I wonder how much of our perceived image of the police comes from larger urban areas. I'm guessing that the higher the crime rate, the more militant and rigid the police become. Smaller towns, with less crime, no gangs, etc.., probably have much nicer police.
It also seems like police have lost the ability to use their own judgement in many situations. One that comes to mind is that it is mandatory for police to take someone to jail if there is any domestic violence. Just from watching the show "cops" from time to time, I've seen the man or woman taking into jail and charged with assault for some pretty minor stuff, even accidental, like opening a door and hitting someone with it, not realizing they were on the other side.
I can see how such a rule came about. Most likely many police would arrive at a house and the beaten spouse would refuse to talk or press charges. It makes sense in that situation to take the husband away regardless of what the wife wants. But it does lead to charges being applied when previously the police many have not bothered, as the incident was very minor.
And the video cams in all police cars I'm sure both prevents police abuse, but also makes cops less hesitant to let people off. I'm guessing that their supervisors review the tapes from time to time. If they see an officer letting people go when a crime was committed, the officer may get in trouble (complete guess hehe).
I know from working for a hospital, that lawsuits over time certainly don't encourage flexibility. With each lawsuit, the rules become more and more stringent. I imagine that police departments are the same way.
I am not sure what the answer is, but I do concur that police have become more stringent over time.
The fair tax merely shifts the regressive parts of a sales tax from those in poverty to those slightly above poverty.
It still ignores the fact that as a percent of income, the richer folks always pay a smaller amount with a sales tax system. Our tax system does need change. But a national sales tax is not the right change. We need to simplify our tax system and take into account more forms of "deferred" income, such as captial gains, so that the rich are actually paying their fair share.
And why couldn't an income tax system be just as fair to the poor as the fair tax consumption tax?
With any sales tax system, as a percent of income, poorer/middle class people will of course always pay more than someone who is very rich. If you just exclude people in the lower income brackets from the consumption/sales tax, that is just a band-aid on a regressive tax system.
You could just as easily have an income tax that only taxed income that was beyond a certain point past poverty, thereby having the exact same effect. With the added bonus of being sure to tax all income gains beyond just what some millionaire chose to spend that year.
I've always found it odd that Washington has such a regressive state tax (only sales tax), while just south in Oregon we have a very progressive tax (only income tax).
There must be some historical reason because overall the demographics of each state are very similar.
If non-commercial personal use copying was legal, I think we'd see market forces move product creation in a good direction.
Music: Recordings of songs become basically advertising. The same as songs played on the radio are now. Musicians would actively try to spread their song recordings for free, in order to increase concert ticket sales. Just as most of us work every day for a pay check, a musician would make money by putting on shows, not sitting back and living off of the sales of 1 hit song. This would provide incentive to have the best live shows, as well as provide incentive to create new music to keep ticket sales high. Other value-added paths would emerge also, such as artwork in albums/cds. I'm sure that musicians would discover many ways to still sell tangible goods in addition to playing shows.
Games: Games would move towards value added interactivity, and profit by subscription fees. Single player stand-alone games might decrease, but we'd see massively multi-player, or community enhanced games skyrocket. You can't copy the community. Instead of thinking of a game as a product in a box, it becomes an experience. This would encourage game designers to think of the game as an ongoing story. Both providing much greater entertainment to the customer, as well as providing the game designer a lifetime of meaningful work (if they choose) in terms of ongoing design and storytelling.
There are many server administration tools that can only be accessed by forwarding an X session to your management desktop. Sun's (now Oracle's) Server 5 apps for instance (ldap, messaging, etc..). The servers themselves have no gui (although they technically could).
I thought I knew, its just her in the past. They flew through the eye of jupiter which bends time, and her dead body is the future, her current body (and now shiny new ship) is the past.
I googled and found a couple more theories (angel, 5th? 7th cylon, or some harbringer of doom involved in some sort of galactic cycle, which I was not too clear about).
I used to think that too. That Islam hasn't been around long enough to 'mature'.
After a while though, I decided that was most likely incorrect in explaining the higher percent of extremists in Islam over other religions. Unless you believe in some notion of a collective consciousness, religions do not 'grow up'.
The followers of the bible, even after the new testament was released, were still very violent, and had a long sordid past of invasions, inquisitions, etc.. The basic structure of the church hasn't changed much since then. The bible hasn't changed since then.
What I think has changed, is the wealth and stability of the Christian nations, and purely political changes that have largely separated church and state, and more recent (last 100 years) of those more stable, powerful, Christian nations, meddling with Muslim States.
Poor countries tend to have populations with views that are considered more extreme and/or rigid. This is true of any religion. I haven't done much research, but I'm guessing that there is a greater percent of poor Muslims than there are poor Christians.
The other factor is political systems that evolved, not as a result in changes in religion, but because of economics, politics, and historical reasons that shaped many of the western countries. There are a ton of factors that lead to the (mostly) separate church and state in most Christian states, but none of those factors came from the church. By removing the military force, ability to tax, and all the other powerful things that government's do from the Religions reach, the power of religion in society greatly decreased. Prior to that, in order for Christian leaders to justify a war in the name of God, they pretty much had to argue from an extreme interpretation of the bible. Once the power of the Church to wage war (among other things) went away, extremist interpretations served less and less purpose over time.
And lastly, the discovery and increased use of oil. It should be pretty obvious that western meddling in Middle Eastern states, overthrowing governments, installing dictatorships, forcing oil to be bought and sold only in US dollars, creating the state of Israel by force and threat of force, etc... All these relatively recent events brew extremism. Doubly so when all of those things were done by Christian nations.
It is my understanding that the founding fathers wrote much of the constitution with the intent to allow the people to overthrow the government if needed. Well, not expressly in the constitution (unless you want to debate the 2nd amendment) but certainly was expressed in their writings back and forth to each other.
How, exactly, would one revolt against your government if treasonous speech were disallowed? I'm more curious than argumentative. I can't think of law that forbids treasonous speech. Certainly treasonous actions are banned. But speech? Are you thinking of the laws against inciting violence? Because I can imagine how words could be treasonous but not inciting violence.
I think regardless of whether a corporation is or isn't a person, or whether the first amendment was intended to be only for people or for any entity, you could argue this:
One of the original intents of the freedom of speech was to help to ensure that the average citizens voice could be heard. Speaking out against the crown could land you in jail. The founders wanted to make sure that elites, governors, presidents, etc.. would never again be able to silence people (or possibly groups of people) because they disagreed with what was said.
Moving forward to modern times. If I'm speaking on a street corner about how much I hate the store behind me, and that store decides to blast music so loud that no one can hear my voice, I am effectively silenced. We have rules in place (noise disturbance, etc..) to prevent that. In much the same way, wealth inequality leads to situations where a voice can be effectively silenced. If I am running for office, and I can only afford one TV ad, while my opponent backed say, exxon mobile, runs 10 ads per day for a year, I have effectively been silenced.
From a strict logical sense, I agree with what you say. But the constitution is a living document, and many people feel that the ruling in Citizens United overturned 63 years of plain common sense when it comes to elections.
Regardless, if the supreme court is going to conclude that money=speech from time to time, based on the judges in office, we need a constitutional amendment to set things right. And meaningful campaign finance reform.....but I'm not holding my breath.
If the internet had not been born from the government, I have little doubt I'd still be typing this message on it, it simply would have been born from a corporation, perhaps with better features and the like.
I'm not so sure about that. It is pretty rare for a corporation to have very long term goals, shelling out lots of cash with no idea about their potential for ROI. Just think of how long arpanet was around before any average person started using it http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARPANET , and even then, how much longer it took for people to think about making any profit from it.
It may have happened, but it would have been nothing like we know today. Can you imagine what the 'internet' would have been like if just microsoft built it. They controlled all the routers and switches, root dns servers, etc.. Can you honestly say that there would have been a chance that the internet would have turned out better, with nicer features, if a corporation was totally in charge of it?
The Dems never had a super majority in the Senate. For a split second they had 60 votes, however, 4-5 of them were blue dog Dems who are almost republican. Shortly thereafter, the Dems had 59 votes, and with record numbers of filibusters (or threats of them) the Republicans were able to stop pretty much everything.
Look at the blocking of closure and filibuster numbers over the last two years. They are record numbers.
The CBO reported in October 2009 reasons for the difference between the 2008 and 2009 deficits, which were approximately $460 billion and $1,410 billion, respectively. Key categories of changes included: tax receipt declines of $320 billion due to the effects of the recession and another $100 billion due to tax cuts in the stimulus bill (the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act or ARRA); $245 billion for the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) and other bailout efforts; $100 billion in additional spending for ARRA; and another $185 billion due to increases in primary budget categories such as Medicare, Medicaid, unemployment insurance, Social Security, and Defense - including the war effort in Afghanistan and Iraq. This was the highest budget deficit relative to GDP (9.9%) since 1945.[57] The national debt increased by $1.9 trillion during FY2009, versus the $1.0 trillion increase during 2008.[58] The Obama Administration also made four significant accounting changes, to more accurately report the total spending by the Federal government. The four changes were: 1) account for the Wars in Iraq and Afghanistan (”overseas military contingencies”) in the budget rather than through the use of “emergency” supplemental spending bills; 2) assume the Alternative Minimum Tax will be indexed for inflation; 3) account for the full costs of Medicare reimbursements; and 4) anticipate the inevitable expenditures for natural disaster relief. These changes would make the debt over ten years look $2.7 trillion larger, but that debt was always there. It was just hidden.[59][60]
$1,410 billion -320 billion (recession) -100 billion (Republican pushed tax cuts in stimulus bill, arpa) -245 billion (Bush bank bailout) -100 billion (Democratic stimulus spending, arpa) -185 billion (Medicare costs naturally going up, Medicaid costs naturally going up, unemployment insurance to offset more workers out of work in the depression, Social Security natural cost going up, and Defense - including the war effort in Afghanistan and Iraq for the first time in the budget) =460 billion. The exact same as the 2008 budget.
If you look at the numbers fairly, Obama didn't increase spending rapidly. Unless the 100 billion for arpa and the partial fraction of the 185 billion for unemployment insurance is huge in your mind.
Bush signed TARP. Bush didn't include the cost of war in his budget.
Show me a Republican president since Nixon that hasn't added to the deficit. Oh wait, you can't...
There are many things lacking in child's brain that lead them to make pretty poor decisions sometimes (underdeveloped empathy in young children, for example), but saying that destructive acts are not on purpose is just plain wrong.
I've seen 4 year olds do mean things on purpose. They know very well that it is going to, say, make a younger sibling cry. Pinching, hitting, with the express intent of either getting a reaction, plain curiosity, or to make the other person leave them alone.
Very purposeful.
It is all the other things (experience, empathy, awareness of consequence, etc..) that the child lacks. Not purpose.
Because then I would cry bloody murder, since to target ads you first of all have to find out more about me than I'm willing to give to advertising companies.
There's one thing that we all want though: entertainment. No personal knowledge required. I've seen some ads that were pretty funny, or moving, or just plain engaging. If every ad were "super bowl ad" quality, people would watch more of them.
But instead, advertisers (naturally) seek to send out as many ads as possible, on as many channels as possible, for the lowest cost. What I doubt many of them take into account, is that sure, they've sent 100 million ads out on radio/tv/internet, but 85% of them were not seen due to blockers, fast forward, whatever. If instead, they sent out 25 million that were 4x the quality in terms of humor/engaging, they would probably have a much higher view rate.
The other issue, personal data and ad quality aside, is the repetitive nature of ads. On any particular station, or on something like Hulu, you are shown the same damn ad for weeks sometimes. No matter how funny or pertinent the ad is to you, you aren't going to watch it the 100th time.
Its fine to advertise a product over and over, but it had better be 10 completely different commercials for the same product, not one shown 10x.
"Although government programs generally are horribly inefficient, do you have any actual data indicating that NASA is just as bad?"
I'd ask where is the data that government in general is "horribly" inefficient.....
I keep seeing this as a conservative talking point, but I have yet to find any data backing it up. Medicare for instance, with its 1-3% overhead costs vs private insurance at 12-15%.
(I know the counter-argument, medicare has all elderly, so relative to administration costs, the payments are huge, thus lowering the relative percent of those administrative costs....but you'd expect that payments going out would require administrative actions and management. If payments go up, administration of those payments should also, yet they don't. Medicare is very very efficient).
I can understand not wanting to bother with games that are difficult to master, or have long completion times per mission/goal. But what I've noticed about many newer games, is in addition to getting easier, is that the player has less and less control.
I'm an adult. I come home from work, and I don't want to spend 2 hours learning and 2 hours more to finish some level in a game, but I do want to move my character/tank whatever around where I want, build defenses how I want, and not be interrupted by movie content all the time.
I picked up a couple new, well reviewed RTS games. It was the most frustrating gameplay I've ever experienced. Dawn of War 2, Warhammer 40,000 for instance. Each mission, you'd be moving along, and mid battle, or mid move across an area to get cover, constant pop ups with voice overs, during which time, you'd loose control of your forces while the game explained something completely stupid to you.
Even worse, mid battle or when moving troops, the game would take control of your screen, slide the view up to some location, and say "go there". And I'm not kidding, it was like every 2 minutes or so.
I miss the days of games like Age of Empires where you could build and build, attack at your pace, exhaust resources if you want to build absurdly large/fun defenses, and basically play, win, or lose the game however you wanted. There is nothing like that on the market now, that I know of.
For me, it seems like the problem isn't easy vs hard. It is the lack of control that modern games give the player. They play more and more like Interactive Movies, that constantly interrupt you, and guide you down narrow paths to tell a story. I blogged about a couple purchases a while back. I haven't bought any games since then.
My Older Blog Post:
I haven’t been playing many games in the last 6 months. This weekend I got the urge to play a RTS, so I read up on reviews, and choose Company of Heroes and Dawn of War 2, Warhammer 40,000.
Both of them suck. At least, if you were expecting to play an RTS in the C&C, Age of Empires, Warcraft sense.
First off, you have zero control. Each game constantly interrupts gameplay by telling you to move to a marker, to engage the target at a second marker, to send artillery to this smoke. You have no control. Each game just tells exactly what to do. Plus, their is no way to "overkill defense" just for the fun of it. I really enjoyed building solid walls of towers in Age of Empires, just for fun:)
Company of Heroes is the by far the worse. Options to build artillery, barracks, etc.. were all greyed out. You’d literally wait, the screen would shift to a building, a voice would come on and say “click this building, click this button”. Once you did that, the screen would shift again to a location maker, and a voice would say “click here to deploy that other thing I had you click”.
What is the point of playing a Real Time Strategy game, if the game decides exactly what you should do?
And lets talk about how the game chooses to direct you: by taking control of the screen every other minute. That has got to be the most annoying game play “experience” I have ever encountered. Not only are you not allowed to actually make a decision, but literally ever minute the game takes control away from your mouse and keyboard, and moves the screen. It completely breaks any remaining sense of control or immersion.
I suppose that multiplayer is the only true reason those games are popular. I would assume (hope) that a multiplayer match actually allows you to make decisions, place defenses where you want them, and doesn’t interrupt your gameplay every other minute by telling you what to do and taking control of all the keys.
And personally, I would actually rather have a relatively small turn out of voters making a choice based on their beliefs, than a huge crowd of people just randomly picking a candidate because everyone is telling them they must vote. Voting isn't the important part.. keeping yourself aware of the politics of your country is!
I would prefer that people stop voting their beliefs, and instead vote on facts. (Will lowering taxes stimulate the economy? How much, and where's the proof?, If we increased taxes the same amount we were going to lower them, and put that money in infrastructure jobs, would it have a bigger effect? How much, and where's the proof?) I'm pretty tired of all the ideological wars here in the US. Trying to find unbiased numbers to support an issue is getting harder and harder.
I agree with you that it would be nice if a larger percent of voters (everywhere) were more informed about politics and issues. However, in the states, low voter turnout is almost always a conservative win. That small slice of largely conservative folks who did vote, won't be more informed. Likely, they will just be more extreme in their views. Rabidly anti-abortion folks, Tea Partiers, the more often than not anti-change/anti-progressive senior citizens...basically, people who are angry, afraid, or some combination of the two are those that will always show up to vote.
So, I don't fear the uneducated masses voting. I wish they were more educated, sure. But being led by fear and anger is far worse than being led by the mixture contained in the uneducated masses. Some of who, happen to be very educated (college kids, busy people with careers and families, etc..).
The overton window (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overton_window) has shifted so far right, that NPR, which when viewed against all the reporting in the world, is actually very center, or slightly right of center against Europe, is accused of having a liberal bias.
There is such as thing as reality. At some point, news needs to be evaluated by how factual it is. I'd trust NPR over MSNBC, FOX, or any other highly commerical news source any day of the week.
If you consider NPR liberal, perhaps it really is true that reality has a well known liberal bias.
"He destroyed and continues to destroy the principle of rule by law"
Huh? That is a pretty broad damning statement. Care to back it up with examples?
"Had GM and Chrysler gone bankrupt, the assets, if they were capable of productive use (which is saying if they were capable of doing more good than harm) would have been sold to organizations capable of running them at a profit. "
And what do you think the rest of the world would be doing while our auto industry was out of action for 5-10 years trying to reclaim market share, re-branding, and forming new business models? And what organization has the capital to buy GM, a GM deep in debt, who isn't already in competition with GM? Why would they want a bunch of factories and car designs that have proven themselves not as workable/marketable as their own?
Slightly offtopic, but about unions:
I'm always curious when I read posts from people that are anti-union (I'm assuming by your tone), what type of system they think would work better to balance the wages and rights of workers against the profit motivation of companies?
Companies attempt to push wages and benefits down as low as they can go. It is a very easy and straightforward way to increase profit. What market force (or other force) would keep wages and benefits at a living level?
If you look at pre-union America, worker conditions and salary were horrible. Because every company was basically paying minimum wage, even if a worker chose to leave, he wouldn't find anything better. Companies had no incentive to raise wages or improve conditions.
Prior to unions, there was no concept of the weekend. What market force would have created weekends?
There are a ton of factors involved in America's manufacturing decline. And I'd rank unions pretty low on the list. Take Germany as an example of a nearly 100% unionized car work force, who's economy is in pretty great shape.
But the rich aren't paying. That's the entire point. Capital gains taxes are low, loopholes, and other advantages makes their effective tax rate much lower than the middle class.
As for those in the bottom rung paying nothing, did it every occur to you why they are in that position, and why the USA has the highest income inequality in the entire world? Why the average wages went down by 2000 dollars for the middle class the last 10 years, but the top earners wages tripled?
Maybe if the top didn't have the vast majority of the country's wealth, they wouldn't be paying, by volume, so much of the taxes. The percent paid of their income certainly isn't high, but since their income itself is so high, the actual dollar amount is high.
Re-read this thread since it has been modded a bit more now. There are plenty of links and examples about how little the very rich actually pay.
From 1950-until Reagan we had very high taxes on the rich (70-90%) and the rich managed to stay rich, our factories continued to employ workers, and the country was largely stable. I have no idea why people are freaked out about a possible return to Clinton's tax rate of 39% and talk of (hopefully) closing some loop holes...
Citizens united certain made things blatantly worse. But it has been going on a long time.
Meaningful campaign finance reform, 100% public funded elections, is probably the only way out. But getting something like that passed is likely impossible.
If X tax revenue needs to be raised, and Y pays less, then Z must pay more. And having one of the richest companies in the world pay 2.4% when most of us are paying an order of magnitude more lacks justice.
This is true for any plausible value of X, so simply saying "there shouldn't be as much tax" is irrelevant.
I think it would more appropriate to say: If X tax revenue needs to be raised, and Y pays less, then who cares about Z, we'll just borrow it from the Chinese:)
Slashdot Mirror
I wonder how much of our perceived image of the police comes from larger urban areas. I'm guessing that the higher the crime rate, the more militant and rigid the police become. Smaller towns, with less crime, no gangs, etc.., probably have much nicer police.
It also seems like police have lost the ability to use their own judgement in many situations. One that comes to mind is that it is mandatory for police to take someone to jail if there is any domestic violence. Just from watching the show "cops" from time to time, I've seen the man or woman taking into jail and charged with assault for some pretty minor stuff, even accidental, like opening a door and hitting someone with it, not realizing they were on the other side.
I can see how such a rule came about. Most likely many police would arrive at a house and the beaten spouse would refuse to talk or press charges. It makes sense in that situation to take the husband away regardless of what the wife wants. But it does lead to charges being applied when previously the police many have not bothered, as the incident was very minor.
And the video cams in all police cars I'm sure both prevents police abuse, but also makes cops less hesitant to let people off. I'm guessing that their supervisors review the tapes from time to time. If they see an officer letting people go when a crime was committed, the officer may get in trouble (complete guess hehe).
I know from working for a hospital, that lawsuits over time certainly don't encourage flexibility. With each lawsuit, the rules become more and more stringent. I imagine that police departments are the same way.
I am not sure what the answer is, but I do concur that police have become more stringent over time.
The fair tax merely shifts the regressive parts of a sales tax from those in poverty to those slightly above poverty.
It still ignores the fact that as a percent of income, the richer folks always pay a smaller amount with a sales tax system. Our tax system does need change. But a national sales tax is not the right change. We need to simplify our tax system and take into account more forms of "deferred" income, such as captial gains, so that the rich are actually paying their fair share.
And why couldn't an income tax system be just as fair to the poor as the fair tax consumption tax?
With any sales tax system, as a percent of income, poorer/middle class people will of course always pay more than someone who is very rich. If you just exclude people in the lower income brackets from the consumption/sales tax, that is just a band-aid on a regressive tax system.
You could just as easily have an income tax that only taxed income that was beyond a certain point past poverty, thereby having the exact same effect. With the added bonus of being sure to tax all income gains beyond just what some millionaire chose to spend that year.
I've always found it odd that Washington has such a regressive state tax (only sales tax), while just south in Oregon we have a very progressive tax (only income tax).
There must be some historical reason because overall the demographics of each state are very similar.
If non-commercial personal use copying was legal, I think we'd see market forces move product creation in a good direction.
Music: Recordings of songs become basically advertising. The same as songs played on the radio are now. Musicians would actively try to spread their song recordings for free, in order to increase concert ticket sales. Just as most of us work every day for a pay check, a musician would make money by putting on shows, not sitting back and living off of the sales of 1 hit song. This would provide incentive to have the best live shows, as well as provide incentive to create new music to keep ticket sales high. Other value-added paths would emerge also, such as artwork in albums/cds. I'm sure that musicians would discover many ways to still sell tangible goods in addition to playing shows.
Games: Games would move towards value added interactivity, and profit by subscription fees. Single player stand-alone games might decrease, but we'd see massively multi-player, or community enhanced games skyrocket. You can't copy the community. Instead of thinking of a game as a product in a box, it becomes an experience. This would encourage game designers to think of the game as an ongoing story. Both providing much greater entertainment to the customer, as well as providing the game designer a lifetime of meaningful work (if they choose) in terms of ongoing design and storytelling.
There are many server administration tools that can only be accessed by forwarding an X session to your management desktop.
Sun's (now Oracle's) Server 5 apps for instance (ldap, messaging, etc..). The servers themselves have no gui (although they technically could).
I thought I knew, its just her in the past. They flew through the eye of jupiter which bends time, and her dead body is the future, her current body (and now shiny new ship) is the past.
I googled and found a couple more theories (angel, 5th? 7th cylon, or some harbringer of doom involved in some sort of galactic cycle, which I was not too clear about).
Which theory did you subscribe to?
I used to think that too. That Islam hasn't been around long enough to 'mature'.
After a while though, I decided that was most likely incorrect in explaining the higher percent of extremists in Islam over other religions. Unless you believe in some notion of a collective consciousness, religions do not 'grow up'.
The followers of the bible, even after the new testament was released, were still very violent, and had a long sordid past of invasions, inquisitions, etc.. The basic structure of the church hasn't changed much since then. The bible hasn't changed since then.
What I think has changed, is the wealth and stability of the Christian nations, and purely political changes that have largely separated church and state, and more recent (last 100 years) of those more stable, powerful, Christian nations, meddling with Muslim States.
Poor countries tend to have populations with views that are considered more extreme and/or rigid. This is true of any religion. I haven't done much research, but I'm guessing that there is a greater percent of poor Muslims than there are poor Christians.
The other factor is political systems that evolved, not as a result in changes in religion, but because of economics, politics, and historical reasons that shaped many of the western countries. There are a ton of factors that lead to the (mostly) separate church and state in most Christian states, but none of those factors came from the church. By removing the military force, ability to tax, and all the other powerful things that government's do from the Religions reach, the power of religion in society greatly decreased. Prior to that, in order for Christian leaders to justify a war in the name of God, they pretty much had to argue from an extreme interpretation of the bible. Once the power of the Church to wage war (among other things) went away, extremist interpretations served less and less purpose over time.
And lastly, the discovery and increased use of oil. It should be pretty obvious that western meddling in Middle Eastern states, overthrowing governments, installing dictatorships, forcing oil to be bought and sold only in US dollars, creating the state of Israel by force and threat of force, etc... All these relatively recent events brew extremism. Doubly so when all of those things were done by Christian nations.
Don't forget O'Reilly's contributions to successful assassinations:
Tiller the Baby Killer
It is my understanding that the founding fathers wrote much of the constitution with the intent to allow the people to overthrow the government if needed. Well, not expressly in the constitution (unless you want to debate the 2nd amendment) but certainly was expressed in their writings back and forth to each other.
How, exactly, would one revolt against your government if treasonous speech were disallowed? I'm more curious than argumentative. I can't think of law that forbids treasonous speech. Certainly treasonous actions are banned. But speech? Are you thinking of the laws against inciting violence? Because I can imagine how words could be treasonous but not inciting violence.
I think regardless of whether a corporation is or isn't a person, or whether the first amendment was intended to be only for people or for any entity, you could argue this:
One of the original intents of the freedom of speech was to help to ensure that the average citizens voice could be heard. Speaking out against the crown could land you in jail. The founders wanted to make sure that elites, governors, presidents, etc.. would never again be able to silence people (or possibly groups of people) because they disagreed with what was said.
Moving forward to modern times. If I'm speaking on a street corner about how much I hate the store behind me, and that store decides to blast music so loud that no one can hear my voice, I am effectively silenced. We have rules in place (noise disturbance, etc..) to prevent that. In much the same way, wealth inequality leads to situations where a voice can be effectively silenced. If I am running for office, and I can only afford one TV ad, while my opponent backed say, exxon mobile, runs 10 ads per day for a year, I have effectively been silenced.
From a strict logical sense, I agree with what you say. But the constitution is a living document, and many people feel that the ruling in Citizens United overturned 63 years of plain common sense when it comes to elections.
Regardless, if the supreme court is going to conclude that money=speech from time to time, based on the judges in office, we need a constitutional amendment to set things right. And meaningful campaign finance reform.....but I'm not holding my breath.
http://www.rightpundits.com/?p=5388
http://www.illinoisfirstamendmentcenter.com/speech.php
If the internet had not been born from the government, I have little doubt I'd still be typing this message on it, it simply would have been born from a corporation, perhaps with better features and the like.
I'm not so sure about that. It is pretty rare for a corporation to have very long term goals, shelling out lots of cash with no idea about their potential for ROI. Just think of how long arpanet was around before any average person started using it http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARPANET , and even then, how much longer it took for people to think about making any profit from it.
It may have happened, but it would have been nothing like we know today. Can you imagine what the 'internet' would have been like if just microsoft built it. They controlled all the routers and switches, root dns servers, etc.. Can you honestly say that there would have been a chance that the internet would have turned out better, with nicer features, if a corporation was totally in charge of it?
The Dems never had a super majority in the Senate. For a split second they had 60 votes, however, 4-5 of them were blue dog Dems who are almost republican. Shortly thereafter, the Dems had 59 votes, and with record numbers of filibusters (or threats of them) the Republicans were able to stop pretty much everything.
Look at the blocking of closure and filibuster numbers over the last two years. They are record numbers.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_federal_budget#2008_vs._2009
The CBO reported in October 2009 reasons for the difference between the 2008 and 2009 deficits, which were approximately $460 billion and $1,410 billion, respectively. Key categories of changes included: tax receipt declines of $320 billion due to the effects of the recession and another $100 billion due to tax cuts in the stimulus bill (the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act or ARRA); $245 billion for the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) and other bailout efforts; $100 billion in additional spending for ARRA; and another $185 billion due to increases in primary budget categories such as Medicare, Medicaid, unemployment insurance, Social Security, and Defense - including the war effort in Afghanistan and Iraq. This was the highest budget deficit relative to GDP (9.9%) since 1945.[57] The national debt increased by $1.9 trillion during FY2009, versus the $1.0 trillion increase during 2008.[58]
The Obama Administration also made four significant accounting changes, to more accurately report the total spending by the Federal government. The four changes were: 1) account for the Wars in Iraq and Afghanistan (”overseas military contingencies”) in the budget rather than through the use of “emergency” supplemental spending bills; 2) assume the Alternative Minimum Tax will be indexed for inflation; 3) account for the full costs of Medicare reimbursements; and 4) anticipate the inevitable expenditures for natural disaster relief. These changes would make the debt over ten years look $2.7 trillion larger, but that debt was always there. It was just hidden.[59][60]
$1,410 billion
-320 billion (recession)
-100 billion (Republican pushed tax cuts in stimulus bill, arpa)
-245 billion (Bush bank bailout)
-100 billion (Democratic stimulus spending, arpa)
-185 billion (Medicare costs naturally going up, Medicaid costs naturally going up, unemployment insurance to offset more workers out of work in the depression, Social Security natural cost going up, and Defense - including the war effort in Afghanistan and Iraq for the first time in the budget)
=460 billion. The exact same as the 2008 budget.
If you look at the numbers fairly, Obama didn't increase spending rapidly. Unless the 100 billion for arpa and the partial fraction of the 185 billion for unemployment insurance is huge in your mind.
Bush signed TARP. Bush didn't include the cost of war in his budget.
Show me a Republican president since Nixon that hasn't added to the deficit. Oh wait, you can't...
There are many things lacking in child's brain that lead them to make pretty poor decisions sometimes (underdeveloped empathy in young children, for example), but saying that destructive acts are not on purpose is just plain wrong.
I've seen 4 year olds do mean things on purpose. They know very well that it is going to, say, make a younger sibling cry. Pinching, hitting, with the express intent of either getting a reaction, plain curiosity, or to make the other person leave them alone.
Very purposeful.
It is all the other things (experience, empathy, awareness of consequence, etc..) that the child lacks. Not purpose.
Because then I would cry bloody murder, since to target ads you first of all have to find out more about me than I'm willing to give to advertising companies.
There's one thing that we all want though: entertainment. No personal knowledge required. I've seen some ads that were pretty funny, or moving, or just plain engaging. If every ad were "super bowl ad" quality, people would watch more of them.
But instead, advertisers (naturally) seek to send out as many ads as possible, on as many channels as possible, for the lowest cost. What I doubt many of them take into account, is that sure, they've sent 100 million ads out on radio/tv/internet, but 85% of them were not seen due to blockers, fast forward, whatever. If instead, they sent out 25 million that were 4x the quality in terms of humor/engaging, they would probably have a much higher view rate.
The other issue, personal data and ad quality aside, is the repetitive nature of ads. On any particular station, or on something like Hulu, you are shown the same damn ad for weeks sometimes. No matter how funny or pertinent the ad is to you, you aren't going to watch it the 100th time.
Its fine to advertise a product over and over, but it had better be 10 completely different commercials for the same product, not one shown 10x.
"Although government programs generally are horribly inefficient, do you have any actual data indicating that NASA is just as bad?"
I'd ask where is the data that government in general is "horribly" inefficient.....
I keep seeing this as a conservative talking point, but I have yet to find any data backing it up. Medicare for instance, with its 1-3% overhead costs vs private insurance at 12-15%.
(I know the counter-argument, medicare has all elderly, so relative to administration costs, the payments are huge, thus lowering the relative percent of those administrative costs....but you'd expect that payments going out would require administrative actions and management. If payments go up, administration of those payments should also, yet they don't. Medicare is very very efficient).
I can understand not wanting to bother with games that are difficult to master, or have long completion times per mission/goal. But what I've noticed about many newer games, is in addition to getting easier, is that the player has less and less control.
I'm an adult. I come home from work, and I don't want to spend 2 hours learning and 2 hours more to finish some level in a game, but I do want to move my character/tank whatever around where I want, build defenses how I want, and not be interrupted by movie content all the time.
I picked up a couple new, well reviewed RTS games. It was the most frustrating gameplay I've ever experienced. Dawn of War 2, Warhammer 40,000 for instance. Each mission, you'd be moving along, and mid battle, or mid move across an area to get cover, constant pop ups with voice overs, during which time, you'd loose control of your forces while the game explained something completely stupid to you.
Even worse, mid battle or when moving troops, the game would take control of your screen, slide the view up to some location, and say "go there". And I'm not kidding, it was like every 2 minutes or so.
I miss the days of games like Age of Empires where you could build and build, attack at your pace, exhaust resources if you want to build absurdly large/fun defenses, and basically play, win, or lose the game however you wanted. There is nothing like that on the market now, that I know of.
For me, it seems like the problem isn't easy vs hard. It is the lack of control that modern games give the player. They play more and more like Interactive Movies, that constantly interrupt you, and guide you down narrow paths to tell a story. I blogged about a couple purchases a while back. I haven't bought any games since then.
My Older Blog Post:
I haven’t been playing many games in the last 6 months. This weekend I got the urge to play a RTS, so I read up on reviews, and choose Company of Heroes and Dawn of War 2, Warhammer 40,000.
Both of them suck. At least, if you were expecting to play an RTS in the C&C, Age of Empires, Warcraft sense.
First off, you have zero control. Each game constantly interrupts gameplay by telling you to move to a marker, to engage the target at a second marker, to send artillery to this smoke. You have no control. Each game just tells exactly what to do. Plus, their is no way to "overkill defense" just for the fun of it. I really enjoyed building solid walls of towers in Age of Empires, just for fun:)
Company of Heroes is the by far the worse. Options to build artillery, barracks, etc.. were all greyed out. You’d literally wait, the screen would shift to a building, a voice would come on and say “click this building, click this button”. Once you did that, the screen would shift again to a location maker, and a voice would say “click here to deploy that other thing I had you click”.
What is the point of playing a Real Time Strategy game, if the game decides exactly what you should do?
And lets talk about how the game chooses to direct you: by taking control of the screen every other minute. That has got to be the most annoying game play “experience” I have ever encountered. Not only are you not allowed to actually make a decision, but literally ever minute the game takes control away from your mouse and keyboard, and moves the screen. It completely breaks any remaining sense of control or immersion.
I suppose that multiplayer is the only true reason those games are popular. I would assume (hope) that a multiplayer match actually allows you to make decisions, place defenses where you want them, and doesn’t interrupt your gameplay every other minute by telling you what to do and taking control of all the keys.
And personally, I would actually rather have a relatively small turn out of voters making a choice based on their beliefs, than a huge crowd of people just randomly picking a candidate because everyone is telling them they must vote. Voting isn't the important part.. keeping yourself aware of the politics of your country is!
I would prefer that people stop voting their beliefs, and instead vote on facts. (Will lowering taxes stimulate the economy? How much, and where's the proof?, If we increased taxes the same amount we were going to lower them, and put that money in infrastructure jobs, would it have a bigger effect? How much, and where's the proof?) I'm pretty tired of all the ideological wars here in the US. Trying to find unbiased numbers to support an issue is getting harder and harder.
I agree with you that it would be nice if a larger percent of voters (everywhere) were more informed about politics and issues. However, in the states, low voter turnout is almost always a conservative win. That small slice of largely conservative folks who did vote, won't be more informed. Likely, they will just be more extreme in their views. Rabidly anti-abortion folks, Tea Partiers, the more often than not anti-change/anti-progressive senior citizens...basically, people who are angry, afraid, or some combination of the two are those that will always show up to vote.
So, I don't fear the uneducated masses voting. I wish they were more educated, sure. But being led by fear and anger is far worse than being led by the mixture contained in the uneducated masses. Some of who, happen to be very educated (college kids, busy people with careers and families, etc..).
This is what it comes to.....
The overton window (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overton_window) has shifted so far right, that NPR, which when viewed against all the reporting in the world, is actually very center, or slightly right of center against Europe, is accused of having a liberal bias.
There is such as thing as reality. At some point, news needs to be evaluated by how factual it is. I'd trust NPR over MSNBC, FOX, or any other highly commerical news source any day of the week.
If you consider NPR liberal, perhaps it really is true that reality has a well known liberal bias.
"He destroyed and continues to destroy the principle of rule by law"
Huh? That is a pretty broad damning statement. Care to back it up with examples?
"Had GM and Chrysler gone bankrupt, the assets, if they were capable of productive use (which is saying if they were capable of doing more good than harm) would have been sold to organizations capable of running them at a profit. "
And what do you think the rest of the world would be doing while our auto industry was out of action for 5-10 years trying to reclaim market share, re-branding, and forming new business models? And what organization has the capital to buy GM, a GM deep in debt, who isn't already in competition with GM? Why would they want a bunch of factories and car designs that have proven themselves not as workable/marketable as their own?
Slightly offtopic, but about unions:
I'm always curious when I read posts from people that are anti-union (I'm assuming by your tone), what type of system they think would work better to balance the wages and rights of workers against the profit motivation of companies?
Companies attempt to push wages and benefits down as low as they can go. It is a very easy and straightforward way to increase profit. What market force (or other force) would keep wages and benefits at a living level?
If you look at pre-union America, worker conditions and salary were horrible. Because every company was basically paying minimum wage, even if a worker chose to leave, he wouldn't find anything better. Companies had no incentive to raise wages or improve conditions.
Prior to unions, there was no concept of the weekend. What market force would have created weekends?
There are a ton of factors involved in America's manufacturing decline. And I'd rank unions pretty low on the list. Take Germany as an example of a nearly 100% unionized car work force, who's economy is in pretty great shape.
But the rich aren't paying. That's the entire point. Capital gains taxes are low, loopholes, and other advantages makes their effective tax rate much lower than the middle class.
As for those in the bottom rung paying nothing, did it every occur to you why they are in that position, and why the USA has the highest income inequality in the entire world? Why the average wages went down by 2000 dollars for the middle class the last 10 years, but the top earners wages tripled?
Maybe if the top didn't have the vast majority of the country's wealth, they wouldn't be paying, by volume, so much of the taxes. The percent paid of their income certainly isn't high, but since their income itself is so high, the actual dollar amount is high.
Re-read this thread since it has been modded a bit more now. There are plenty of links and examples about how little the very rich actually pay.
From 1950-until Reagan we had very high taxes on the rich (70-90%) and the rich managed to stay rich, our factories continued to employ workers, and the country was largely stable. I have no idea why people are freaked out about a possible return to Clinton's tax rate of 39% and talk of (hopefully) closing some loop holes...
Citizens united certain made things blatantly worse. But it has been going on a long time.
Meaningful campaign finance reform, 100% public funded elections, is probably the only way out. But getting something like that passed is likely impossible.
If X tax revenue needs to be raised, and Y pays less, then Z must pay more. And having one of the richest companies in the world pay 2.4% when most of us are paying an order of magnitude more lacks justice.
This is true for any plausible value of X, so simply saying "there shouldn't be as much tax" is irrelevant.
I think it would more appropriate to say:
If X tax revenue needs to be raised, and Y pays less, then who cares about Z, we'll just borrow it from the Chinese:)