They are being asked to do research like this: "Conduct a study explaining why Newton's apple falls from the tree, but without using Gravity as part of the explanation". And there is 100 years of Gravity research already, and 40 years specifically about the apple and the Gravity that conclusively links the two together.
I didn't see anything in that link that scientifically proved that American's are more easily persuaded.
Perhaps the average American is not more easily persuaded than the average person from another country. You think it might have to do with the fact that America is the political lobbying target of every major corporation in the world?
I guarantee that if Canada or some other country were subjected to the amount of money in politics and the amount of "think tanks", political media conglomerates, lobbyists, etc.. that the US is subjected to, the Canadians would appear to be voting against their own self interests just like Americans often do.
I'm curious if those stricter election laws have led to better politicians being elected? Like average people, not super wealthy out of touch politicians like in the US.
Or simply agree that the bottom of society needs to be a little bit higher and raise the minimum wage, and tie its growth to inflation (or tie it to something that grows over time, instead of letting the whims of the political climate dictate if someone has enough money to afford food).
Conservatives hate food stamps and housing assistance (well, the current bunch do) and also hate the idea of raising the minimum wage. The two notions are at odds with each other.
But if your corporation has multiple divisions/products, you can let one take massive losses while the others support it, until your competition is gone.
Second, assuming the monopolist does manage to drive out all competition, and begins charging obscene prices, it becomes not only possible but very profitable for competitors to enter
Unless there are infrastructure and other barriers to entry that would need to be overcome in order to enter/re-enter the market. At the very least, those barriers would delay re-entry, all the while the monopoly is raking in profits. And the second you start to gain a bit of market share, the monopoly just drops prices again, or buys you out.
Lines of code involved is a meaningless figure if tests have revealed specific areas that are causing bottlenecks.
And many of the bottlenecks may have nothing to do with the healthcare.gov site code at all. It may be back-end database issues, or even hardware related, or not the new code at all... it could be slow to answer third party servers that healthcare.gov had to interface with.
If all the web, app, db, and integration code is properly broken out in different servers or virtual machines, it is probably somewhat easy to see where the bottlenecks are, and to focus in very specific areas for further testing.
I thought studies had shown that torture does not produce accurate intel? At least, not any more quickly or efficiently than traditional interrogation techniques.
Courts have determined that what the government is doing (what was whistled about) is constitutional.
You can disagree with the court decisions, but by definition of law, the current government actions (wiretaps, drone strikes, mass surveillance, etc..) are legal. Snowden and others like him, unfortunately, are not real whistleblowers because of these new legal definitions.
Therefore the government wouldn't be doing its job unless it sought to prosecute Snowden. Secret, legal, government programs were leaked.
We shouldn't be mad at Obama's administration for cracking down on these "Whistleblowers", instead we should be mad that under Obama's administration, and the prior one, that laws were put in place to make all this stuff legal to begin with.
Start demanding oversight of the 'secret' courts that ruled on things like mass surveillance. Protest to have a defense attorney for the people argue against the government. Demand that judges on the secret court be appointed by at least elected officials (currently all judges are put on the secret court by the chief justice).
There are a ton of things to be mad about, but prosecuting people who broke the law isn't one of them.
As has been pointed out, it is less expensive to keep someone in prison their entire life than it is to keep them on death row for ~10 years with the numerous appeals involved.
I've always wondered why my city, Portland, doesn't have city provided broadband yet. We have Intel here, and a bunch of other tech companies. Yet I'm still limited to Comcast or Quest, and both have crappy pricing.
Well, the honda fuel cell car is in production and being leased in limited amounts to residents of southern California. There are hydrogen refueling stations there. So far no one has exploded hehe.
Since Oregon's largest city, Portland, is so far north and close to Washington State, there is a huge amount of traffic between Vancouver Washington and Portland Oregon.
A lot of people live in Washington but work and drive in Portland Oregon. Not knowing where the miles were driven is going to make the tax ineffective at capturing actual use.
Where did you read that the real program will use odometer checks? If I live in Oregon but do most of my driving in Washington, how is a odometer check going to determine that? It would be unfair to get gas taxed in Washington then taxed again for the same miles in Oregon.
most americans seem to be patriotic beyond reason. this might be caused by being taught from early on that they are morally, military and in any other way superior to any other country. later they keep those views and will defend _anything_ being done. it might be by weird reasoning, "they do it too" or other methods.
it might help in some cases, but looks like long term it leads to an inability to criticise real problems and a decline.
I don't understand why anyone assumes that US citizens are taught different things or that US citizens are less intelligent that citizens of other countries.
It seems pretty obvious to me that the answer to why our politics seem odd, why we vote for things not in our best interest, is 100% because of the amount of money and corporations involved in our democracy. Every major economic powerhouse on the planet wants to influence US politics. That means our citizens are subjected to a massive amount of disinformation, entire news networks set up to push political party view points, huge amounts of lobbyists from huge amounts of corporations, etc...
And that isn't even getting into the elections and campaign finance.
Just look at this list of companies: http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/fortune500/2012/full_list/
Now imagine every single one of them buying up media time (and maybe buying entire media networks!), donating to local and national elections, paying for lobbyists to bribe/influence your politicians, etc.. Unless your country already had in-place very strong election laws and lobbying laws, you'd start voting exactly like US citizens do, with a few cultural differences here and there.
https://www.privateinternetaccess.com/pages/contact-us (Look under where you are located) https://www.privateinternetaccess.com/blog/2013/06/prism/
We are located in the US. Being in the US is optimal for VPN Privacy services since the US is one of the few countries that does not have a mandatory data retention policy. Countries in the EU are forced to log, even though some claim they do not.
they saw the writing on the wall, and saw that the American public was highly supportive of the Tea Party.
You need to narrow that statement. It would be accurate to say that in certain highly gerrrymandered tea party districts, support was high for the tea party and 'doing something' (shutdown).
But nationally, support for the Tea Party is at all time lows. This was both before and after the shutdown.
The summary mentioned drugs costing more. Does the NHS not bargain, as a whole, for lower cost drugs? That was one of the things that the US Obamacare (ACA) could have done, but didn't due to political reasons.
I really like the idea of amending the constitution to make elections more fair, especially by removing the means by which money is dumped all over without oversight.
However, it kinda makes me nervous that Texas is so enthusiastic. Once the constitutional convention is called, what other amendments is Texas going to be proposing? Stuff like amendments to ban gay marriage?
I guess I'd need to see a list of the 34 states before I felt better about a convention.
I don't think that 19% DOD figure takes into account other military related spending, like the VA health system. If you add up all the costs of defense, I think it gets pretty close to 900 billion. I don't have an average since 9/11 handy, but you can see in 2013 that military related spending was 830 billion http://www.usgovernmentspending.com/us_defense_spending_30.html
Still you are right that social safety net spending of one kind or another is a large percent of the budget.
Slashdot Mirror
They are being asked to do research like this: "Conduct a study explaining why Newton's apple falls from the tree, but without using Gravity as part of the explanation". And there is 100 years of Gravity research already, and 40 years specifically about the apple and the Gravity that conclusively links the two together.
Or we could eliminate all corporate and private funding of 'politicians'.
I didn't see anything in that link that scientifically proved that American's are more easily persuaded.
Perhaps the average American is not more easily persuaded than the average person from another country. You think it might have to do with the fact that America is the political lobbying target of every major corporation in the world?
I guarantee that if Canada or some other country were subjected to the amount of money in politics and the amount of "think tanks", political media conglomerates, lobbyists, etc.. that the US is subjected to, the Canadians would appear to be voting against their own self interests just like Americans often do.
I'm curious if those stricter election laws have led to better politicians being elected? Like average people, not super wealthy out of touch politicians like in the US.
Or simply agree that the bottom of society needs to be a little bit higher and raise the minimum wage, and tie its growth to inflation (or tie it to something that grows over time, instead of letting the whims of the political climate dictate if someone has enough money to afford food).
Conservatives hate food stamps and housing assistance (well, the current bunch do) and also hate the idea of raising the minimum wage. The two notions are at odds with each other.
First, predatory pricing is ruinously expensive.
But if your corporation has multiple divisions/products, you can let one take massive losses while the others support it, until your competition is gone.
Second, assuming the monopolist does manage to drive out all competition, and begins charging obscene prices, it becomes not only possible but very profitable for competitors to enter
Unless there are infrastructure and other barriers to entry that would need to be overcome in order to enter/re-enter the market. At the very least, those barriers would delay re-entry, all the while the monopoly is raking in profits. And the second you start to gain a bit of market share, the monopoly just drops prices again, or buys you out.
Lines of code involved is a meaningless figure if tests have revealed specific areas that are causing bottlenecks.
And many of the bottlenecks may have nothing to do with the healthcare.gov site code at all. It may be back-end database issues, or even hardware related, or not the new code at all... it could be slow to answer third party servers that healthcare.gov had to interface with.
If all the web, app, db, and integration code is properly broken out in different servers or virtual machines, it is probably somewhat easy to see where the bottlenecks are, and to focus in very specific areas for further testing.
I thought studies had shown that torture does not produce accurate intel? At least, not any more quickly or efficiently than traditional interrogation techniques.
http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/newsdesk/2013/10/a-cia-lawyer-answers-to-the-senate.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enhanced_interrogation_techniques#Effectiveness_and_reliability
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Effectiveness_of_torture_for_interrogation
Courts have determined that what the government is doing (what was whistled about) is constitutional.
You can disagree with the court decisions, but by definition of law, the current government actions (wiretaps, drone strikes, mass surveillance, etc..) are legal. Snowden and others like him, unfortunately, are not real whistleblowers because of these new legal definitions.
Therefore the government wouldn't be doing its job unless it sought to prosecute Snowden. Secret, legal, government programs were leaked.
We shouldn't be mad at Obama's administration for cracking down on these "Whistleblowers", instead we should be mad that under Obama's administration, and the prior one, that laws were put in place to make all this stuff legal to begin with.
Start demanding oversight of the 'secret' courts that ruled on things like mass surveillance. Protest to have a defense attorney for the people argue against the government. Demand that judges on the secret court be appointed by at least elected officials (currently all judges are put on the secret court by the chief justice).
There are a ton of things to be mad about, but prosecuting people who broke the law isn't one of them.
As has been pointed out, it is less expensive to keep someone in prison their entire life than it is to keep them on death row for ~10 years with the numerous appeals involved.
What town is this? I've never seen a morning commuter cyclist disobey a traffic law in my city.
I've always wondered why my city, Portland, doesn't have city provided broadband yet. We have Intel here, and a bunch of other tech companies. Yet I'm still limited to Comcast or Quest, and both have crappy pricing.
Well, the honda fuel cell car is in production and being leased in limited amounts to residents of southern California. There are hydrogen refueling stations there. So far no one has exploded hehe.
Since Oregon's largest city, Portland, is so far north and close to Washington State, there is a huge amount of traffic between Vancouver Washington and Portland Oregon.
A lot of people live in Washington but work and drive in Portland Oregon. Not knowing where the miles were driven is going to make the tax ineffective at capturing actual use.
Where did you read that the real program will use odometer checks? If I live in Oregon but do most of my driving in Washington, how is a odometer check going to determine that? It would be unfair to get gas taxed in Washington then taxed again for the same miles in Oregon.
most americans seem to be patriotic beyond reason. this might be caused by being taught from early on that they are morally, military and in any other way superior to any other country. later they keep those views and will defend _anything_ being done. it might be by weird reasoning, "they do it too" or other methods.
it might help in some cases, but looks like long term it leads to an inability to criticise real problems and a decline.
I don't understand why anyone assumes that US citizens are taught different things or that US citizens are less intelligent that citizens of other countries.
It seems pretty obvious to me that the answer to why our politics seem odd, why we vote for things not in our best interest, is 100% because of the amount of money and corporations involved in our democracy. Every major economic powerhouse on the planet wants to influence US politics. That means our citizens are subjected to a massive amount of disinformation, entire news networks set up to push political party view points, huge amounts of lobbyists from huge amounts of corporations, etc...
And that isn't even getting into the elections and campaign finance.
Just look at this list of companies: http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/fortune500/2012/full_list/
Now imagine every single one of them buying up media time (and maybe buying entire media networks!), donating to local and national elections, paying for lobbyists to bribe/influence your politicians, etc.. Unless your country already had in-place very strong election laws and lobbying laws, you'd start voting exactly like US citizens do, with a few cultural differences here and there.
https://www.privateinternetaccess.com/pages/contact-us (Look under where you are located)
https://www.privateinternetaccess.com/blog/2013/06/prism/
We are located in the US. Being in the US is optimal for VPN Privacy services since the US is one of the few countries that does not have a mandatory data retention policy. Countries in the EU are forced to log, even though some claim they do not.
True?
And some bacteria take nitrogen from the air and give it to the plant. https://www.google.com/search?q=nitrogen+fixing+endophytes+soil+carbon
they saw the writing on the wall, and saw that the American public was highly supportive of the Tea Party.
You need to narrow that statement. It would be accurate to say that in certain highly gerrrymandered tea party districts, support was high for the tea party and 'doing something' (shutdown).
But nationally, support for the Tea Party is at all time lows. This was both before and after the shutdown.
I knew there had to be more to the story.
The summary mentioned drugs costing more. Does the NHS not bargain, as a whole, for lower cost drugs? That was one of the things that the US Obamacare (ACA) could have done, but didn't due to political reasons.
Interesting. Thanks.
True, but Obamacare does nothing to reduce the cost of health care.
That remains to be seen. But it will reduce the cost of health insurance
I really like the idea of amending the constitution to make elections more fair, especially by removing the means by which money is dumped all over without oversight.
However, it kinda makes me nervous that Texas is so enthusiastic. Once the constitutional convention is called, what other amendments is Texas going to be proposing? Stuff like amendments to ban gay marriage?
I guess I'd need to see a list of the 34 states before I felt better about a convention.
I don't think that 19% DOD figure takes into account other military related spending, like the VA health system. If you add up all the costs of defense, I think it gets pretty close to 900 billion. I don't have an average since 9/11 handy, but you can see in 2013 that military related spending was 830 billion http://www.usgovernmentspending.com/us_defense_spending_30.html
Still you are right that social safety net spending of one kind or another is a large percent of the budget.
You're right, 14% is not much.