First, go pull out your old freshman macroeconomics textbook. Open the first page. Here's the quote you're looking for:
"The purpose of business is the efficient distribution of goods and services throughout society. Profit is used as a means to that end."
The whole point of allowing a business a bottom line is to encourage them to serve the needs and interests of the community they operate in. Again, the purpose of a mule is to pull a plow, not to eat carrots.
If you want to make an argument for personal freedom as a basis of economic activity, I'll totally agree with you as soon as those businesses pay the going tax rate and bear their own liability as sole proprietorships and the various flavors of partnership. The second you ask society to cut you a deal for favored tax treatment and limited liability as a corporation, your "personal freedom" is no longer an issue.
Second, you lack the courage of your convictions. You want to say businesses should be purely self-interested amoral entities, but not "sociopathic." Unfortunately, the clinical definition of a sociopath is "an amoral, purely self-interested entity."
Third, you must work in marketing. Perception is not reality. (Yeah, I saw "Sneakers" too, bank runs and insolvency, yeah, yeah, yeah.)
As the ghosts of the Challenger, Deepwater Horizon and Massey Industries will be happy to tell you, Perception is not reality. Reality is reality. Ask an engineer, they'll be happy to explain it.:-)
If you want to partcipate in and enjoy the fruits of a Democracy, then there are responsibilities you must live up to.
Tell you what. I'll be happy to revisit the issue of corporate citizenship when one of Google's board members dies defending this country as members of my family have.
Read it. Every one of the fifty states have some line about serving the public good. It's the ENTIRE reason we shield them from liability and give them tax breaks. Up unitl the 1980s, this wasn't even a question. Of course, businesses have moral, ethical and community concerns. Their whole purpose is to serve the public good. The reason we allow these legal fictions to exist in the first place is to serve the public. We're using the profit motive to get them to do that. We use carrots to get mules to move, but the purpose of a mule is to pull the plow, not eat carrots.
Then the 1980s came and the big lie began. Carl Icahn and T. Boone Pickens an other corporate raiders started to argue that businesses had no responsiility but their bottom line.
They got laughed out of the room. No one even bothered to seriously argue it. It was such a greedy, venal, nonsense argument, no one took it seriously. So Pickens dug his hands into education in Texas, and started paying colleges to take it seriously. Repeat it often enough and The Big Lie can get a foothold.
Stop a minute and think about what you're saying. Why would we as a society EVER want to grant the favor of a corporate charter to a group of men who have no scruples about anything? EVERY citizen of the United States has civic duties and responsibilties, and if corporations are to be considered "citizens," then why on Earth shouldn't they carry the same duties as the rest of us?
First of all, ket's kill this nonsense idea about businesses and their private property rights. Inside your own private home, you can implement whatever racist, sexist, discriminatory policies you like.
Once you form a corporation and open to the public for business, you agree to play by different rules. When you file a corporate charter, you make the explicit black-letter deal that in exchange for limited liability and tax considerations, you are going to serve the public good. Just as it's time we put an end to cops claiming "privacy" rights in the course of performing their duties, and it's time we put an end to business's claiming they have "private property" rights in the course of their business. You've already agreed you're not a "private person" when you made the deal for a corpoate charter.
You can absolutely say "I don't want any minorities in my home." You absolutely can NOT say "I don't want any minorities in my business."
Now, my country, the USA, has certain values that stem from our history. We don't like kings, we don't like searches except under extreme circumstances, we believe you should be free to speak your mind or pray to any god you choose.
Yeah, it was hard to type that with a straight face.
Any way, just in case you were educated in Texas, here's something you should know. The American Revolution was kickstarted by men working under psuedonyms. Our most beloved author, Samuel Clemens, worked under a psuedonym. (You Texas kids, go ahead and google it. I'll wait.) Our most beloved badass actor, Marion Morrison, worked under a psuedonym (Everyone under 40, go ahead and google it.).
We like psuedonyms in this country, because as the Supreme Court has repeatedly held, speech isn't free if expressing an unpopular opinion costs you your livelihood -- Google "Red Scare Fifties" for more on that.
Google may not be obligated to join any crusades, by they are obliged to respect the basic mores that make modern democracies possible.
Read the decision. The ruling is that this is not a violation of this individual's free speech because the information being presented is for mere business, rather than political, purposes.
Now contrast that with "Citizens United" and other recent court rulings that have held corporate commercial speech is absolutely protected by the First Amendment.
Now take a look at the recent unprecendented wave of corporate donations and junkets being flooded into the judiciary, including the Supreme Court. For the first time in history, we have Supreme Court justices openly accepting small fortunes from various interests that appeared before them.
We've got an awful lot of corruption to clean up in the judiciary before we can expect to get fair and logical decisions out of them again.
Because obviously slave labor never completed a single pyramid.:-) As for the South, take a look at some of the antelbellum structures in Georgia. Plantation owners made money hand-over-fist. If you've got a repetitive, labor-intensive task, like moving rock or farming sugar, cotton or tobacco, slave labor works great.
Even today, the CCA corporation makes a ton of money off slave prison labor. We could industrialize agriculture tomorrow and have robots pick crops like they build cars, but the ready availability of easy exploited illegal labor means we make more money not doing so.
Don't kid yourself. Just because slave labor can't do your job as well as you can doesn't mean the company won't outsource your job anyway. All we have to do is show we'll save payroll costs in the next 90 days, and the layoff is a done deal, the hell with the consequences on day 91.
If I analize all past lottery results I can predict future ones.... To bad that doesn't work....
Are you insane? This works GREAT!
Do you know how much people are willing to pay for a lottery-winning system? Show them a picture of a yacht with bikinis, tease them with stories of telling their boss to take this job and shove it, throw in some "Doctor Who" math about how the flux capacitor can overload the warp core to discover the quantum entanglement and people will line up around the block to give you their money.
Even if they notice it doesn't work, they'll cheerfully accept that the fix is coming in a patch next week...
They won't even notice that you misspelled "analyze.":-)
It's already being done. Stephen Baker's book "Numerati" already reports the use of "Crime Scores" on individuals the same way credit scores are used by banks and health scores are used by insurance companies. Even if you have an issue with Baker's book, think about how easily such a system could be implemented.
Bob exists: Score 0.
Bob dropped out of high school. Score +1 Bob lives in high crime area. Score +1 Bob makes less than 20K/year reported IRS income. Score +1 Bob has had contact with the police in the past 3 years. Score +1
Bob makes no income. Score +2. Bob has made no income for multiple years. Score +2
Bob is a known associate of criminals. Score +3
Bob is related to a convicted criminal. Score +4
Bob has previously been convicted of a crime. Score +10
Now think of all the wonderful ways credit scores have been screwed up...
Actually, it does take a fairly big boom to bring a modern plane down. Even an explosive decompression doesn't bring the plane down.
The funny thing is that the guys who design and build planes would prefer they not fall out of the sky, so they tend to be big believers in redundancy. The sort of bombs you could smuggle on planes -- grenades, exploding shoes and underwear, binary explosives mixed up in the bathroom and other assorted nonsense -- don't pose much of a threat. You can relax. The sound you'll hear as your plane falls out of the sky is not going to be "Allahu Akbar" with incredibly annoying ululation.
Nope, the sound you'll hear in dramatic time-shifted voiceover as your plane falls out of the sky will be "Well, Bill, I'm not really seeing the ROI justification for this maintenance schedule. I think a more reasonable approach would be to set the maintenance schedule to what the vendor certified as MTBF. The engineers are paranoid, and that's what we pay them for, but they don't really understand the real-world business impact..."
You want a thought to make you break out in a cold sweat as you sit crammed between the fat guy and the screaming kid?
Here's one. The same sort of guys guys who decided to blow up the Space Shuttle Challenger and the Deepwater Horizon set the maintenance schedule on your plane and also decided just how much fuel your plane should be loaded with before takeoff.
You're not going to die because Achmed the terrorist got to sit down on your plane. You're going to die because the airline lobbyists got to sit down with your senator.
Stalking as a degree got defined by law at the cost of blood. We literally stacked up too many bodies of women until it could no longer be ignored. It wasn't a natural consequence.
Speaking of the law, here's what Warren and Brandeis thought of technological surveillance:
The Right to Privacy Warren and Brandeis, Harvard Law Review, December 15, 1890 Recent inventions and business methods call attention to the next step which must be taken for the protection of the person, and for securing to the individual what Judge Cooley calls the right "to be let alone" [10] Instantaneous photographs and newspaper enterprise have invaded the sacred precincts of private and domestic life; and numerous mechanical devices threaten to make good the prediction that "what is whispered in the closet shall be proclaimed from the house-tops."
Warren and Brandeis were worried about technologial advances destroying privacy in 1890. Just how big of a heart attack do you think they'd have at the idea of the police warrantlessly tracking citizens 24/7?
And how far do you think our liberties have slipped?
I'm going to go ahead and guess that they know a little more about the Constitution than you do, and may be aware of subtleties of its interpretation that cloud the issue.
And yet, the wonderful thing is that BeanThere still has the right to call them on their nonsense. You just made the most literal "Appeal to Authority" argument I've ever heard. I'll go BeanThere one better. Not only do I believe their decisions of late have been grievously, horrifically wrong, I don't think they're the caliber of men fit to walk through the Court's doors and sit in the shadow of Thurgood Marshall, Earl Warren and Oliver Wendell Holmes.
I don't want to know what you do with your consenting self in the privacy of your own home. Now, if you haven't given yourself consent, then yes, it becomes a police matter.
The cops can already get this information by dangerously and expensively tailing you or flying over your head, and they can do that without a warrant; why should obtaining the same information from a GPS be any different?
Because Liberty is a matter of degree, not just type. A woman runs into her ex-boyfriend at Starbucks Monday morning. If she doesn't see him again, that's chance. If she bumps into him again at lunch, that's odd. If she sees him at dinner, it's weird. If she sees him every time she sets foot out her door, that's stalking.
Police departments have finite resources. They can only surveil a handful of people full-time. That's police work. If they can automate that and keep track of thousands of people simultaneously while logging their every movement into a database, that's Orwellian.
The fact that they would do that while trespassing on my property is just creepy.
SuperDave80 could have made his argument with a little more rigor, but what's he reaching for is "Not even the King is above the Law."
The Government cannot expect us to follow the Law if it will not follow the Law itself. This was the whole point of the Magna Carta, one of the founding documents of modern law.
The 1215 Charter required King John of England to proclaim certain liberties, and accept that his will was not arbitrary, for example by explicitly accepting that no "freeman" (in the sense of non-serf) could be punished except through the law of the land, a right which is still in existence today.
If the Rule of Law does not apply to all, including and especially the Executive, then you have the walking definition of a corrupt state and an illegitimate government. When the government does not obey the law, you have a duty to break it and oppose the men in power. I'll let the Declaration of Independence speak for itself:
...whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends... it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.
When the government does not follow the Law, then there is no Law to be followed.
You will, of course, still have moral limits on your behavior.
If it were up to this court the government would be able to quarter troops in our homes.
You should be HONORED to have one of our brave troops set foot in your home, you dope-smoking Liberal. If it wasn't for our troops, you wouldn't have a home, you Sharia-loving socialist! You should take a trip down to the local VA hospital to get a close look at the blood and limbs that have been lost to save your freedom. My wife and I moved into the garage so the fine young hero in our care could sleep in a decent bed after the rock mattresses he got in Afghanistan.
Sure, they were good enough to fight for you in Iraq, but now you think our troops should be homeless. You make me sick, you Jon Stewart acolyte.
[I defy you to work through Poe's Law on this one.:-) ]
First of all, for someone making TSA wages, $160 is a significant investment.
Second of all, what are you going to do if it shows you're just about ready to glow in the dark?
Quit? If that was an option, you'd have done it long ago.
Tell your boss? Tell him what, that the unauthorized, unapproved device that you just violated national security with has thrown a spurious reading?
Tell your coworkers? "Honey, Bill says we have to get evicted this month because his armpatch turned green." I think you'd find your coworkers would rather call you a liar and a troublemaker than volunteer to become homeless.
Alert the media? "The TSA responded to blog reports today that Bill the TSA Guy has been fired for mental health issues, theft and sexual harassment charges. Mr. Bill has been committed for a 72-hour hold on suicide watch... [cut to coworker video] Bill was always a liar and a troublemaker..."
Youtube? "Defense contractor Quantum Dynamics, the maker of the badge in the "Bill the TSA Guy" video, reported today that the badge reading was in error and the result of user error, most likely the result of having been placed in a microwave oven...[cut to badge in microwave] See how the badge looks just like the one in Bill's video... [cut to coworker] Bill was always a liar and a troublemaker hanging around the microwave making popcorn when he should have been working..."
I've seen people die of cancer, and I've always said I wouldn't wish it on my worst enemy.
but wouldn't you think that someone that was the former head of a government security agency might know a bit about the needs of that agency and be able to start a company that can provide for those needs?
Yes, I know, it's common practice, but profiting from an industry that you have or had official power over is textbook corruption. Participating in a bidding process where you have special inside knowledge is corruption, and it doesn't get more special or inside than "I was head of the agency last week."
The TSA had already been lobbying for rad badges, and been turned down because the badges would make people tend to believe the scanners weren't safe.:-)
I grew up on Navy bases during the Vietnam war. We expected 18-year-old kids to stand up to gunfire. And they did. But since we're talking civilian cops, let me tell you a civilian story.
When I was in college, I got ran through the training they hold for volunteer firefighters in my state. At the end of the week, they held a little dinner/get together. It was a small community, everyone knew everyone.
There was a table where the grizzled old men sat, and the guy who was showing me the ropes clued me in on the stories. That guy got his ear burned off saving a kid. That one traded that finger for some woman. The guy with burn scars over his entire left arm? That was a bad day, but they got everybody out.
They also had a couple of chairs out for their friends who couldn't make it on account of being dead.
No, I really don't think it's too much to ask of an officer of the law to speak in a professional tone when he's in uniform and talking to a group of law students. I expect one of the city's finest to express himself without using words like bitch, slut and whore.
I really don't think we're setting that bar too high.
Slashdot Mirror
First, go pull out your old freshman macroeconomics textbook. Open the first page. Here's the quote you're looking for:
"The purpose of business is the efficient distribution of goods and services throughout society. Profit is used as a means to that end."
The whole point of allowing a business a bottom line is to encourage them to serve the needs and interests of the community they operate in. Again, the purpose of a mule is to pull a plow, not to eat carrots.
If you want to make an argument for personal freedom as a basis of economic activity, I'll totally agree with you as soon as those businesses pay the going tax rate and bear their own liability as sole proprietorships and the various flavors of partnership. The second you ask society to cut you a deal for favored tax treatment and limited liability as a corporation, your "personal freedom" is no longer an issue.
Second, you lack the courage of your convictions. You want to say businesses should be purely self-interested amoral entities, but not "sociopathic." Unfortunately, the clinical definition of a sociopath is "an amoral, purely self-interested entity."
Third, you must work in marketing. Perception is not reality. (Yeah, I saw "Sneakers" too, bank runs and insolvency, yeah, yeah, yeah.)
As the ghosts of the Challenger, Deepwater Horizon and Massey Industries will be happy to tell you, Perception is not reality. Reality is reality. Ask an engineer, they'll be happy to explain it. :-)
If you want to partcipate in and enjoy the fruits of a Democracy, then there are responsibilities you must live up to.
Tell you what. I'll be happy to revisit the issue of corporate citizenship when one of Google's board members dies defending this country as members of my family have.
Go ahead. Grab a corporate charter. I'll wait.
Read it. Every one of the fifty states have some line about serving the public good. It's the ENTIRE reason we shield them from liability and give them tax breaks. Up unitl the 1980s, this wasn't even a question. Of course, businesses have moral, ethical and community concerns. Their whole purpose is to serve the public good. The reason we allow these legal fictions to exist in the first place is to serve the public. We're using the profit motive to get them to do that. We use carrots to get mules to move, but the purpose of a mule is to pull the plow, not eat carrots.
Then the 1980s came and the big lie began. Carl Icahn and T. Boone Pickens an other corporate raiders started to argue that businesses had no responsiility but their bottom line.
They got laughed out of the room. No one even bothered to seriously argue it. It was such a greedy, venal, nonsense argument, no one took it seriously. So Pickens dug his hands into education in Texas, and started paying colleges to take it seriously. Repeat it often enough and The Big Lie can get a foothold.
Stop a minute and think about what you're saying. Why would we as a society EVER want to grant the favor of a corporate charter to a group of men who have no scruples about anything? EVERY citizen of the United States has civic duties and responsibilties, and if corporations are to be considered "citizens," then why on Earth shouldn't they carry the same duties as the rest of us?
First of all, ket's kill this nonsense idea about businesses and their private property rights. Inside your own private home, you can implement whatever racist, sexist, discriminatory policies you like.
Once you form a corporation and open to the public for business, you agree to play by different rules. When you file a corporate charter, you make the explicit black-letter deal that in exchange for limited liability and tax considerations, you are going to serve the public good. Just as it's time we put an end to cops claiming "privacy" rights in the course of performing their duties, and it's time we put an end to business's claiming they have "private property" rights in the course of their business. You've already agreed you're not a "private person" when you made the deal for a corpoate charter.
You can absolutely say "I don't want any minorities in my home." You absolutely can NOT say "I don't want any minorities in my business."
Now, my country, the USA, has certain values that stem from our history. We don't like kings, we don't like searches except under extreme circumstances, we believe you should be free to speak your mind or pray to any god you choose.
Yeah, it was hard to type that with a straight face.
Any way, just in case you were educated in Texas, here's something you should know. The American Revolution was kickstarted by men working under psuedonyms. Our most beloved author, Samuel Clemens, worked under a psuedonym. (You Texas kids, go ahead and google it. I'll wait.) Our most beloved badass actor, Marion Morrison, worked under a psuedonym (Everyone under 40, go ahead and google it.).
We like psuedonyms in this country, because as the Supreme Court has repeatedly held, speech isn't free if expressing an unpopular opinion costs you your livelihood -- Google "Red Scare Fifties" for more on that.
Google may not be obligated to join any crusades, by they are obliged to respect the basic mores that make modern democracies possible.
Read the decision. The ruling is that this is not a violation of this individual's free speech because the information being presented is for mere business, rather than political, purposes.
Now contrast that with "Citizens United" and other recent court rulings that have held corporate commercial speech is absolutely protected by the First Amendment.
Now take a look at the recent unprecendented wave of corporate donations and junkets being flooded into the judiciary, including the Supreme Court. For the first time in history, we have Supreme Court justices openly accepting small fortunes from various interests that appeared before them.
We've got an awful lot of corruption to clean up in the judiciary before we can expect to get fair and logical decisions out of them again.
Because obviously slave labor never completed a single pyramid. :-) As for the South, take a look at some of the antelbellum structures in Georgia. Plantation owners made money hand-over-fist. If you've got a repetitive, labor-intensive task, like moving rock or farming sugar, cotton or tobacco, slave labor works great.
Even today, the CCA corporation makes a ton of money off slave prison labor. We could industrialize agriculture tomorrow and have robots pick crops like they build cars, but the ready availability of easy exploited illegal labor means we make more money not doing so.
Don't kid yourself. Just because slave labor can't do your job as well as you can doesn't mean the company won't outsource your job anyway. All we have to do is show we'll save payroll costs in the next 90 days, and the layoff is a done deal, the hell with the consequences on day 91.
Yes, because reality is so perfectly modeled in videogames. Tell me again, when I get killed, where will I respawn? :-)
TSA/DHS annual budget: 43.1 billion.
NASA annual budget: 17.3 Billion.
We'd rather molest the children than secure their future.
I bet the bombproof cargo containers are a lot cheaper than the TSA body scanners.
And that's why strong cargo containers and flight deck door locks don't get implemented. They don't make the right people rich.
If I analize all past lottery results I can predict future ones.... To bad that doesn't work....
Are you insane? This works GREAT!
Do you know how much people are willing to pay for a lottery-winning system? Show them a picture of a yacht with bikinis, tease them with stories of telling their boss to take this job and shove it, throw in some "Doctor Who" math about how the flux capacitor can overload the warp core to discover the quantum entanglement and people will line up around the block to give you their money.
Even if they notice it doesn't work, they'll cheerfully accept that the fix is coming in a patch next week...
They won't even notice that you misspelled "analyze." :-)
It's already being done. Stephen Baker's book "Numerati" already reports the use of "Crime Scores" on individuals the same way credit scores are used by banks and health scores are used by insurance companies. Even if you have an issue with Baker's book, think about how easily such a system could be implemented.
Bob exists: Score 0.
Bob dropped out of high school. Score +1
Bob lives in high crime area. Score +1
Bob makes less than 20K/year reported IRS income. Score +1
Bob has had contact with the police in the past 3 years. Score +1
Bob makes no income. Score +2.
Bob has made no income for multiple years. Score +2
Bob is a known associate of criminals. Score +3
Bob is related to a convicted criminal. Score +4
Bob has previously been convicted of a crime. Score +10
Now think of all the wonderful ways credit scores have been screwed up...
Actually, it does take a fairly big boom to bring a modern plane down. Even an explosive decompression doesn't bring the plane down.
The funny thing is that the guys who design and build planes would prefer they not fall out of the sky, so they tend to be big believers in redundancy. The sort of bombs you could smuggle on planes -- grenades, exploding shoes and underwear, binary explosives mixed up in the bathroom and other assorted nonsense -- don't pose much of a threat. You can relax. The sound you'll hear as your plane falls out of the sky is not going to be "Allahu Akbar" with incredibly annoying ululation.
Nope, the sound you'll hear in dramatic time-shifted voiceover as your plane falls out of the sky will be "Well, Bill, I'm not really seeing the ROI justification for this maintenance schedule. I think a more reasonable approach would be to set the maintenance schedule to what the vendor certified as MTBF. The engineers are paranoid, and that's what we pay them for, but they don't really understand the real-world business impact..."
You want a thought to make you break out in a cold sweat as you sit crammed between the fat guy and the screaming kid?
Here's one. The same sort of guys guys who decided to blow up the Space Shuttle Challenger and the Deepwater Horizon set the maintenance schedule on your plane and also decided just how much fuel your plane should be loaded with before takeoff.
You're not going to die because Achmed the terrorist got to sit down on your plane. You're going to die because the airline lobbyists got to sit down with your senator.
Usually the bodies get stacked in drawers in the morgue.
Here let me Google That For You: Stalking Victims
Get a cup of cocoa, a blankie and a comfortable chair, because you'll be reading a while.
Poe's Law
Stalking as a degree got defined by law at the cost of blood. We literally stacked up too many bodies of women until it could no longer be ignored. It wasn't a natural consequence.
Speaking of the law, here's what Warren and Brandeis thought of technological surveillance:
The Right to Privacy
Warren and Brandeis, Harvard Law Review, December 15, 1890
Recent inventions and business methods call attention to the next step which must be taken for the protection of the person, and for securing to the individual what Judge Cooley calls the right "to be let alone" [10] Instantaneous photographs and newspaper enterprise have invaded the sacred precincts of private and domestic life; and numerous mechanical devices threaten to make good the prediction that "what is whispered in the closet shall be proclaimed from the house-tops."
Warren and Brandeis were worried about technologial advances destroying privacy in 1890. Just how big of a heart attack do you think they'd have at the idea of the police warrantlessly tracking citizens 24/7?
And how far do you think our liberties have slipped?
I'm going to go ahead and guess that they know a little more about the Constitution than you do, and may be aware of subtleties of its interpretation that cloud the issue.
And yet, the wonderful thing is that BeanThere still has the right to call them on their nonsense. You just made the most literal "Appeal to Authority" argument I've ever heard. I'll go BeanThere one better. Not only do I believe their decisions of late have been grievously, horrifically wrong, I don't think they're the caliber of men fit to walk through the Court's doors and sit in the shadow of Thurgood Marshall, Earl Warren and Oliver Wendell Holmes.
Smoke this! It's the law!
Wow, sorry man, started taking myself just a little too seriously there for a second...
Yeah, I thought about that, but the people who sound off like this usually want to be the ones doing the comforting, see Larry Craig.
I don't want to know what you do with your consenting self in the privacy of your own home. Now, if you haven't given yourself consent, then yes, it becomes a police matter.
The cops can already get this information by dangerously and expensively tailing you or flying over your head, and they can do that without a warrant; why should obtaining the same information from a GPS be any different?
Because Liberty is a matter of degree, not just type. A woman runs into her ex-boyfriend at Starbucks Monday morning. If she doesn't see him again, that's chance. If she bumps into him again at lunch, that's odd. If she sees him at dinner, it's weird. If she sees him every time she sets foot out her door, that's stalking.
Police departments have finite resources. They can only surveil a handful of people full-time. That's police work. If they can automate that and keep track of thousands of people simultaneously while logging their every movement into a database, that's Orwellian.
The fact that they would do that while trespassing on my property is just creepy.
SuperDave80 could have made his argument with a little more rigor, but what's he reaching for is "Not even the King is above the Law."
The Government cannot expect us to follow the Law if it will not follow the Law itself. This was the whole point of the Magna Carta, one of the founding documents of modern law.
The 1215 Charter required King John of England to proclaim certain liberties, and accept that his will was not arbitrary, for example by explicitly accepting that no "freeman" (in the sense of non-serf) could be punished except through the law of the land, a right which is still in existence today.
If the Rule of Law does not apply to all, including and especially the Executive, then you have the walking definition of a corrupt state and an illegitimate government. When the government does not obey the law, you have a duty to break it and oppose the men in power. I'll let the Declaration of Independence speak for itself:
...whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends ... it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.
When the government does not follow the Law, then there is no Law to be followed.
You will, of course, still have moral limits on your behavior.
If it were up to this court the government would be able to quarter troops in our homes.
You should be HONORED to have one of our brave troops set foot in your home, you dope-smoking Liberal. If it wasn't for our troops, you wouldn't have a home, you Sharia-loving socialist! You should take a trip down to the local VA hospital to get a close look at the blood and limbs that have been lost to save your freedom. My wife and I moved into the garage so the fine young hero in our care could sleep in a decent bed after the rock mattresses he got in Afghanistan.
Sure, they were good enough to fight for you in Iraq, but now you think our troops should be homeless. You make me sick, you Jon Stewart acolyte.
[I defy you to work through Poe's Law on this one. :-) ]
First of all, for someone making TSA wages, $160 is a significant investment.
Second of all, what are you going to do if it shows you're just about ready to glow in the dark?
Quit? If that was an option, you'd have done it long ago.
Tell your boss? Tell him what, that the unauthorized, unapproved device that you just violated national security with has thrown a spurious reading?
Tell your coworkers? "Honey, Bill says we have to get evicted this month because his armpatch turned green." I think you'd find your coworkers would rather call you a liar and a troublemaker than volunteer to become homeless.
Alert the media? "The TSA responded to blog reports today that Bill the TSA Guy has been fired for mental health issues, theft and sexual harassment charges. Mr. Bill has been committed for a 72-hour hold on suicide watch... [cut to coworker video] Bill was always a liar and a troublemaker..."
Youtube? "Defense contractor Quantum Dynamics, the maker of the badge in the "Bill the TSA Guy" video, reported today that the badge reading was in error and the result of user error, most likely the result of having been placed in a microwave oven...[cut to badge in microwave] See how the badge looks just like the one in Bill's video... [cut to coworker] Bill was always a liar and a troublemaker hanging around the microwave making popcorn when he should have been working..."
I've seen people die of cancer, and I've always said I wouldn't wish it on my worst enemy.
Today I found out I meant it.
but wouldn't you think that someone that was the former head of a government security agency might know a bit about the needs of that agency and be able to start a company that can provide for those needs?
Yes, I know, it's common practice, but profiting from an industry that you have or had official power over is textbook corruption. Participating in a bidding process where you have special inside knowledge is corruption, and it doesn't get more special or inside than "I was head of the agency last week."
Chertoff belongs in jail.
The TSA had already been lobbying for rad badges, and been turned down because the badges would make people tend to believe the scanners weren't safe. :-)
I grew up on Navy bases during the Vietnam war. We expected 18-year-old kids to stand up to gunfire. And they did. But since we're talking civilian cops, let me tell you a civilian story.
When I was in college, I got ran through the training they hold for volunteer firefighters in my state. At the end of the week, they held a little dinner/get together. It was a small community, everyone knew everyone.
There was a table where the grizzled old men sat, and the guy who was showing me the ropes clued me in on the stories. That guy got his ear burned off saving a kid. That one traded that finger for some woman. The guy with burn scars over his entire left arm? That was a bad day, but they got everybody out.
They also had a couple of chairs out for their friends who couldn't make it on account of being dead.
No, I really don't think it's too much to ask of an officer of the law to speak in a professional tone when he's in uniform and talking to a group of law students. I expect one of the city's finest to express himself without using words like bitch, slut and whore.
I really don't think we're setting that bar too high.