite all the book juggling to cover it up.
Bush Jr's tax cuts haven't improved "the economy", just the sectors favored by Bush's base of rich bankers. The stock market's value has dropped compared to the value of global equity. Even Bush admits the economy is "in the tank" if you're just a regular American. Income has shrunk consistently under Reagan/Bush administrations, unless you're a bank.
If you ignore the $TRILLIONS in subsidies and crippling effects on those not already rich masked by the huge benefits to the rich, then supply-side is a success. If you're rich, it's a successful way to steal from everyone else.
Iran/Contra was Bush Sr's baby, as was the S&L heist which he deregulated. They were directly connected: the CIA robbed the Indian Springs S&L to fund missiles for Iran with a fake ID. The $1.5TRILLION S&L heist paid for the fake Reagan "boom", along with the rest of the junk bonds the S&Ls didn't buy and the huge Reagan/Bush debt. Even quadrupling+ the size of the government (while getting reelected 3x to "shrink government") didn't save the aerospace industry from the 1990-4 recession they created; Clinton's management of the Dotcom Bubble did. Bush invited Iraq to invade Kuwait after Iraq threatened to because Kuwait was drilling sideways into Iraq's oilfields.
Clinton's infotech policies fed the economy at the expense of our rights like DMCA and his attempted Clipper Chip, and he put his wife in charge of the universal health insurance boondoggle to give her power while dooming the program. And Janet Reno would have been more at home in Bush Sr's cabinet. While he did execute a "model police action" in Yugoslavia (despite the blood), he also maintained a continuous airwar over Iraq that Bush Jr just had to ramp up for our worst strategic error in our history.
But Clinton had flaws that fed his investment banking bribers^Wcontributors, without actually being a fascist. Bush Sr and his accomplices from Nixon through Jr are fascists. The degree of their fascism has increased as they and their party have pulled American political consensus far to the right. Which is why Goldwater, except for his itchy nuke finger, looks like a centrist Democrat today. I'm concerned for Canada's momentum under the influence of America's gravity, and hope that our errors are so graphic that Canada can, as usual, learn from them without our costs.
Hezbollah's website (Nasrallah's) is hosted by the royal Saudi "stables" contractor, recently a unit of giant American defense contractor UDI. These actual business "conspiracies" have always been "shadowy" mostly through the willing ignorance of the uninformed. With Google and emailable URLs, the dots are much easier to connect, for ourselves and the public.
I used to live in Canada for several years. I had to "explain America" frequently, but it was much easier under Clinton, even when dismayed/disappointed Canadians couldn't believe he'd get impeached for covering up a blowjob. Canada's still the kinder, gentler nation, and (especially with Global Warming) looks better every day.
The single feature that brought PDAs to the masses was the Palm Pilot's one-button sync. Finally people thought of their data as an independent entity, not just the condition they had left one computer or another in.
When home backups are that simple and easy, the computers will start to disappear, and we'll live in our data rather than at "the" computer.
No, it's not enough to prove more than your own limited thinking.
If I said "Jews have a lot of money", that would be a stereotype. If I said "the rich have a lot of money", that would be the truth. Just because a group's defining characteristics can be stated as a generalization doesn't make that statement a "stereotype". There is some debate, and has been much in these threads, about whether the rich contribute less to the economy than do the poor. But stating it is no stereotype.
You probably still think that I'm wrong, because you're one of those people who can't admit you're wrong when you've got no way to argue. You just post an insult and think it's enough.
Some investments are more productive than others. Yachts are less productive purchases than hammers.
Try making a fortune and automating financial systems like I have before spouting naive economics at people smarter and more experienced - and richer - than you.
Do the rich spend more money on food, or on yachts in foreign ports? Do the rest of us spend more money on food than do the rich? Aren't you just inferring a metaphor into literal economics?
Alaska, home of oil, Republicans, Internet hatred, the biggest snow jobs in the country. Maybe we could send all these Republicans there for freezedrying.
You'd be the undisputed champion if you just posted as AC. But your content-free obnoxious post wins its own award for unqualified stupidity.
So I see you're really more a fan of Kissinger than of Nixon. Kissinger got away with crimes against humanity because the global justice system is rigged to protect the powerful even more than is the US justice system. His pet Pinochet didn't even see justice until he was too old and feeble, with his political creditors mostly dead, to push back any more.
Nixon was no "closet" racist - his racism is evident on the tapes he made. I don't see what that has to do with Kennedy's "missile gap" rhetoric, though I note that Kennedy did face down Russian missiles in Cuba successfully, a tougher Cold Warrior than Nixon. I didn't make any claim about their relative propaganda integrity, just whether Nixon just "inherited" Vietnam and tried to get out while saving face. He capitalized on Vietnam as much as he could. And I didn't say he was KKK, or anything at all about Eisenhower, just that Nixon's Southern Strategy was racist, consistent with his ignoring racism while VP, and continues to hurt the US today. I think you are indulging a desire to go too far, while I am remaining proportional.
I think "blaming" Truman for Israel's formation is completely legitimate, though I (probably) disagree with what you'd blame him for. I'd blame him for allowing the borders to be drawn in typical British postcolonial fashion, dividing tribes to set them against each other and create endless local wars to distract them from competing with the colonizers. Iran's case is one where Nixon's oil policy and his CIA's sponsorship of the tyrannical Shah put Iran into its revolutionary state. And my point was about Republicans in general, who ran their Iran/Contra resupply operation, and even put Oliver North in the desert where Carter's helicopter rescue attempt "somehow" crashed and burned, even if you don't believe Republicans colluded with Iran to release the hostages coincidentally on Reagan's inauguration day.
Since you're in Canada, and unfamiliar with Fox News, you don't have as much reason to come to an American perspective on our Republican Party. It has perpetuated terrible frauds on America, producing collusions with our enemies to keep themselves in power through fear, exploiting the easily led American media consumers as much as the foreign producers exploited by their counterparts. The central player in their acts is George Bush Sr, who was not only Nixon's first China chief, but also the Republican Party chair who cleaned up after Watergate to run in 1980 and sit in power for a dozen years (more than anyone but Nixon). I don't claim that Clinton and even Carter let China grow too powerful at our expense. But there's no comparison between their responsibility over 12 years and Republicans over 26 years. 18 of which 26 years have seen Bush Sr actually calling the shots, preceeded by more years slightly removed or just calling shots in China. Hell, Bush Sr was the only person ever to answer the question "where were you the day JFK was shot?" with "I don't know", though it turns out he was in Dallas that day, flying out that morning.
These people are awful. They are joined to the corporate media, including (especially) Fox News. They have sailed the US through several wars for their global corporate interests, including Iraq and Vietnam, even when assisted by Democrats (usually through failure of Congressional oversight or campaign criticism). Now we're discussing the Republicans shutting the people off from research libraries in a blatant move to protect corporate polluters. I don't think any of the Democrats since America became huge (191x) have tried that kind of tyranny. But it's perfectly consistent with Republicans, especially Nixon.
They might try to pass their costs to the consumer. But that's a problem with competition in the telco cartels. Which is being solved by tech innovation and legal requirements to force open access to telecom subscriber networks.
If AT&T was found liable for these exposures to probably 500K subscribers the past few years at $5K each cost for protection, that's $2.5B. They might try to pass the cost on to all their subscribers, but they'd find subscribers dropping and switching to competitors. While it probably costs maybe a few $million to upgrade their practices and SW to reduce liability.
With competition, these telcos would first see their profits shrink, then reinvest in upgrades. That's how real market economics works, especially when the market's operation is protected by competition assurance and service standards.
If the highly productive contributions of middle class production and consumption compared to upper class isn't intuitive to you, you can look into the economics. It's fairly well understood now, after massive trickle down and supply side economics experiments failed in the US and elsewhere.
Except they don't. Trickle down doesn't. It was one thing when it was a theory untested by the world. But after basing economies on it for generations, we know it doesn't work. The rich keep their money flowing among themselves - it doesn't even trickle outside their close networks. They live in places with pollution and labor standards, but outsource their production to places which don't. The luxury items are not nearly as productive in the economy as factories or schools. They lock up opportunities so entrepreneurs can't find efficiences which change systems, but at best find niches among the anticompetitive business networks.
Trickle down was a nice fantasy, like Communism. We don't believe it anymore, now that we've tried it and paid the costs of its failure.
"This is why supply side economics work so well."
You forgot the <SNARK*gt; tag.
"Don't like Bush that much" followed by "Democrats are the same" is the last refuge of the Republican voter grudgingly admitting the reality of Bush, while denying the reality of Democrats. Go look up the "real wage growth" under Republicans and Democrats and tell me again. Or just remember what your life was like under Clinton, vs now under Bush.
Oh, I'm pissed about the patrician tax system. But the rich stay rich without growing the economy as much as the rest of us who take chances. Who spend our money on business that grows production. Who start businesses to find efficiencies around the perverted economics that subsidizes the rich.
The fact is that the rich keep the benefit for themselves, while the rest of us are forced to share it more. That makes us more important to the economy.
Nixon was a Republican president with a Democratic Congress with shakesperian paranoia and a lot to be afraid of after committing unprecedented crimes of tyranny.
Nixon inherited the Democrats Vietnam by campaigning to end it, then escalating it beyond any reasonable level, in another unprecedented crime of tyranny. Twice, for two terms in office. Although he knew South Vietnam was doomed, he campaigned on supporting them just long enough to get reelected, though he planned to drop them cold as soon as he was reelected.
Nixon moved the US off the gold standard in a fashion that moved us to the petroleum standard, creating OPEC and our dependence on it.
Nixon desegregated the South by executing the Democratic Congress' laws and fulfilling the Democrats' promise, because it was too late to interfere with the nearly-won Civil Rights revolution without committing political suicide. When Nixon was Eisenhower's Vice President for 8 years, Nixon helped perpetuate racism and Jim Crow until the people took the lead in getting free, supported by Democrats. Nixon based the Republican political recovery on a "Southern Strategy" of pandering to Southern racists, which defines the Republican Party, and the US they usually control, to this day.
Nixon managed the Mideast into a series of wars with Israel, OPEC holding us hostage, Iran's revolution that might be the death of us all, and no peace until Democrat Jimmy Carter negotiated one between Israel and Egypt that lasts through today.
Nixon "leveraged detente" with China by sending George Bush Sr as his first ambassador, resulting in a China that's a more legitimate threat to us than even Soviet Russia ever was. In fact, by most measures, the modern China that Nixon helped create is beating us in practically every competition that counts, exploiting the loopholes designed to serve Nixon's Republican corporate constituency. Staking so much on a losing Vietnam War did more to strengthen China and Russia than just leaving Vietnam to go the way of Yugoslavia ever could have.
A "fair and balanced" (did you really just say that?) view of Nixon's legacy shows that American politics has moved so far to the right that Nixon's relatively moderate corporatism makes the current Republicans look fascist. That the discredit Nixon dealt to the presidency grew an entire generation of Republicans who will stop at nothing for power, discarding Democratic opposition in Congress so ruthlessly that the Republican agenda finally works unimpeded by officials or competing superpowers.
Now, Nixon wasn't the devil (that's Cheney, who worked for Nixon). And Democrats are no salvation - there is none. But looking at the current catastophic Republican inheritors of Nixon's party, including many of its star players, shows Nixon overwhelmingly bad for the US for generations, some still to come. Without Nixon, Bush couldn't have gotten the power he still has. Especially Nixon's institutionalization of so many fake "national security" violations of the Constitution, and his adoption of the CIA/NSA for Republican partisan conspiracies.
I'm glad that Nixon didn't reduce the country to smoking ruins the way Bush is working on. But that hardly balances the lasting damage Nixon did. He deserves all the scorn and spite he gets, and much more, even if there was some mercy in his awful reign.
I'd agree. I'd also say that ignoring the lower utility of rich people's incomes compared to less rich people's incomes, reducing the greater productivity of working people's capital, is economics so flawed as to be worthless. I'd call it "Republican political economics".
Athenian democrats also let Athens be destroyed by Spartan militarists - two and a half millennia ago.
If you want to go back a century and blame Democrats' recessions/panics on outside conditions, be my guest. How about talking about the entire series of Republican catastrophes that actually define our modern economy and politics?
The rich lock up their income unproductively more than the rest of us. The real estate value increase doesn't grow the economy, it grows the money supply, and generates even more debt, when it grows the way it has under Bush. Debt to foreign enemies like China. Rather than sink that money into producing consumer goods, it goes into real estate speculation, which makes banks (especially foreign) rich.
You are confusing making money with growing the economy that matters: production of goods and services for the benefit of consumers. The rich don't contribute to essential economy that nearly as much as do the rest of us.
I'm not against luxury goods - I own plenty myself. Nor did I ever suggest taking them away, so you can keep your fat ass buried in your La-Z-Boy chair in front of your big-screen TV. I merely debunk the Reaganomics "trickle down" BS that everyone should know by now is just a lie to subsidize rich people. Maybe if you looked into it more than into QVC for your wife's earrings, you'd understand it better. Then you might enjoy an economy that serves the people servicing it better than the people merely exploiting it at your expense, and buy nicer earrings for her.
The Republican Party has indeed been kidnapped by its neocon chickenhawks. But the rest of the party has gone along with gusto. From the Republican Congress that backs every neocon initiative, to the 50M Republicans voting for Bush whenever they get the chance, to Bush himself doing nothing but "catapulting the propaganda", the Republican Party has turned its traditional "loyalty" into rigid obedience, a zombie horde shuffling for the neocons.
By contrast, the Democrats govern themselves and the country the way it's designed to work: competition between conflicting interests, politicians in each other's way, lots of debate considering even unpopular options before decisions get made, then the full force of the country behind the execution, even while some of the country works against those efforts. Messy, but safer from government tyranny, the American Way.
I don't see just any woman any more likely to "follow the law" than any man, especially a Republican woman (*cough* Condoleeza Rice *cough*). Or any of the other values you ascribe to a woman, as anyone with a wife could tell you. Women of course have as much right to opportunity as men, especially in public and politics.
And though the Republicans have fucked up things worse than ever before, things can always get worse (eg. President Jeb Bush, or President Rudolph Giuliani...). There's still a lot of value and fight left in tattered America, and plenty of people who could run us even worse.
I really enjoyed the movie Dennis Hopper presented, called Best Sellers in the English version I saw. They present the interchangeability of art and advertising, especially after the 1980s saw so many film/art directors produce ads and vice versa.
I did notice. I'm just amplifying and extending your remarks. Because I know so many Slashdotters think it's raining when people are just pissing on them. I enjoy helping them get appropriate pissed off - better than pissed on.
Hah - Anonymous Republican Coward calls me a "political bigot", and talks about paying heed to someone, while blowing meaningless hot air in a flimsy defense of their Republican Party's endless lies.
If I hate you because you put the tyrant in power, that doesn't make me a bigot. That makes you a tyrant's subject, and me a patriot.
Sure, it's so easy for you to make the same charge about Democrats that you won't do it.
Just because you Republicans are so racist that you equate politics with White people, even when you don't realize you're blurting it out, that you think political awareness is "bigotry", doesn't mean the rest of us have do buy into your demented political totalitarianism.
More predictable lies from an Anonymous Republican Coward. These Anonymous Cowards are nearly always Republican liars. What a bunch of slackers.