I'd be curious to know what those charts define as 'output'. Do they include non-tangible things like consulting or knowledge work of any kind? Are we perhaps producing less finished products, but more parts which can be stamped out easier without labor? I know that hit Oregon hard during the recession. We have a high amount of companies that produce only parts. During a recession, companies that produce finished products draw from their surplus part warehouses, and don't restock their part shelves.
"When most of the country's population is a strong, independent middle class they want the government to take care of what is reasonable..."
But then you went on to this:
"People who can house themselves, feed themselves.....don't want the kinds of "help" (dependency) that the government can offer."
When our middle class was the strongest it has ever been, the vast majority of the country was very much in favor of medicare, medicaid, strong support for unions, etc.. When most people have more than they need, they don't mind a little extra tax to help someone down on their luck. And they certainly would fight to keep their union job, including supporting a lot of government regulation over corporations to make sure that their union remained strong.
The 50's, 60's, and 70's was very "liberal" compared to today, and had a very strong middle class. There are quite a few factors that one can argue hurt the middle class, but I'd mark the beginning with Regan's shift in the tax code.
I couldn't find the numbers with a quick google search, but isn't one of the largest issues that the US has dropped tariffs on Chinese (and other countries) goods while our companies still face very high tariffs when we attempt to export?
Our companies have a very hard time competing if they must pay a living US wage while competing with a living Chinese wage. And then of course, companies in China have far less pollution regulation and other things that increase US company costs.
IMO, without tariffs leveling the playing field, the 'free market' is a race to the bottom for the middle class.
Now, we wouldn't need tariffs if all countries agreed on things like pollution, workers rights and conditions, etc...
And it doesn't help that in many cases, tax breaks for "investing" overseas is often more than the the tax, so that the US actually ends up paying companies to "invest" overseas in some cases.
I'm not sure if you were just stating what a laissez faire economical system is about, or if you were endorsing it. Regardless, the largest issue always comes down to resources. We can see how easy it is for a corporation to bury a private citizen in legal work. They have the lawyers and money. The average person cannot afford lengthy, complicated, scientific trials to defend themselves against pollution on their land.
In theory it sounds perfect. In practice, the little people get screwed.
Last night's Jon Stewart was talking about this very thing.
The author he was interviewing was basically making the case that our system is broke, but not because of the overreach of government (a case against tea party/conservative anti-regulation).
At one point, Stewart said, (paraphrasing) "So basically you are saying that politics has been so perfected that governance is impossible"....
The spirit of the rules themselves aren't necessarily broken, but they have been around so long, that every single way to abuse them is well documented, and now in use each election cycle. And a party pushes the rule boundaries each year, the other party responds the next year with another stretch of the limits of those rules.
The rules need to change. Historically the senate was supposed to be a place where proposals went to die. A moderating effect on the house, whereby only the most sensible bills would pass. But now we see every single bill dying in a political game, and it is pretty obvious that those rules need to change.
I would rather see the senate rules changed to allow passing bills by a simple majority (thereby letting the electorate truly get whatever populist fad is raging that year) than see all progress stopped. I'm sure we would see horrible sessions, with horrible consequences, but maybe....just maybe, that would wake the average citizen up and we'd start taking voting a little bit more seriously.
Of course, this is all tied in with the average citizen's ability to get to the truth. And I don't have high hopes for that given the amount of money flooding political campaigns (Citizen's United scotus ruling, for example).
In an ideal world, major campaign finance reform would take place first.
Sadly, I think that most conservatives, at least in leadership positions in the party, are in fact promoting ideology over reality.
I've found very few conservative talking heads that promoted a coherent argument. Occasionally I'll hear one or two on NPR that are at least logically consistent.
Most of them are smart enough to be logically consistent if they wanted to, but I think what the modern conservative movement has found, is that it is far more effect to sell feelings over facts, hyperbole over moderate debate, fear and anger over cooperation and progress, etc...
I'm not sure that Linux did the converting. More likely, people with that level of curiosity will find things to tinker with and end up as power users in whatever subject they were tinkering with. And people with that "can do" attitude are probably more likely to want to try an "alternative" desktop OS.
I grew up with windows, and between dos, the registry, and basic scripting to trying foxpro / vb / etc.. it was just as nice a learning ground as linux, especially if it was your first computer experience. Most things worked well in windows, so you spent your time trying to do things you wanted (creating a program, tweaking an opensource one, learning to automate tasks with scripts, etc..) , rather than just trying to make things work (as was common with very early Linux releases).
Perhaps you can say that because Linux often requires tweaking, or outright fixing of software that is temperamental, one is forced to learn things that they might not have wanted to, or bothered to before. And some percent of them end up enjoying fixing/creating and go on to careers in computers. But I don't think that there is anything inherent in Linux that makes someone more curious about computers than they would have been if they were using another system.
I'm not sure how well supported they are, but aren't there some hypotheses that Earth's atmosphere could become Venus-like if certain runaway conditions occur? In that case, then yeah, Mars would be a better place to live than Earth.
I think the general anti-rich sentiment in the country is a result of wall street bailouts to billionaires, among other things.
What's particularly galling about the tea party/conservative attitude, is that the vast majority of people shown in conservative rallies are generally poor, on medicaid/medicare, yet they are arguing for massive financial gains for billionaires, like the Koch brothers, and at the same time arguing against social services that they currently use....
That is one of the reasons why I think some type of estate tax is important. If you have more money than you, your kids, their kids, their kids kids (forever) can spend, what incentive is there for that family to ever rise to excellence again.
I don't like seeing an estate tax applied on smaller things, like farms, but multi-billion dollar funds, heck yes.
Unfortunately, then your religion just becomes a God of the Gaps. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/God_of_the_gaps
As science explains more, God appears to have done less and less. It is much less problematic, from a logical standpoint, to attribute things to God that are not part of the observable universe (your soul/heaven/hell/morality, etc..).
I guess, having just watched months of political debates and news shows, that I was more commenting on those than an individual person's ability to gauge the truth.
The vast majority of American's will always be 'average', and the average person is never going to research, say, the details of climate change theories to determine if the newscaster is speaking the truth or not.
When I was talking about the overton window, it was reminding me of debates on opinion news shows where it took the factual side of the argument nearly the entire debate to just debunk 5% of the lies that the other side made. And in the end, to the average viewer, the debate appeared to be won by the person spewing the half-truths.
In theory it would be fantastic if the country as a whole became much more logical and effective at critical thinking. I just don't think it will ever happen. I can't point to any time in history when the majority of people were any more or less able to think critically than they are now.
"I wouldn't debate someone who tried to tell me that 2 plus 2 equals five. I might laugh at them but I wouldn't debate them"
It is not the proper role of the state and its police power to make sure that adults exercise good decision-making
In the case of government, it is part of their role to promote general welfare. In the case of police, it is to serve and protect, and part of that is definitely preventing crime.
I'm pretty sure I remember stats when the domestic abuse laws were being put in place, that if the abuser was not removed, that over time the abuse got worse, and many women would end up dead.
If you have statistics saying "removing an abuser early prevents a large number of women from being beaten to death" I'm pretty sure that falls under "general wellfare" and/or serving and protecting by preventing crime. And while the wife may have a choice to leave (we'll skip all the mental reasons why often a spouse is conditioned to accept abuse and it is closer to a mental disorder than a choice...) the kids do not. The police are protecting the kids as much as they are the wife, and possible preventing a cycle of violence, whereby the kids would have grown up to beat their partners.
Your freedom to yell does not limit my freedom to yell louder.
If yelling costs money though...
There are plenty of examples where someone speaking the truth on a budget has easily prevailed against an opponent that spent ridiculous sums to spew garbage.
Good point. This recent election saw a couple of the big spenders loose. But what about in a race where both sides are logically consistent, but ideologically different. In that case, the biggest spender tends to win. In our country, money=speech.
You missed the point. Many Americans don't want their money to go towards paying the healthcare of others; if someone else pays for it, they couldn't give a rat's ass.
It's not that they don't want the poor people helped, it's that they don't want to help the poor people.
And what those people are failing to understand, is that they are already paying for it, and in the most inefficient manner possible.
Everyone gets free health care in the US, it's called the emergency room, and it is very expensive. All of us with insurance pay for those emergency room visits because everything becomes more expensive to compensate for the emergency room loses. I worked for a hospital that went out of business directly as a result of the emergency room visits by the uninsured.
It might be partly religion, but I think it also has to do with our perceived quality of life and general self-confidence.
I was listening to the 'best of the left' podcast yesterday, and one of the segments was talking about standardized test results given to high school students. Long story short, horrible test scores. But the one question that 'scored high' was the one asking the students to rank how they felt they had done on the test. Their perceived ability was much higher than their actual ability.
It got me thinking about America's general cockiness when it comes to our perceived worth in the world. Movies like "Team America" make fun of this and exaggerate it, but it is basically true. And if the overall country is like this, I imagine each individual feels slightly more self-important than those living in other countries.
What good is logic and critical thinking if the information available to you is half-truths and sometimes outright lies. Likewise, what good is critical thinking if every debate starts so far right as a fact-less mess of lies and half-truths, that even arguing and fighting your way to the middle still leaves you with a bad result.
The overton window has been shifted so far towards corporatism/facism/far-right that any compromise still leaves you with corporatism/un-favorable to the working class.
The only answer I see, is massive, meaningful, campaign finance reform. I don't have high hopes of that ever happening though, unless things get so bad that the people nearly (or really) revolt.
Just kinda playing devils advocate here: I wonder if I could make a claim that the Koch billionaire brothers (and others pursuing a similar message) are stifling my free speech by flooding the airwaves with ads. That my voice is limited, because I am not rich. Is this DDOS flood against a few web sites similar to the flood of money for ads, think tanks, bloggers, radio, etc.
I know they are not identical (one makes the information completely unavailable, the other hides and obscures information) but it sure feels the same.
Your right, but replace gun with taser. His excuse was that he was going for his taser, and grabbed his gun by mistake.
The law should have been asking why he was attempting to taser someone who was handcuffed, restrained, and had multiple officers holding him.
But the law won't ask that. Tasers have become accepted as pain compliance tools, rather than non-lethal disablement tools as they were intended. In the near future, I wouldn't be surprised if I heard about cops using tasers in interrogations. After all, not answering a question means you are not complying. I've seen tasers used against people who were committing non-violent acts of physical noncompliance (not bending their legs to get in the car, refusing to get up, etc..).
Slashdot Mirror
I'd be curious to know what those charts define as 'output'. Do they include non-tangible things like consulting or knowledge work of any kind? Are we perhaps producing less finished products, but more parts which can be stamped out easier without labor? I know that hit Oregon hard during the recession. We have a high amount of companies that produce only parts. During a recession, companies that produce finished products draw from their surplus part warehouses, and don't restock their part shelves.
It sure seems like many of our products, including famous ones, have decreased. Even the Red Flyer Wagon:(
Newsweek gallery of products no longer made in America
I was with you through this:
"When most of the country's population is a strong, independent middle class they want the government to take care of what is reasonable..."
But then you went on to this:
"People who can house themselves, feed themselves.....don't want the kinds of "help" (dependency) that the government can offer."
When our middle class was the strongest it has ever been, the vast majority of the country was very much in favor of medicare, medicaid, strong support for unions, etc.. When most people have more than they need, they don't mind a little extra tax to help someone down on their luck. And they certainly would fight to keep their union job, including supporting a lot of government regulation over corporations to make sure that their union remained strong.
The 50's, 60's, and 70's was very "liberal" compared to today, and had a very strong middle class. There are quite a few factors that one can argue hurt the middle class, but I'd mark the beginning with Regan's shift in the tax code.
I couldn't find the numbers with a quick google search, but isn't one of the largest issues that the US has dropped tariffs on Chinese (and other countries) goods while our companies still face very high tariffs when we attempt to export?
Our companies have a very hard time competing if they must pay a living US wage while competing with a living Chinese wage. And then of course, companies in China have far less pollution regulation and other things that increase US company costs.
IMO, without tariffs leveling the playing field, the 'free market' is a race to the bottom for the middle class.
Now, we wouldn't need tariffs if all countries agreed on things like pollution, workers rights and conditions, etc...
And it doesn't help that in many cases, tax breaks for "investing" overseas is often more than the the tax, so that the US actually ends up paying companies to "invest" overseas in some cases.
I'm not sure if you were just stating what a laissez faire economical system is about, or if you were endorsing it. Regardless, the largest issue always comes down to resources. We can see how easy it is for a corporation to bury a private citizen in legal work. They have the lawyers and money. The average person cannot afford lengthy, complicated, scientific trials to defend themselves against pollution on their land.
In theory it sounds perfect. In practice, the little people get screwed.
Last night's Jon Stewart was talking about this very thing.
The author he was interviewing was basically making the case that our system is broke, but not because of the overreach of government (a case against tea party/conservative anti-regulation).
At one point, Stewart said, (paraphrasing) "So basically you are saying that politics has been so perfected that governance is impossible"....
The spirit of the rules themselves aren't necessarily broken, but they have been around so long, that every single way to abuse them is well documented, and now in use each election cycle. And a party pushes the rule boundaries each year, the other party responds the next year with another stretch of the limits of those rules.
The rules need to change. Historically the senate was supposed to be a place where proposals went to die. A moderating effect on the house, whereby only the most sensible bills would pass. But now we see every single bill dying in a political game, and it is pretty obvious that those rules need to change.
I would rather see the senate rules changed to allow passing bills by a simple majority (thereby letting the electorate truly get whatever populist fad is raging that year) than see all progress stopped. I'm sure we would see horrible sessions, with horrible consequences, but maybe....just maybe, that would wake the average citizen up and we'd start taking voting a little bit more seriously.
Of course, this is all tied in with the average citizen's ability to get to the truth. And I don't have high hopes for that given the amount of money flooding political campaigns (Citizen's United scotus ruling, for example).
In an ideal world, major campaign finance reform would take place first.
Sadly, I think that most conservatives, at least in leadership positions in the party, are in fact promoting ideology over reality.
I've found very few conservative talking heads that promoted a coherent argument. Occasionally I'll hear one or two on NPR that are at least logically consistent.
Most of them are smart enough to be logically consistent if they wanted to, but I think what the modern conservative movement has found, is that it is far more effect to sell feelings over facts, hyperbole over moderate debate, fear and anger over cooperation and progress, etc...
I'm not sure that Linux did the converting. More likely, people with that level of curiosity will find things to tinker with and end up as power users in whatever subject they were tinkering with. And people with that "can do" attitude are probably more likely to want to try an "alternative" desktop OS.
I grew up with windows, and between dos, the registry, and basic scripting to trying foxpro / vb / etc.. it was just as nice a learning ground as linux, especially if it was your first computer experience. Most things worked well in windows, so you spent your time trying to do things you wanted (creating a program, tweaking an opensource one, learning to automate tasks with scripts, etc..) , rather than just trying to make things work (as was common with very early Linux releases).
Perhaps you can say that because Linux often requires tweaking, or outright fixing of software that is temperamental, one is forced to learn things that they might not have wanted to, or bothered to before. And some percent of them end up enjoying fixing/creating and go on to careers in computers. But I don't think that there is anything inherent in Linux that makes someone more curious about computers than they would have been if they were using another system.
I'm not sure how well supported they are, but aren't there some hypotheses that Earth's atmosphere could become Venus-like if certain runaway conditions occur? In that case, then yeah, Mars would be a better place to live than Earth.
http://www.google.com/search?sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8&q=earth+could+turn+into+venus
Wouldn't it be easier to launch multiple unmanned heavy payload rockets who's capsules could set down on Mars years in advance?
I do like the idea of a giant spaceship someday though:)
What manufacturer made the audio fingerprinting device? We don't have a large p2p problem at our school, but it could change someday I suppose.
Are there schools out there that do not require a login for wireless access? CALEA is much easier to comply with by requiring logins to your network.
Good to know, thanks.
There are so many half-truths and outright lies in media/think tanks these days, that it's hard to keep up.
Most people on slashdot are multi-millionaires?
I think the general anti-rich sentiment in the country is a result of wall street bailouts to billionaires, among other things.
What's particularly galling about the tea party/conservative attitude, is that the vast majority of people shown in conservative rallies are generally poor, on medicaid/medicare, yet they are arguing for massive financial gains for billionaires, like the Koch brothers, and at the same time arguing against social services that they currently use....
That is one of the reasons why I think some type of estate tax is important. If you have more money than you, your kids, their kids, their kids kids (forever) can spend, what incentive is there for that family to ever rise to excellence again.
I don't like seeing an estate tax applied on smaller things, like farms, but multi-billion dollar funds, heck yes.
I don't think that most people would consider catholics "religious fundamentalists".
Unfortunately, then your religion just becomes a God of the Gaps. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/God_of_the_gaps
As science explains more, God appears to have done less and less. It is much less problematic, from a logical standpoint, to attribute things to God that are not part of the observable universe (your soul/heaven/hell/morality, etc..).
I guess, having just watched months of political debates and news shows, that I was more commenting on those than an individual person's ability to gauge the truth.
The vast majority of American's will always be 'average', and the average person is never going to research, say, the details of climate change theories to determine if the newscaster is speaking the truth or not.
When I was talking about the overton window, it was reminding me of debates on opinion news shows where it took the factual side of the argument nearly the entire debate to just debunk 5% of the lies that the other side made. And in the end, to the average viewer, the debate appeared to be won by the person spewing the half-truths.
In theory it would be fantastic if the country as a whole became much more logical and effective at critical thinking. I just don't think it will ever happen. I can't point to any time in history when the majority of people were any more or less able to think critically than they are now.
"I wouldn't debate someone who tried to tell me that 2 plus 2 equals five. I might laugh at them but I wouldn't debate them"
And then your party would lose that election:)
It is not the proper role of the state and its police power to make sure that adults exercise good decision-making
In the case of government, it is part of their role to promote general welfare. In the case of police, it is to serve and protect, and part of that is definitely preventing crime.
I'm pretty sure I remember stats when the domestic abuse laws were being put in place, that if the abuser was not removed, that over time the abuse got worse, and many women would end up dead.
If you have statistics saying "removing an abuser early prevents a large number of women from being beaten to death" I'm pretty sure that falls under "general wellfare" and/or serving and protecting by preventing crime. And while the wife may have a choice to leave (we'll skip all the mental reasons why often a spouse is conditioned to accept abuse and it is closer to a mental disorder than a choice...) the kids do not. The police are protecting the kids as much as they are the wife, and possible preventing a cycle of violence, whereby the kids would have grown up to beat their partners.
Your freedom to yell does not limit my freedom to yell louder.
If yelling costs money though...
There are plenty of examples where someone speaking the truth on a budget has easily prevailed against an opponent that spent ridiculous sums to spew garbage.
Good point. This recent election saw a couple of the big spenders loose. But what about in a race where both sides are logically consistent, but ideologically different. In that case, the biggest spender tends to win. In our country, money=speech.
You missed the point. Many Americans don't want their money to go towards paying the healthcare of others; if someone else pays for it, they couldn't give a rat's ass.
It's not that they don't want the poor people helped, it's that they don't want to help the poor people.
And what those people are failing to understand, is that they are already paying for it, and in the most inefficient manner possible.
Everyone gets free health care in the US, it's called the emergency room, and it is very expensive. All of us with insurance pay for those emergency room visits because everything becomes more expensive to compensate for the emergency room loses. I worked for a hospital that went out of business directly as a result of the emergency room visits by the uninsured.
It might be partly religion, but I think it also has to do with our perceived quality of life and general self-confidence.
I was listening to the 'best of the left' podcast yesterday, and one of the segments was talking about standardized test results given to high school students. Long story short, horrible test scores. But the one question that 'scored high' was the one asking the students to rank how they felt they had done on the test. Their perceived ability was much higher than their actual ability.
It got me thinking about America's general cockiness when it comes to our perceived worth in the world. Movies like "Team America" make fun of this and exaggerate it, but it is basically true. And if the overall country is like this, I imagine each individual feels slightly more self-important than those living in other countries.
Hi fellow Portlander.
I agree http://oregonbeer.org/facts/
What good is logic and critical thinking if the information available to you is half-truths and sometimes outright lies. Likewise, what good is critical thinking if every debate starts so far right as a fact-less mess of lies and half-truths, that even arguing and fighting your way to the middle still leaves you with a bad result.
The overton window has been shifted so far towards corporatism/facism/far-right that any compromise still leaves you with corporatism/un-favorable to the working class.
The only answer I see, is massive, meaningful, campaign finance reform. I don't have high hopes of that ever happening though, unless things get so bad that the people nearly (or really) revolt.
Just kinda playing devils advocate here: I wonder if I could make a claim that the Koch billionaire brothers (and others pursuing a similar message) are stifling my free speech by flooding the airwaves with ads. That my voice is limited, because I am not rich. Is this DDOS flood against a few web sites similar to the flood of money for ads, think tanks, bloggers, radio, etc.
I know they are not identical (one makes the information completely unavailable, the other hides and obscures information) but it sure feels the same.
Your right, but replace gun with taser. His excuse was that he was going for his taser, and grabbed his gun by mistake.
The law should have been asking why he was attempting to taser someone who was handcuffed, restrained, and had multiple officers holding him.
But the law won't ask that. Tasers have become accepted as pain compliance tools, rather than non-lethal disablement tools as they were intended. In the near future, I wouldn't be surprised if I heard about cops using tasers in interrogations. After all, not answering a question means you are not complying. I've seen tasers used against people who were committing non-violent acts of physical noncompliance (not bending their legs to get in the car, refusing to get up, etc..).