Government grants a corporation life with a charter, it can just as easily revoke the charter. Charters used to have limited durations, were reviewed, and in the past some were actually revoked.
If you were in front of the US Supreme Court and they asked you how this is fundamentally different than tracking your car through traditional police surveillance, how would you answer?
A couple points I could make:
....
GPS tracking is, in the end, a technological device, which can (and will) be defeated, spoofed, or just plain destroyed - it can't and shouldn't be considered as reliable a substitute for eyeball tracking. It's a safe bet that once it's widely known that these devices exist (and how to identify them) people will crack the case and either start sending false data back (or just reattach it to a Greyhound and leave it at that).
There's the other worse condition also: police could modify the gps results they receive to "prove" to a judge they need a home warrant. Or as the final piece of circumstantial evidence that a prosecutor is asking for to go ahead with a prosecution.
It wasn't long ago that the news was a lot better than it is today. Television news used to be a money loser for tv channels. However, it was something they did to fulfill the "for the public good" part of the contract that gave them public airwaves.
Dan Rather once said that he saw the news taking a downturn after 60 minutes showed TV executives that news could make money. It was like every TV executive in the nation sat up and thought "Hey... we can still pretend to be good for the public and make more money at the same time!".
There's a lot more to it than that of course (concentration of media ownership into the hands of a few mega corporations, regulation changes, etc..), but the news used to be a lot better than it is today.
Why do you find it ignorant that he's wishing for some way for citizens to see a more clear, more distilled, less biased view of whats going on in politics?
At least that's what I got out of his article. I was picturing some app that worked like Reddit. Ideas, laws, political actions, being up voted and down voted hourly. Some way to see what others are thinking, someway to make sure that well informed people are doing the voting, some way to stick to the facts and minimize opinion, etc..
Hard, nay nearly impossible to do? Yeah. But as far as dreams go,wouldn't it be wonderful if debates about things like the health care reform bill had some sort of unbiased information pool that people could have looked at in an easy and engaging matter?
I guess in the end, what I heard him saying was "I'm tired of the huge amounts of misinformation and I'm kinda thinking out loud about how it could be better".
I have a feeling that more people would care if they could get a more distilled, hopefully less biased, view of what's going on in Government (and right on your iPad:)). You know, what the news media should be doing if they weren't entirely profit motivated now.
Most older relatives I talk to about issues, like net neutrality, or health care reform, find it very complex. Just try to google for good information, unbiased, about the health care reform bill. It is nearly impossible with the flood of partisan blogs out there.
We could probably kill several birds with one stone if we strengthened and extended libel and slander laws to political speech.
You want to buy and make a commercial to say something about a policy or candidate? You better make sure it is factually accurate and not misleading or do not pass go, do not collect 200 dollars, go directly to jail.
Bernie Sanders has a standing "interview" on the Thom Hartman radio show every Friday morning. When I happen to listen in, I've always been impressed with his ideas.
I'd like to ask him if he sees any hope for, and a specific way to obtain, meaningful campaign finance regulation. (Making it easier for third parties to run in primaries and generals, removing or scaling back the power that money has in elections, etc... ).
By almost all, you mean 60%. But yeah, it was way more than I expected it to be. And 50% of garlic.
Having grown up in an agricultural based town, it is baffling to me why those numbers are so high.
And the cynic in me is guessing that any of the cost savings that stores make by purchasing from China is not passed down to the consumer. Just more profit.
I know it's more expensive, but I hope more and more folks support local business and local agriculture by shopping at responsible mission driven stores and co-ops. Like here in Portland, http://www.newseasonsmarket.com/talk-with-us/our-story
Beyond the economic argument, do we really want to go back to the days before the EPA? Nixon's first EPA administrator, William Ruckelshaus, describes that time in the Wall Street Journal:
"We humans with our big cars and our big factories and our big cities were discharging terrible stuff into the air and water, and it had to be stopped or we would soon make our nest uninhabitable. The public was growing increasingly outraged. Every night on colour television, we saw yellow sludge flowing into blue rivers; every day, as we drove to work, we saw black smudges against the barely visible blue sky. We knew that our indiscriminate use of pesticides and toxic substances was threatening wildlife and public health.
"But we didn't do much about it. Until 1970, most regulation of industry was done by the states, which competed so strongly for plants and jobs that regulating companies to protect public health was beyond them.
There is no way to vote for change when the primaries are filled with candidate clones of each other, differing only slightly on policy issues.
There is a lot of anger in the country, yet notice how few independents or 3rd party candidates are able to get into primary elections for things like the Senate or Congress.
I keep seeing slashdot posts saying that increased availability of loans is to (mainly) blame for rising tuition costs. Where's the proof though? Is this causation or correlation?
This paper lists quite a few factors, none of which are the availability of loans (well, it might have been mentioned, but not as a main point. Been a while since I read it.).
I forget his name, but a guest on the Rachael Maddow show made a pretty good case for a way out of this situation. It is generally easier to effect change at the State level. If enough States had elected officials critical of the CU SCOTUS ruling, they could call for a constitutional convention and amend the constitution to either declare that corporations are not people, or that money is not free speech, or various other combinations that would revoke corporate influence in politics.
I think this speaks more to how pathetic the leadership of a lot of US companies have become more than it does on Jobs
They are leading quite well right now. As an average, corporate profits are at record highs. Despite having really no new innovations or services.
Over the last 30 years, various regulation changes and some de-regulation occurred that allowed corporations to both become more entangled in politics (which meant legislation became more and more in favor of profit for those corporations), as well as shelter more and more of their money (often tax free). Corporate CEO's began to make larger and larger salaries, in place of stocks and options, which changed the CEO's strategy from long term growth of his stocks into short term performance.
Our historically low taxes and large number of loopholes alone is a major factor. Take the lowering of the capital gains tax from 30% to 15%. Now it makes more sense to invest your money in things that will be taxed at 15% rather than at 30%. The low taxes and loopholes in general also mean that now is the time to store that profit. When taxes are higher, large businesses tend to invest profit back into the business, because that is a tax deductable.
The utopia comes when the automation is self-sustaining. Right now all those automated processes cost money to run. The day that automation is self-sustaining, can build its own clean energy sources, nano-forges can create anything from food to cars and plans with any atom source, etc.. That day means that money is obsolete because nothing is scarce anymore.
As long as there is artificial and natural scarcity of goods, there will be inequality.
The problem with this absurd argument is that people want stuff, not jobs. The only reason you work a job is so you can buy the things you want/need. And if you don't have to work as much to get them, that's hardly a problem.
The problem is that we're not willing to accept an economic system that's more in tune with the realities of modern life. If there's less work to do, we need to improve the quality of life per unit of work ratio to keep people from falling into poverty simply because there's no work for them to do.
The future I hope for is one in which all work is automated, nano-bot forges can nearly instantly build anything, food/drinks are star-trek-style created from any source of atoms, and the majority of people don't work, but they still "do things". In this scenario I see people pursuing only things that interest them. Some programmers may still program, some mathematicians may still do mathematics, and likely most people will just live: reading books, raising kids, gardening, etc..
The only major problem I see in this future is the transition period. What happens when only some nations have this ability? Likely major wars.
I don't think it was air burst. It had a parachute system to lay down gently on the ground and then detonate. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B53_nuclear_bomb#Specifications
It was also shown touching down on the rachael maddow show.
The more the loans are big and easy to get, the more the education costs raise. Reversed causality.
Where is the evidence that it is causing the cost of education to rise? Is it merely correlation? When the State and Federal government cut back on funding for higher education in my State, the colleges responded by raising tuition and other fees.
In general, community colleges and state universities are not profit driven. They typically operate at near non-profit levels with the goal of providing education for as many students as possible. In fact, it is nearly always written into policy.
There are a myriad of factors involved in the rise in the cost of higher education. Here's a glimpse of some of those factors: http://net.educause.edu/ir/library/pdf/ffp0005s.pdf
I don't see very many (like nearly zero) primary elections where any candidate is promoting serious change, let alone main elections. We need major campaign finance reform, but the body that has to do the reforming is the one that will resist it the most...
This doesn't seem to be a socialism vs not socialism issue though.
Some things, like the EPA, still make sense as a national organization to me. We can't have State A pumping pollution into a river that runs into State B. That isn't something I can imagine being solved by pollution only being controlled at a state or local level.
State and federal funding of my state's community colleges has been in a steady decline for years now. The result: tuition and other costs has risen.
There is a certain minimum operating cost for state and community colleges and they often operate barely above that line. You could cut out departments and offer less to the community, but if demand comes back for a certain department, it takes a long time to get it going again.
If the Government made State community colleges and universities free to attend, it would hold the price down on private universities. But we don't seem to value education as much as other Countries.
Slashdot Mirror
This was modded funny, but sometimes I have this feeling that there are some people in power that might actually think this way.
If corporations are people how can one impose death penalty and incarceration to them?
http://multinationalmonitor.org/mm2002/02oct-nov/oct-nov02corp1.html
http://reclaimdemocracy.org/corporate_accountability/history_corporations_us.html
Government grants a corporation life with a charter, it can just as easily revoke the charter. Charters used to have limited durations, were reviewed, and in the past some were actually revoked.
If you were in front of the US Supreme Court and they asked you how this is fundamentally different than tracking your car through traditional police surveillance, how would you answer?
A couple points I could make:
There's the other worse condition also: police could modify the gps results they receive to "prove" to a judge they need a home warrant. Or as the final piece of circumstantial evidence that a prosecutor is asking for to go ahead with a prosecution.
It wasn't long ago that the news was a lot better than it is today. Television news used to be a money loser for tv channels. However, it was something they did to fulfill the "for the public good" part of the contract that gave them public airwaves.
Dan Rather once said that he saw the news taking a downturn after 60 minutes showed TV executives that news could make money. It was like every TV executive in the nation sat up and thought "Hey... we can still pretend to be good for the public and make more money at the same time!".
There's a lot more to it than that of course (concentration of media ownership into the hands of a few mega corporations, regulation changes, etc..), but the news used to be a lot better than it is today.
Why do you find it ignorant that he's wishing for some way for citizens to see a more clear, more distilled, less biased view of whats going on in politics?
At least that's what I got out of his article. I was picturing some app that worked like Reddit. Ideas, laws, political actions, being up voted and down voted hourly. Some way to see what others are thinking, someway to make sure that well informed people are doing the voting, some way to stick to the facts and minimize opinion, etc..
Hard, nay nearly impossible to do? Yeah. But as far as dreams go,wouldn't it be wonderful if debates about things like the health care reform bill had some sort of unbiased information pool that people could have looked at in an easy and engaging matter?
I guess in the end, what I heard him saying was "I'm tired of the huge amounts of misinformation and I'm kinda thinking out loud about how it could be better".
I have a feeling that more people would care if they could get a more distilled, hopefully less biased, view of what's going on in Government (and right on your iPad:)). You know, what the news media should be doing if they weren't entirely profit motivated now.
Most older relatives I talk to about issues, like net neutrality, or health care reform, find it very complex. Just try to google for good information, unbiased, about the health care reform bill. It is nearly impossible with the flood of partisan blogs out there.
I'd be more in favor of that if the number from each state were based upon that State's population.
The Senate having equal members for each State already weights low population conservative States plenty.
We could probably kill several birds with one stone if we strengthened and extended libel and slander laws to political speech.
You want to buy and make a commercial to say something about a policy or candidate? You better make sure it is factually accurate and not misleading or do not pass go, do not collect 200 dollars, go directly to jail.
Bernie Sanders has a standing "interview" on the Thom Hartman radio show every Friday morning. When I happen to listen in, I've always been impressed with his ideas.
I'd like to ask him if he sees any hope for, and a specific way to obtain, meaningful campaign finance regulation. (Making it easier for third parties to run in primaries and generals, removing or scaling back the power that money has in elections, etc... ).
If you like Franken, listen to the Thomm Hartman radio show on Friday mornings. Bernie Sanders is on every Friday at 9am (pst) for one hour.
I think it should be possible to remain technologically advanced without spending as much as the US does.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_military_expenditures
You have to combine the next 20 countries' military spending before it even approaches the US spending levels.
By almost all, you mean 60%. But yeah, it was way more than I expected it to be. And 50% of garlic.
Having grown up in an agricultural based town, it is baffling to me why those numbers are so high.
And the cynic in me is guessing that any of the cost savings that stores make by purchasing from China is not passed down to the consumer. Just more profit.
I know it's more expensive, but I hope more and more folks support local business and local agriculture by shopping at responsible mission driven stores and co-ops. Like here in Portland, http://www.newseasonsmarket.com/talk-with-us/our-story
How times change...
The EPA was formed under a republican president.
From Why the GOP is going after the EPA
Beyond the economic argument, do we really want to go back to the days before the EPA? Nixon's first EPA administrator, William Ruckelshaus, describes that time in the Wall Street Journal:
"We humans with our big cars and our big factories and our big cities were discharging terrible stuff into the air and water, and it had to be stopped or we would soon make our nest uninhabitable. The public was growing increasingly outraged. Every night on colour television, we saw yellow sludge flowing into blue rivers; every day, as we drove to work, we saw black smudges against the barely visible blue sky. We knew that our indiscriminate use of pesticides and toxic substances was threatening wildlife and public health.
"But we didn't do much about it. Until 1970, most regulation of industry was done by the states, which competed so strongly for plants and jobs that regulating companies to protect public health was beyond them.
"Environmentally, it was a race to the bottom."
You do know that climate models take into account sun spots, cycles, and other causes of warming right?
There is no way to vote for change when the primaries are filled with candidate clones of each other, differing only slightly on policy issues.
There is a lot of anger in the country, yet notice how few independents or 3rd party candidates are able to get into primary elections for things like the Senate or Congress.
I keep seeing slashdot posts saying that increased availability of loans is to (mainly) blame for rising tuition costs. Where's the proof though? Is this causation or correlation?
This paper lists quite a few factors, none of which are the availability of loans (well, it might have been mentioned, but not as a main point. Been a while since I read it.).
http://net.educause.edu/ir/library/pdf/ffp0005s.pdf
I forget his name, but a guest on the Rachael Maddow show made a pretty good case for a way out of this situation. It is generally easier to effect change at the State level. If enough States had elected officials critical of the CU SCOTUS ruling, they could call for a constitutional convention and amend the constitution to either declare that corporations are not people, or that money is not free speech, or various other combinations that would revoke corporate influence in politics.
I think this speaks more to how pathetic the leadership of a lot of US companies have become more than it does on Jobs
They are leading quite well right now. As an average, corporate profits are at record highs. Despite having really no new innovations or services.
Over the last 30 years, various regulation changes and some de-regulation occurred that allowed corporations to both become more entangled in politics (which meant legislation became more and more in favor of profit for those corporations), as well as shelter more and more of their money (often tax free). Corporate CEO's began to make larger and larger salaries, in place of stocks and options, which changed the CEO's strategy from long term growth of his stocks into short term performance.
Our historically low taxes and large number of loopholes alone is a major factor. Take the lowering of the capital gains tax from 30% to 15%. Now it makes more sense to invest your money in things that will be taxed at 15% rather than at 30%. The low taxes and loopholes in general also mean that now is the time to store that profit. When taxes are higher, large businesses tend to invest profit back into the business, because that is a tax deductable.
The utopia comes when the automation is self-sustaining. Right now all those automated processes cost money to run. The day that automation is self-sustaining, can build its own clean energy sources, nano-forges can create anything from food to cars and plans with any atom source, etc.. That day means that money is obsolete because nothing is scarce anymore.
As long as there is artificial and natural scarcity of goods, there will be inequality.
The problem with this absurd argument is that people want stuff, not jobs. The only reason you work a job is so you can buy the things you want/need. And if you don't have to work as much to get them, that's hardly a problem.
The problem is that we're not willing to accept an economic system that's more in tune with the realities of modern life. If there's less work to do, we need to improve the quality of life per unit of work ratio to keep people from falling into poverty simply because there's no work for them to do.
The future I hope for is one in which all work is automated, nano-bot forges can nearly instantly build anything, food/drinks are star-trek-style created from any source of atoms, and the majority of people don't work, but they still "do things". In this scenario I see people pursuing only things that interest them. Some programmers may still program, some mathematicians may still do mathematics, and likely most people will just live: reading books, raising kids, gardening, etc..
The only major problem I see in this future is the transition period. What happens when only some nations have this ability? Likely major wars.
I don't think it was air burst. It had a parachute system to lay down gently on the ground and then detonate.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B53_nuclear_bomb#Specifications
It was also shown touching down on the rachael maddow show.
The more the loans are big and easy to get, the more the education costs raise. Reversed causality.
Where is the evidence that it is causing the cost of education to rise? Is it merely correlation? When the State and Federal government cut back on funding for higher education in my State, the colleges responded by raising tuition and other fees.
In general, community colleges and state universities are not profit driven. They typically operate at near non-profit levels with the goal of providing education for as many students as possible. In fact, it is nearly always written into policy.
There are a myriad of factors involved in the rise in the cost of higher education. Here's a glimpse of some of those factors: http://net.educause.edu/ir/library/pdf/ffp0005s.pdf
http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/The_Simpsons/Season_8#Treehouse_of_Horror_VII
I don't see very many (like nearly zero) primary elections where any candidate is promoting serious change, let alone main elections. We need major campaign finance reform, but the body that has to do the reforming is the one that will resist it the most...
This doesn't seem to be a socialism vs not socialism issue though.
Some things, like the EPA, still make sense as a national organization to me. We can't have State A pumping pollution into a river that runs into State B. That isn't something I can imagine being solved by pollution only being controlled at a state or local level.
State and federal funding of my state's community colleges has been in a steady decline for years now. The result: tuition and other costs has risen.
There is a certain minimum operating cost for state and community colleges and they often operate barely above that line. You could cut out departments and offer less to the community, but if demand comes back for a certain department, it takes a long time to get it going again.
If the Government made State community colleges and universities free to attend, it would hold the price down on private universities. But we don't seem to value education as much as other Countries.