I think if you look at the sum of factors leading to the recession, it is fairly obvious that the blame is more on the Republican side. Mainly Glass-Steagell, but more importantly, the de-emphasis on enforcing regulation throughout the Bush jr. Presidency. More and more interviews with "people on the inside" seem to indicate that there was a strong administrative push calling on regulators to back off.
Regardless of Glass-Steagell or CRA, if regulators had been doing there jobs, it might not have gotten so bad.
I couldn't find the link, but if I recall correctly, wasn't the money spent on regulation during Bush's years lower than normal? Less funding, less support, a general attitude of "just back off business".
Whats sad, is that Bush, and some of the people under him, seemed to know it was a big problem, but didn't act. See the financial regulation section: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_policy_of_the_George_W._Bush_administration#Regulatory_philosophy
I think if you look at the sum of factors leading to the recession, it is fairly obvious that the blame is more on the Republican side. Mainly Glass-Steagell, but more importantly, the de-emphasis on enforcing regulation throughout the Bush jr. Presidency. More and more interviews with "people on the inside" seem to indicate that there was a strong administrative push calling on regulators to back off.
Regardless of Glass-Steagell or CRA, if regulators had been doing there jobs, it might not have gotten so bad.
I couldn't find the link, but if I recall correctly, wasn't the money spent on regulation during Bush's years lower than normal? Less funding, less support, a general attitude of "just back off business".
Whats sad, is that Bush, and some of the people under him, seemed to know it was a big problem, but didn't act. See the financial regulation section: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_policy_of_the_George_W._Bush_administration#Regulatory_philosophy
I agree with you that Obama was complicit in calling on other governments to crack down on wikileaks.
My point is that in the greater scope, you can't blame him for not getting more done in his first year.
At one point in time he had a super majority, but it was never a real super majority because of the blue dogs.
And yes, he still has a majority, but if you have followed what the Senate Rep. have been doing, its been to filibuster (threaten) like crazy, and hold up ALL legislation, even when some of that legislation was stuff they previous called for! A prime example of that is the recent small business loan bill.
My point was never about wikileaks, it was about your comments that Obama should have been able to pass anything he wants. Which is completely untrue when you look at the make up of the Senate Democrats and the behavior of the Senate Republicans.
"President Obama had a super majority. The Republican party could do nothing to stop any bill from passing. And still you want to blame somebody else."
"Factually wrong. Kennedy was alive for a part of Obama's term in office, and even after Kennedy died, a Democrat interim senator was appointed - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_G._Kirk [wikipedia.org]"
Nice nitpicking. You expect Obama to solve the prior 8 years of problems in less than 1 year with 60 democrats, several of which, like Lieberman, voted against democratic bills in the Senate.
Whether or not there was a brief period of time when Obama "enjoyed" a super majority is irrelevant when assigning blame to his ability to get bills passed.
If you want to nitpick, at least do it with relevance to the prior comment. The brief super majority, which never even existed due to blue dog democrats, was inadequate to actually passing any laws.
I won't comment on anything else, but Obama never had a senate super majority. At best, it was 59 Dems, while they waited on the outcome of the election to replace Kennedy. That election was won by a Republican.
And regardless of that, even if there was a point in time where the Dems had 60 seats (and all of them were actually alive), the Dems are much more diverse. Joe Lieberman and other Dems fought against much of Obama's legislation. Healthcare is the big example.
Sadly enough, 10 years ago I recall making some excel spreadsheets for accountants that might as well have been full blown computer programs. It certainly took at least some aspects of computer science to create.
Accountants: "We need you to encode the entire Medicare reimbursement rules and all these rules from this book, and tie it in with all the logic in this insurance plan and and and.....yes, in excel". Me: "But....but... this would be much more simple if I could do X,Y,Z and it would be centralized and hosted on a server and and and..." Accountants: "Yes, but we only know excel". Me: "Sigh...".
I'm not sure what type of system you were attempting to buy, but a stirling engine (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stirling_engine) spinning a small generator wouldn't be very expensive. There are tons of DIY plans if you want a project. You can hand build a generator (bunch of magnets and copper wire) very easily. Or, like I just did, you can buy a old washing machine motor:), http://www.watchtv.net/~rburmeister/smart.html.
You should start a community group and buy in bulk. In Portland, OR, a large number of people in one area of town did this, promising to only buy from 1 contractor (bunch of bid wars over that). That bulk buying power brought the cost down quite a bit. After federal and state tax credits were applied, I think the average price was like 3,500 or 4,000 dollars on what would have been a 12,000 dollar cost.
Unfortunately, every single person I know who tried to actually use it found it confusing, not intuitive, and the vast majority of the more powerful features were never discovered.
Wave could do so many things, but seemed to rarely do them better than dedicated solutions, so that no person could point to it and say "I am definitely going to use Wave to replace my use of X". For instance, a Wave could be an entire project collaboration space, or a way to play a chess game with a friend online, or just email. But was any one of those three uses easier or more intuitive than existing dedicated products?
I could go on about the UI also... so much potential though. It really was a neat attempt at consolidating many of the tools we use today.
Gotta love how one ancedontal story is +5 insightful and proves that government is inefficient.
I experienced the exact opposite. So what? I would contend that, depending on the service in question, the government is vastly more efficient than "free market" (or whatever you want to call 'not government').
It's even more simple than that. Poor people spend a much higher percent of their income than the rich. Typically, the poor spend 100% of their income. That alone makes it easy to see that a sales tax approach would tax, as a percent of income, the poor, much more than the rich.
There's plenty of Oil in Iraq to pay us back, and then some. http://usgovinfo.about.com/library/weekly/aairaqioil.htm http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oil_reserves#Estimated_reserves_by_country
However, that is not the point. Do you really think that the private oil corporations care how much tax payer money is spent securing those oil fields? But even that is a secondary point. Controlling energy is much more important than making money off it.
Google a bit about James Baker, silk road, Afghanistan pipelines, to see plans drawn up in the 1990's to limit China and Russians access to oil and natural gas reserves in the region. Basically building a bunch of pipelines all the way to the Caspian sea. Its no surprise that we are in Afghanistan.
Now.... the powers that be may have waited until they had an excuse to enter those countries, but control of energy, power, and money are huge factors in deciding to go to war. For proof, please see any genocide in Africa, and the US response to it.
I wonder if Verizon can actually read the password, or if they can only see if it has been changed or not?
Given that many people re-use a single password, or perhaps a few..... a verizon employee with access to those routers could most likely access tons of facebook, bank, and other accounts.
I don't see how he could be at risk for pharming with remote access disabled. Unless there is a drive-by-pharming attack that targets the remote administration spec, and in which case, again, the admin password is irrelevant.
You probably have the most important post in this entire thread.
There are dozens of reasons, besides global warming, to move away from fossil fuel use as soon as possible. And there are many strategies to do so with very little economic pains. See "Winning the Oil Endgame" on Ted.com for one example.
Indeed, many of the talks and articles that discuss moving away from oil, give figures indicating that the transition will actually boost the economy. New jobs with more variety, new manufacturing that can take place in country rather than overseas, savings for business due to more power efficiency, etc...
Despite all that, we (the US) haven't even started. Tiny little tax credits here and there, and tiny little amounts of government investment in 'green research'. I wonder how much the trillions spent on the Iraq war would have done in retrofitting our power grid for storage of power, and how many solar/thermal plants and wind farms it could have built. Priorities.
Summary from the web page: "Bored in school, failing classes, at odds with peers: This child might be an entrepreneur, says Cameron Herold. At TEDxEdmonton, he makes the case for parenting and education that helps would-be entrepreneurs flourish -- as kids and as adults."
With the seemingly constant struggle that schools have with funding, more and more specialized programs, electives, and other ways of educating are being removed. Rather than "cracking down" on kids getting D's, schools should be looking for innovative ways to discover what that kid is actually good at.
I did fairly well in school, but I knew many kids that struggled with math, but who later turned out to be very successful musicians, artists, comedians, 1 that got in very early in yahoo's start, etc.. With how fast technology moves, it seems less and less important to be teaching minute details to the percent of kids that just aren't interested. Instead, some of those kids may be big picture thinkers, and more likely to employ a bunch of mathematicians than to do the math themselves.
When the US Navy studied it (2004'ish I think), do you know if they were just duped by the hype or did they see other uses or some promise in the research?
There sure seems to be a lot of cold fusion research happening. I'm not a scientist, so I'm not sure of the quality of those studies. I stumbled across http://www.lenr-canr.org/ at some point in the past and occasionally check it to see if anything new has been discovered.
The pro-nuclear people seem to be 100% convinced that it is impossible (or economically infeasible) to have steady base load electricity using "green/renewable" sources.
I haven't researched enough to comfortably conclude who's correct, though. Personally, I don't have a problem with nuclear energy. Especially the small, buried, self-contained varieties. However, from what I've read, it doesn't seem like much of a engineering problem to create stable base load from solar and wind (solar thermal liquid salt, and pumped-hydro for wind).
The major problem with using new forms of energy isn't so much cost or technical feasibility, but rather, deciding who's going to pay for what. Like the recent slashdot post on wind farms in Oregon that overproduced, and the grid couldn't handle it, so they were told to lower production. If there were pumped-hydro storage available (Oregon has a ton of mountains and valleys), problem solved. But who's responsibility is it to build the storage? The grid owner? The wind farm owners?
This is one of those areas that will require local/national government regulations to get things moving (for instance, if you own a grid, you must be able to store some percent via hyrdo, salt, battery, whatever.), or nationalizing or local public ownership of the grids and production.
The only model that will produce good quality news, now that the internet has changed everything, is public owned, non-profit news.
News is a necessary service required for a functioning democracy. It is no less important than water, electricity, roads, or other services that are typically government owned, or local public ownership.
Would you pay 5 dollars a month for a local (or another 5 for a national) news agency that had a TV channel, a newspaper, and who's board of directors was elected by the public under the mandate of objective reporting? Zero advertising allowed. Not beholden to any corporation.
Wouldn't it be possible to monitor the total electrical output of 1 or many farms, and the split second its too much, redirect part of the power to a pump-storage?
I'm researching building a single wind generator for my Father's farm, and one of the issues is you don't want to overcharge your batteries, and another issue is in big wind, you don't want to fry your generator.
The recommended way is to buy this device that A) monitors your batteries, and if full, dumps the power (wasting it on a heater or something), and B) if the blades are spinning too fast, you can either buy mechanical brakes, or with certain tail designs, (or a spring/hinge) the blades will start turning away from the wind if the wind is strong enough.
Give that the problems seem easy to solve for a single wind generator, I assume that some point along the grid would be monitoring the total combined power of 1 or several windfarms, and if it was too much, it could either dump it or redirect it to pump-storage.
Slashdot Mirror
I think if you look at the sum of factors leading to the recession, it is fairly obvious that the blame is more on the Republican side. Mainly Glass-Steagell, but more importantly, the de-emphasis on enforcing regulation throughout the Bush jr. Presidency. More and more interviews with "people on the inside" seem to indicate that there was a strong administrative push calling on regulators to back off.
Regardless of Glass-Steagell or CRA, if regulators had been doing there jobs, it might not have gotten so bad.
http://www.time.com/time/specials/packages/completelist/0,29569,1872229,00.html
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/20/business/20prexy.html
I couldn't find the link, but if I recall correctly, wasn't the money spent on regulation during Bush's years lower than normal? Less funding, less support, a general attitude of "just back off business".
Whats sad, is that Bush, and some of the people under him, seemed to know it was a big problem, but didn't act.
See the financial regulation section: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_policy_of_the_George_W._Bush_administration#Regulatory_philosophy
I think if you look at the sum of factors leading to the recession, it is fairly obvious that the blame is more on the Republican side. Mainly Glass-Steagell, but more importantly, the de-emphasis on enforcing regulation throughout the Bush jr. Presidency. More and more interviews with "people on the inside" seem to indicate that there was a strong administrative push calling on regulators to back off.
Regardless of Glass-Steagell or CRA, if regulators had been doing there jobs, it might not have gotten so bad.
http://www.time.com/time/specials/packages/completelist/0,29569,1872229,00.html
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/20/business/20prexy.html
I couldn't find the link, but if I recall correctly, wasn't the money spent on regulation during Bush's years lower than normal? Less funding, less support, a general attitude of "just back off business".
Whats sad, is that Bush, and some of the people under him, seemed to know it was a big problem, but didn't act.
See the financial regulation section: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_policy_of_the_George_W._Bush_administration#Regulatory_philosophy
I agree with you that Obama was complicit in calling on other governments to crack down on wikileaks.
My point is that in the greater scope, you can't blame him for not getting more done in his first year.
At one point in time he had a super majority, but it was never a real super majority because of the blue dogs.
And yes, he still has a majority, but if you have followed what the Senate Rep. have been doing, its been to filibuster (threaten) like crazy, and hold up ALL legislation, even when some of that legislation was stuff they previous called for! A prime example of that is the recent small business loan bill.
My point was never about wikileaks, it was about your comments that Obama should have been able to pass anything he wants. Which is completely untrue when you look at the make up of the Senate Democrats and the behavior of the Senate Republicans.
"President Obama had a super majority. The Republican party could do nothing to stop any bill from passing. And still you want to blame somebody else."
"Factually wrong.
Kennedy was alive for a part of Obama's term in office, and even after Kennedy died, a Democrat interim senator was appointed - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_G._Kirk [wikipedia.org]"
Nice nitpicking. You expect Obama to solve the prior 8 years of problems in less than 1 year with 60 democrats, several of which, like Lieberman, voted against democratic bills in the Senate.
Whether or not there was a brief period of time when Obama "enjoyed" a super majority is irrelevant when assigning blame to his ability to get bills passed.
If you want to nitpick, at least do it with relevance to the prior comment. The brief super majority, which never even existed due to blue dog democrats, was inadequate to actually passing any laws.
I won't comment on anything else, but Obama never had a senate super majority. At best, it was 59 Dems, while they waited on the outcome of the election to replace Kennedy. That election was won by a Republican.
And regardless of that, even if there was a point in time where the Dems had 60 seats (and all of them were actually alive), the Dems are much more diverse. Joe Lieberman and other Dems fought against much of Obama's legislation. Healthcare is the big example.
Sadly enough, 10 years ago I recall making some excel spreadsheets for accountants that might as well have been full blown computer programs. It certainly took at least some aspects of computer science to create.
Accountants: "We need you to encode the entire Medicare reimbursement rules and all these rules from this book, and tie it in with all the logic in this insurance plan and and and.....yes, in excel".
Me: "But....but... this would be much more simple if I could do X,Y,Z and it would be centralized and hosted on a server and and and..."
Accountants: "Yes, but we only know excel".
Me: "Sigh...".
I'm not sure what type of system you were attempting to buy, but a stirling engine (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stirling_engine) spinning a small generator wouldn't be very expensive. There are tons of DIY plans if you want a project. You can hand build a generator (bunch of magnets and copper wire) very easily. Or, like I just did, you can buy a old washing machine motor:), http://www.watchtv.net/~rburmeister/smart.html.
You should start a community group and buy in bulk. In Portland, OR, a large number of people in one area of town did this, promising to only buy from 1 contractor (bunch of bid wars over that). That bulk buying power brought the cost down quite a bit. After federal and state tax credits were applied, I think the average price was like 3,500 or 4,000 dollars on what would have been a 12,000 dollar cost.
I saw a lot of potential in the product.
Unfortunately, every single person I know who tried to actually use it found it confusing, not intuitive, and the vast majority of the more powerful features were never discovered.
Wave could do so many things, but seemed to rarely do them better than dedicated solutions, so that no person could point to it and say "I am definitely going to use Wave to replace my use of X". For instance, a Wave could be an entire project collaboration space, or a way to play a chess game with a friend online, or just email. But was any one of those three uses easier or more intuitive than existing dedicated products?
I could go on about the UI also... so much potential though. It really was a neat attempt at consolidating many of the tools we use today.
Gotta love how one ancedontal story is +5 insightful and proves that government is inefficient.
I experienced the exact opposite. So what? I would contend that, depending on the service in question, the government is vastly more efficient than "free market" (or whatever you want to call 'not government').
http://www.dilbert.com/blog/entry/government_efficiency/
We've discovered Glenn Beck's slashdot account.
It's even more simple than that. Poor people spend a much higher percent of their income than the rich. Typically, the poor spend 100% of their income. That alone makes it easy to see that a sales tax approach would tax, as a percent of income, the poor, much more than the rich.
There's plenty of Oil in Iraq to pay us back, and then some.
http://usgovinfo.about.com/library/weekly/aairaqioil.htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oil_reserves#Estimated_reserves_by_country
However, that is not the point. Do you really think that the private oil corporations care how much tax payer money is spent securing those oil fields? But even that is a secondary point. Controlling energy is much more important than making money off it.
Google a bit about James Baker, silk road, Afghanistan pipelines, to see plans drawn up in the 1990's to limit China and Russians access to oil and natural gas reserves in the region. Basically building a bunch of pipelines all the way to the Caspian sea. Its no surprise that we are in Afghanistan.
Now.... the powers that be may have waited until they had an excuse to enter those countries, but control of energy, power, and money are huge factors in deciding to go to war. For proof, please see any genocide in Africa, and the US response to it.
I'm a little surprised that you consider yourself a conservative, yet think that Iraq and Afghanistan were for oil/money/corporate interests.
As a liberal, that makes me pretty happy to see that at least some conservatives are thinking critically, and reading accurate news sources.
I wonder if Verizon can actually read the password, or if they can only see if it has been changed or not?
Given that many people re-use a single password, or perhaps a few..... a verizon employee with access to those routers could most likely access tons of facebook, bank, and other accounts.
I don't see how he could be at risk for pharming with remote access disabled. Unless there is a drive-by-pharming attack that targets the remote administration spec, and in which case, again, the admin password is irrelevant.
You probably have the most important post in this entire thread.
There are dozens of reasons, besides global warming, to move away from fossil fuel use as soon as possible. And there are many strategies to do so with very little economic pains. See "Winning the Oil Endgame" on Ted.com for one example.
Indeed, many of the talks and articles that discuss moving away from oil, give figures indicating that the transition will actually boost the economy. New jobs with more variety, new manufacturing that can take place in country rather than overseas, savings for business due to more power efficiency, etc...
Despite all that, we (the US) haven't even started. Tiny little tax credits here and there, and tiny little amounts of government investment in 'green research'. I wonder how much the trillions spent on the Iraq war would have done in retrofitting our power grid for storage of power, and how many solar/thermal plants and wind farms it could have built. Priorities.
I don't know the details of those bills, but I can't imagine how you think that teacher salaries are somehow too high....
The teachers that I know work very hard, make pretty low salaries, and have to put up with a host of crap that other jobs do not.
http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng/cameron_herold_let_s_raise_kids_to_be_entrepreneurs.html
Pretty interesting Ted Talk.
Summary from the web page:
"Bored in school, failing classes, at odds with peers: This child might be an entrepreneur, says Cameron Herold. At TEDxEdmonton, he makes the case for parenting and education that helps would-be entrepreneurs flourish -- as kids and as adults."
With the seemingly constant struggle that schools have with funding, more and more specialized programs, electives, and other ways of educating are being removed. Rather than "cracking down" on kids getting D's, schools should be looking for innovative ways to discover what that kid is actually good at.
I did fairly well in school, but I knew many kids that struggled with math, but who later turned out to be very successful musicians, artists, comedians, 1 that got in very early in yahoo's start, etc.. With how fast technology moves, it seems less and less important to be teaching minute details to the percent of kids that just aren't interested. Instead, some of those kids may be big picture thinkers, and more likely to employ a bunch of mathematicians than to do the math themselves.
When the US Navy studied it (2004'ish I think), do you know if they were just duped by the hype or did they see other uses or some promise in the research?
http://www.lenr-canr.org/Collections/USNavy.htm
http://www.lenr-canr.org/FilesByDate.htm
There sure seems to be a lot of cold fusion research happening. I'm not a scientist, so I'm not sure of the quality of those studies. I stumbled across http://www.lenr-canr.org/ at some point in the past and occasionally check it to see if anything new has been discovered.
I doubt it's intellectual dishonesty. More likely the poster didn't know of that analysis. It is less than a month old.
Well, there are a second set of anti-nuclear folks who are not afraid of a meltdown, but rather, just do not see the need to use nuclear.
http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng/debate_does_the_world_need_nuclear_energy.html
The pro-nuclear people seem to be 100% convinced that it is impossible (or economically infeasible) to have steady base load electricity using "green/renewable" sources.
I haven't researched enough to comfortably conclude who's correct, though. Personally, I don't have a problem with nuclear energy. Especially the small, buried, self-contained varieties. However, from what I've read, it doesn't seem like much of a engineering problem to create stable base load from solar and wind (solar thermal liquid salt, and pumped-hydro for wind).
The major problem with using new forms of energy isn't so much cost or technical feasibility, but rather, deciding who's going to pay for what. Like the recent slashdot post on wind farms in Oregon that overproduced, and the grid couldn't handle it, so they were told to lower production. If there were pumped-hydro storage available (Oregon has a ton of mountains and valleys), problem solved. But who's responsibility is it to build the storage? The grid owner? The wind farm owners?
This is one of those areas that will require local/national government regulations to get things moving (for instance, if you own a grid, you must be able to store some percent via hyrdo, salt, battery, whatever.), or nationalizing or local public ownership of the grids and production.
The only model that will produce good quality news, now that the internet has changed everything, is public owned, non-profit news.
News is a necessary service required for a functioning democracy. It is no less important than water, electricity, roads, or other services that are typically government owned, or local public ownership.
Would you pay 5 dollars a month for a local (or another 5 for a national) news agency that had a TV channel, a newspaper, and who's board of directors was elected by the public under the mandate of objective reporting? Zero advertising allowed. Not beholden to any corporation.
Wouldn't it be possible to monitor the total electrical output of 1 or many farms, and the split second its too much, redirect part of the power to a pump-storage?
I'm researching building a single wind generator for my Father's farm, and one of the issues is you don't want to overcharge your batteries, and another issue is in big wind, you don't want to fry your generator.
The recommended way is to buy this device that A) monitors your batteries, and if full, dumps the power (wasting it on a heater or something), and B) if the blades are spinning too fast, you can either buy mechanical brakes, or with certain tail designs, (or a spring/hinge) the blades will start turning away from the wind if the wind is strong enough.
Give that the problems seem easy to solve for a single wind generator, I assume that some point along the grid would be monitoring the total combined power of 1 or several windfarms, and if it was too much, it could either dump it or redirect it to pump-storage.