The only president in the past 40 years to reduce the debt was Bill Clinton, and that was much more a product of economic boom times as it was of any political agenda on either side of the aisle.
Which is the side of Keynesian Economics you seldom hear either side talk about. It's expected that government "spend" its way out of recession. But you make sure to pay off this debt during times of prosperity.
Yeah, the only sensible way to run a Republic is to set a sustainable spending rate, borrow to keep it up when times are tough, and then pay it down when times are good.
The problem is that Republics are run by politicians, who have better things to spend money on when times are good. Conventional wisdom holds that the USA was running a luxurious surplus a decade ago. But did we pay down our debts? No, we cut taxes, almost doubled defense spending (not even counting two unbudgeted wars), gave Medicare its biggest expansion since it was created (without identifying any way to pay for it), etc. Now the same politicians who took us down that path are whining that we can't make ends meet.
Since 2008 we should have been borrowing from a position of no debt, rather than from a position of already having the public credit card maxed out.
FWIW, both the US military and the US intelligence community have, in official reports, identified climate change as one of the biggest threats to national security that the US will have to deal with this century.
What is going to be bad, IMO, is that the shift in temperature zones is gong to turn some of the agricultural "haves" into "have nots", and vice versa. Some people are going to fight that change - with guns.
On a side note, the latest Scientific American has an article about the discovery of large deposits of rare elements in Afghanistan. My first thought was, "Oh, boy! That's really going to help stop all the fighting."
"Normally, the country can count on conservatives to deal in facts."
I don't think he understands how the rest of us view (modern) conservatives.
If he's trying with this article to pitch reason and science to his fellow conservatives, by suggesting to them that it's consistent with their core values, best of luck to him. But if he really thinks that this is where his audience is really coming from, he's woefully out of touch. Today's conservatives' unwavering faith in The Market doesn't come from their observation of its empirical validity, but from a gut-feeling belief in the Unseen Hand of the market as the demiurge of God.
I don't know how many "conservatives" actually believe in the free market. I suspect for many it's just a convenient myth for justifying a policy of letting the rich do whatever they want.
Frankly, Bob Inglis sounds like a true fiscal conservative.
"True fiscal conservative" usually boils down to "don't tax the rich and don't spend on the poor". Look what happened when the party of "fiscal conservatives" controlled the whole US government for six years during the last decade.
Frankly, I suspect that the Republican party is on the verge of a huge collapse that will have them spending 20 years in the wilderness again, if they're lucky. They are deliberately or ignorantly leading their followers astray, and this will blow up in their faces unless they continue to lose to the Democrats.
Fortunately for the Republicans, no one is so adept at screwing the pooch as Democrats are. If the Democrats' politicians had values and leadership, they could have beheaded the Republican party since 2005.
If only more conservatives felt the same way. But American conservatives (and Republicans in particular) are about as far as it gets from "dealing in facts" these days and are more anti-science than the far left.
"Dealing in facts" means recognising evolution. That's unacceptable in the US Right. So something even mildly controversial, like climate change, has no hope.
This is where it gets funny. Republicans of the traditional stripe don't have any problem with evolution, but pretend it's in doubt for political expediency. But climate change denial is dear to their hearts, because they think it's going to cost rich people money to deal with it.
The Republican party put together a strategy that has served them superbly for 30-50 years, but now the chickens are coming home to roost.
According to former Republican in name only representative Bob Inglis
Text in italics added. Mr. Inglis refutes his own thesis by indulging in fantasy regarding the nature of "conservatism."
This gets back to the myth of US politics. The traditional modern Republican party isn't about conservative values; it's about ruling for the benefit of the richest fraction of a percent of the population. If you look at what Republicans actually *do* instead of listening to what they say, it becomes glaringly obvious that their political philosophy is that the proper role of government is to ensure that the rich get richer faster than they would without having a government around to help.
The problem for that political philosophy is that there aren't enough rich people to win enough elections to rule a republic. So they have to convince half the population to vote against their own best interests. That's where "conservative" comes in. Appeal to White bigots and sanitize it by calling it "the Southern Strategy". Throw an occasional bone to the religious right so they'll vote for your politicians. Pretend there's some scientific doubt about evolution. Stir up Anglo-Saxon bigots and call it "Immigration Reform" - historians will someday call it the Southwestern Strategy.
Mr. Inglis is just objecting to the current race to the bottom. When I wrote "traditional modern Republican party", that was to distinguish the old guard from the nutters they've been suckering into voting for them for at least 50 years, but who are now taking over the asylum. You reap what you sow, kind of thing. But lots of "traditional modern Republicans" don't like what they're reaping. A lot of those nutters don't think ruling for the rich is their top priority.
Interesting... When such actions were taken when President Bush was in office,/. was rife with "Bush is teh debbil!" type screaming. Now that it's President Obama calling the shots, the opposition is now genericized to "USA bad"...
I am a liberal. I suspect Obama is guilty of war crimes too. At the very minimum, he is guilty of giving shelter to war criminals.
I won't be voting for him next year, no matter what kind of dog the Republicans pick to run against him.
I suspect the stereotype is based on the familiar situation where a small but very vocal minority gets all the headlines, leaving the impression that it's "almost everyone".
Some pundits are starting to ask whether the civil disorder that has plagued the Middle East and several European countries recently is about to break out in the USA.
A lot of people are unhappy about being trampled down so billionaires can become trillionaires. And it doesn't help when the long-term unemployed hear bankers say they're hoping for more recession because they know how to make a buck off of it.
Sorry, can't remember where I learned that. I'm pretty sure it followed from the whole Antony / Cleopatra / Civil War thing. I think it was Augustus' rule. Not sure how long it endured.
Although the bible does not really give an extremely clear timeline of the last two, three years of Jesus' life, it can be inferred with some certainty that he did not actually roam about the countryside with a couple of thousand followers at any point
Wasn't he out in the country when he did the loaves/fish miracle? Fed 5,000 people who hadn't been home to eat, IIRC.
Read Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach, 3rd edition. It's supposedly the most-used AI textbook in the world.
It's weak on the biologically inspired methods (genetic algorithms, neural networks, fuzzy logic), but very solid in "Good Old Fashioned AI" (GOFAI) and some of the decision-making procedures from other fields such as economics.
If you don't have a background in CS, you'll need to work through a book on discrete math first.
However, given what we do know about Jesus, one wouldn't expect historians from his time to mention him.
In general your argument is correct. However, if some populist prophet really had been leading several thousand followers around the countryside in First Century Judea, the Romans would have come down on them like a ton of bricks, and we'd probably be hearing about how 5000 people were crucified for sedition in 30 AD.
The Romans had no sense of humor about sedition in the first place. And Judea was one of the last places they would have tolerated it, since it was between Egypt (breadbasket of Rome, where even Senators were not allowed to visit because of the risk that they would start a revolt and cut off the food supply) and Syria (the only place where armies of the rival superpower of the era could cross into Roman territory).
FWIW, Jesus is mentioned in the text of Josephus AWKI, but it is thought to be a "pious interpolation", because it's so out of character with Josephus' views on everything else.
The scrolls were first found in the 1940s, so it's 60+ years.
The primary cause of the delay (as I understand it) is that there is a universal presumption among scholars that whoever is working on it has the right of first publication, and they generally work on it 'till it's done.
However, these scrolls could be considered are world treasure, and the scholars who worked on them weren't the people who actually found them, so it doesn't seem to me to be the same circumstances as (say) waiting for whoever dug up some bones to announce a new hominid species.
And 60+ years seems excessive under any circumstances. Scholars have been born, educated, had their careers, and died while waiting for this stuff to come out.
FWIW...
Back maybe 20 years ago the Biblical Archeology Review (big critics of the delay) published the text of some of the material, which they obtained by reverse engineering a concordance that had been published by the team working on the scrolls.
There's an old photo (which I happened to see in a BAR article) of one of the priests who was working on the scrolls, sitting in front of a pile of small papyrus scraps, holding a lit cigarette in his hand. Makes you wonder how much of the material ended up in the ash bin before it got analyzed.
It's good if they're requiring data privacy plans, but they should also develop some minimal requirements for what those plans say. How many stories to we get every week about someone's EULA claiming they have the right to sell your GPS data, or a corporation taking over another's assets and claiming that it is not held to the privacy agreements that data was collected under?
In general, courts have consistently found that violations of TOS are not criminal... if for no other reason than that would allow corporations (or anybody else for that matter) to write their own law... which is completely ridiculous.
Ridiculous to sane people like you and me, but some people think it would be the natural order of things.
It's funny to read the Greek Sophists (23-24 centuries ago) argue that democratic laws were just a scam where the powerless ganged up to take advantage of the powerful.
Slashdot Mirror
Which is the side of Keynesian Economics you seldom hear either side talk about. It's expected that government "spend" its way out of recession. But you make sure to pay off this debt during times of prosperity.
Yeah, the only sensible way to run a Republic is to set a sustainable spending rate, borrow to keep it up when times are tough, and then pay it down when times are good.
The problem is that Republics are run by politicians, who have better things to spend money on when times are good. Conventional wisdom holds that the USA was running a luxurious surplus a decade ago. But did we pay down our debts? No, we cut taxes, almost doubled defense spending (not even counting two unbudgeted wars), gave Medicare its biggest expansion since it was created (without identifying any way to pay for it), etc. Now the same politicians who took us down that path are whining that we can't make ends meet.
Since 2008 we should have been borrowing from a position of no debt, rather than from a position of already having the public credit card maxed out.
FWIW, both the US military and the US intelligence community have, in official reports, identified climate change as one of the biggest threats to national security that the US will have to deal with this century.
What is going to be bad, IMO, is that the shift in temperature zones is gong to turn some of the agricultural "haves" into "have nots", and vice versa. Some people are going to fight that change - with guns.
On a side note, the latest Scientific American has an article about the discovery of large deposits of rare elements in Afghanistan. My first thought was, "Oh, boy! That's really going to help stop all the fighting."
For example global warming, the boosters claim the debate is over.
In science the debate is NEVER over.
The earth was flat, until we found out it was round.
The atom was the smallest indivisible object, until we broke it.
Please remind us which scientists told us the earth was flat.
"Normally, the country can count on conservatives to deal in facts."
I don't think he understands how the rest of us view (modern) conservatives.
If he's trying with this article to pitch reason and science to his fellow conservatives, by suggesting to them that it's consistent with their core values, best of luck to him. But if he really thinks that this is where his audience is really coming from, he's woefully out of touch. Today's conservatives' unwavering faith in The Market doesn't come from their observation of its empirical validity, but from a gut-feeling belief in the Unseen Hand of the market as the demiurge of God.
I don't know how many "conservatives" actually believe in the free market. I suspect for many it's just a convenient myth for justifying a policy of letting the rich do whatever they want.
Frankly, Bob Inglis sounds like a true fiscal conservative.
"True fiscal conservative" usually boils down to "don't tax the rich and don't spend on the poor". Look what happened when the party of "fiscal conservatives" controlled the whole US government for six years during the last decade.
Frankly, I suspect that the Republican party is on the verge of a huge collapse that will have them spending 20 years in the wilderness again, if they're lucky. They are deliberately or ignorantly leading their followers astray, and this will blow up in their faces unless they continue to lose to the Democrats.
Fortunately for the Republicans, no one is so adept at screwing the pooch as Democrats are. If the Democrats' politicians had values and leadership, they could have beheaded the Republican party since 2005.
If only more conservatives felt the same way. But American conservatives (and Republicans in particular) are about as far as it gets from "dealing in facts" these days and are more anti-science than the far left.
"Dealing in facts" means recognising evolution. That's unacceptable in the US Right. So something even mildly controversial, like climate change, has no hope.
This is where it gets funny. Republicans of the traditional stripe don't have any problem with evolution, but pretend it's in doubt for political expediency. But climate change denial is dear to their hearts, because they think it's going to cost rich people money to deal with it.
The Republican party put together a strategy that has served them superbly for 30-50 years, but now the chickens are coming home to roost.
According to former Republican in name only representative Bob Inglis
Text in italics added. Mr. Inglis refutes his own thesis by indulging in fantasy regarding the nature of "conservatism."
This gets back to the myth of US politics. The traditional modern Republican party isn't about conservative values; it's about ruling for the benefit of the richest fraction of a percent of the population. If you look at what Republicans actually *do* instead of listening to what they say, it becomes glaringly obvious that their political philosophy is that the proper role of government is to ensure that the rich get richer faster than they would without having a government around to help.
The problem for that political philosophy is that there aren't enough rich people to win enough elections to rule a republic. So they have to convince half the population to vote against their own best interests. That's where "conservative" comes in. Appeal to White bigots and sanitize it by calling it "the Southern Strategy". Throw an occasional bone to the religious right so they'll vote for your politicians. Pretend there's some scientific doubt about evolution. Stir up Anglo-Saxon bigots and call it "Immigration Reform" - historians will someday call it the Southwestern Strategy.
Mr. Inglis is just objecting to the current race to the bottom. When I wrote "traditional modern Republican party", that was to distinguish the old guard from the nutters they've been suckering into voting for them for at least 50 years, but who are now taking over the asylum. You reap what you sow, kind of thing. But lots of "traditional modern Republicans" don't like what they're reaping. A lot of those nutters don't think ruling for the rich is their top priority.
"Most preschoolers get scolded for writing on walls, but kids living 13,000 years ago were encouraged to scribble, at least in caves."
Uhm... How do they know that those children didn't get scolded for it too?
Interesting... When such actions were taken when President Bush was in office, /. was rife with "Bush is teh debbil!" type screaming. Now that it's President Obama calling the shots, the opposition is now genericized to "USA bad"...
I am a liberal. I suspect Obama is guilty of war crimes too. At the very minimum, he is guilty of giving shelter to war criminals.
I won't be voting for him next year, no matter what kind of dog the Republicans pick to run against him.
I think if I were Kapersky Labs, I wouldn't be advertising the fact that I was in on this kind of thing.
I suspect the stereotype is based on the familiar situation where a small but very vocal minority gets all the headlines, leaving the impression that it's "almost everyone".
Some pundits are starting to ask whether the civil disorder that has plagued the Middle East and several European countries recently is about to break out in the USA.
A lot of people are unhappy about being trampled down so billionaires can become trillionaires. And it doesn't help when the long-term unemployed hear bankers say they're hoping for more recession because they know how to make a buck off of it.
A common meme on the liberal blogs is that the police are protecting the very people who are trying to screw them.
Supposedly there is ongoing legal action on account of the the same cop, who is accused of abusive behavior during a 2004 protest:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/sep/27/occupy-wall-street-anthony-bologna?newsfeed=true
Sorry, can't remember where I learned that. I'm pretty sure it followed from the whole Antony / Cleopatra / Civil War thing. I think it was Augustus' rule. Not sure how long it endured.
Although the bible does not really give an extremely clear timeline of the last two, three years of Jesus' life, it can be inferred with some certainty that he did not actually roam about the countryside with a couple of thousand followers at any point
Wasn't he out in the country when he did the loaves/fish miracle? Fed 5,000 people who hadn't been home to eat, IIRC.
don't kill me with -1 troll, it's a joke.
Slashdot should have a "just kidding" button, that will change your -5, troll to +5, funny.
Read Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach, 3rd edition. It's supposedly the most-used AI textbook in the world.
It's weak on the biologically inspired methods (genetic algorithms, neural networks, fuzzy logic), but very solid in "Good Old Fashioned AI" (GOFAI) and some of the decision-making procedures from other fields such as economics.
If you don't have a background in CS, you'll need to work through a book on discrete math first.
to ancient aliens intent on probing and implanting their mind control chips
Funny place to put a mind control chip...
However, given what we do know about Jesus, one wouldn't expect historians from his time to mention him.
In general your argument is correct. However, if some populist prophet really had been leading several thousand followers around the countryside in First Century Judea, the Romans would have come down on them like a ton of bricks, and we'd probably be hearing about how 5000 people were crucified for sedition in 30 AD.
The Romans had no sense of humor about sedition in the first place. And Judea was one of the last places they would have tolerated it, since it was between Egypt (breadbasket of Rome, where even Senators were not allowed to visit because of the risk that they would start a revolt and cut off the food supply) and Syria (the only place where armies of the rival superpower of the era could cross into Roman territory).
FWIW, Jesus is mentioned in the text of Josephus AWKI, but it is thought to be a "pious interpolation", because it's so out of character with Josephus' views on everything else.
The scrolls were first found in the 1940s, so it's 60+ years.
The primary cause of the delay (as I understand it) is that there is a universal presumption among scholars that whoever is working on it has the right of first publication, and they generally work on it 'till it's done.
However, these scrolls could be considered are world treasure, and the scholars who worked on them weren't the people who actually found them, so it doesn't seem to me to be the same circumstances as (say) waiting for whoever dug up some bones to announce a new hominid species.
And 60+ years seems excessive under any circumstances. Scholars have been born, educated, had their careers, and died while waiting for this stuff to come out.
FWIW...
Back maybe 20 years ago the Biblical Archeology Review (big critics of the delay) published the text of some of the material, which they obtained by reverse engineering a concordance that had been published by the team working on the scrolls.
There's an old photo (which I happened to see in a BAR article) of one of the priests who was working on the scrolls, sitting in front of a pile of small papyrus scraps, holding a lit cigarette in his hand. Makes you wonder how much of the material ended up in the ash bin before it got analyzed.
Due to a hilarious "accent" difference, my kindergarten class learned how to say "wolf" properly: "woof".
And you're still trying to understand the moral of the story of "The Little Boy Who Cried Woof"...
And the world's first democracy was an Evil Empire.
Not sure what all that has to do with what I posted, though.
It's good if they're requiring data privacy plans, but they should also develop some minimal requirements for what those plans say. How many stories to we get every week about someone's EULA claiming they have the right to sell your GPS data, or a corporation taking over another's assets and claiming that it is not held to the privacy agreements that data was collected under?
In general, courts have consistently found that violations of TOS are not criminal... if for no other reason than that would allow corporations (or anybody else for that matter) to write their own law... which is completely ridiculous.
Ridiculous to sane people like you and me, but some people think it would be the natural order of things.
It's funny to read the Greek Sophists (23-24 centuries ago) argue that democratic laws were just a scam where the powerless ganged up to take advantage of the powerful.