Right, it depends on what the definition of multitasking is. When I think multitask I think single core processor. My focus is the processor and it can only really do one thing at a time, but I can do things that don't require thought along side things that do require thought, like holding a conversation while stirring soup (or sending audio data to the soundcard to play while the processor handles input). The focus can switch from one thing to another in such a way that you aren't slowing the original task by performing the other because you would otherwise just be waiting, like a thread blocking while it waits on a response from the network. In reality you can call thread.Sleep(timeout) and allow the processor to do other tasks, checking periodically to see if the original task is ready to be continued when the timeout expires.
With this interpretation, being good at multitasking means you are good at organizing your operations so you can minimize the time you are blocking needlessly, and good at estimating the timeout value to check back on other tasks, and prioritizing the tasks so the most important ones are completed in a timely manner, and knowing when the time to switch from one task to another will not exceed the amount of time you would be wasting while waiting for the first task to complete. It does not mean that you are good at dictating a letter while you write a blog post simultaneously.
Yes, the problem I've always had with poetry is that the meanings I get are often very, very different from the rest of my peers. I usually say something rational based on the content and the world when asked about the meaning of a poem that makes perfect sense to me, and get very lukewarm responses. Then somebody else will say they take the meaning as something wild-assed derived from a feeling they had when they read it, not based entirely within the context, and logically not sound. If their answer really reflected the meaning of the text, then the text is full of broken metaphors, and this is called clever, or a good observation.
No, it's not. It's a tangent sprung up from the original topic. If you are going use a poem to start a discussion, fine. I understand that. But when you ask about the meaning of a poem in a classroom it often sounds like stoners guessing at the meaning of life, based not on what they've seen of the world, but whatever damned thing pops in to their mind. When they reach an idea that sounds "deep" they conclude that must be the meaning. It doesn't make sense.
I can agree that the problem of living too long is a problem. However, I would say the solution to that would be to raise the age at which you can collect social security to be the life expectancy of the nation. Then we can pay less to it mandatorily and are free to supplement with our own retirement funds.
So, sure, we can get rid of social security and medicare and medicaid. That's likely, at some point, to really make your life difficult. That's a huge cost to you - you lose a big benefit. What do you get? Do your taxes go down? To you get to keep more of your money? No. You don't. The benefit of getting rid of social security and medicare and medicaid is that the richest Americans can continue to pay 15% taxes on their capital gains and dividends while the rest of us pay up to a marginal 43% combined on income and payroll taxes.
If they got rid of social security, medicare and medicaid everybody's taxes most certainly would go down, as they are seperate taxes from income tax. I don't need you to tell me what the rich are trying to do to me, I have my own beliefs that extend beyond this narrow conversation. One of which is I believe we should abolish taxes on wages, increase capital gains taxes and adopt a consumption tax for all spending above the poverty line. I'm not being duped by the rich in to supporting their low taxes, I'm expressing ideas on how I think a free society should govern itself. One of those things should be you are free to save for your own retirement. I support medicare and medicaid, but I am not a fan of social security, and the fact that the wealthy might want to save money off of eliminating it has no relationship to my opinion.
When people have an accident and can not continue to work that, I think, is the perfect cause for charity. Medical care for all the people who can't afford it is a good role for the government. Fewer people are incapacitated to the point where they can't work and people love to help that cause. The working poor are a less cuddly breed and people would be reluctant to help, and medical expenses are extremely variable and based on chance, that is why government is more appropriate there. Regular living expenses for somebody who can't work are consistent, predictable and less urgent.
Above all, though, I want everybody to be aware that these entitlement are every bit based on their personal values as every other "intrusive" law, including smoking bans, 6 foot rules at strip clubs, anti-gambling laws and drug laws. The only difference is that they "won". The values underpinning Social Security, medicare and medicaid are the values that reflect society, and people pushing the values that "lost" should not be looked down on for speaking their mind and trying to be active in their government. The religious especially are looked down on for their political views, as being oppressive. Well guess what? Some people feel oppressed by Social Security and having to give to welfare. That's the point I was trying to make. Not that Social Security is bad (which I do think) but that those programs are a product of tyranny of the majority; it'd be nice to live in a society where enough people believed in the programs that they want to force on everybody else that they could support them without the participation of those who oppose it.
Social Security would never be practical if not for the forced participation of those who do not need it. That is the only reason it has to be a law, and I want people to know it. Of course some laws have to be that way, but you should never forget what you're doing. If you forget, you lose sight of where the limit should be and you won't see the abuse when it happens.
Re:Could Someone Help Me Out With This?
on
Debt Deal Reached
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· Score: 0
Well, first of all the first paragraph was dripping in sarcasm. The point is secularism and religion and their effects on the government are not that different. I was trying to prove the point that everybody has values they try to force on other people through the government. You've decided that helping people out is the proper thing to do, so you want to make laws to make that happen. Christians think fetus-saving is the proper thing to do, so they want to make laws to make that happen. Some people think keeping people off of drugs is the proper thing to do, so they want to make laws to make that happen.
Then you come along "but-but-but! But! My ideas are right! It should be my values that are laws!" Well good for you, you are at the same standing as everybody else. Wouldn't it be nice if you could voluntarily do the things you think are right so long as you aren't using force? The cultural stigma of being a selfish jackass who never gives to charity, or more importantly gives his time to charity, is less of an offense than somebody who doesn't tip their waitress. That's the real problem. And how did we get that way? You're told you can just throw money at the problem. Just throw money at it, it works with everything. Our taxes will solve all of our problems. It's pathetic that we live in a society where the only way we can give to charity is when we vote the money out of other people's hands.
This is in no way a defense of Christians, it's just an attack on our culture. People can be good people when you give them the responsibility to do so. We campaign for laws the way we should campaign for social changes. Social changes, not legal changes. Any legalities not supported by society will be broken from the start. Big shocker that we have such a broken legal system, isn't it?
Uh, what?! You mean that an auction house using real money, just like any other auction house using real money on the internet, might actually require people to note the income on their taxes? Quick! Somebody tell everybody who ever used eBay the government is saddling up to ride in on them at dawn! It's about to get real ugly!
Re:Could Someone Help Me Out With This?
on
Debt Deal Reached
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· Score: -1, Flamebait
I wish you would stop pushing your morals on the rest of us. You're just as bad as the Christians, deciding what you think is right and using force to make us all fall in line. All this "Love thy brother" and "treat others as you wish to be treated" nonsense is straight from the Bible too! It's disgusting.
Personally, I'm of the belief that social security and government programs of the sort are society's way of abdicating responsibility for their neighbors. "It's not my fault my neighbor is starving, its the governments!" It's a lot easier not to be involved in charities if you feel like you've been forced to give to one every time you get paid.
Re:Could Someone Help Me Out With This?
on
Debt Deal Reached
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· Score: 1
Uh, tax consumption above the poverty line, and raise the capital gains tax? How come 401(k)s are nothing but a smart idea, but privatized social security is a sugar-coated satan sandwich? Even without eliminating wage taxes you could even set it up so that money placed in an approved retirement fund that would replace social security will be tax free until you start drawing from the account... Many employers may even help to contribute if they know the money is going toward retirement. If you combine a consumption tax with employer contributions and eliminate the payroll taxes, people will want to save and will have the means to do so themselves.
But a consumption tax is regressive! Oh, that's right. Because the wealthy not spending their money will do what with it? Spend it or invest it. If they spend it, they get taxed. If they invest it, their gains are taxed. If they just sit on it.... well then it's not doing them any good, is it?
Well seeing as how I've been in prison myself and did quite a bit of research on it, and spent a lot of time on forums where former and soon-to-be inmates post on topics just like this, I'll take my research over your assertions. And I'm not saying there is never any prison rape, I'm just saying it is exaggerated. A very low percentage of people in prison are raped, the impression a lot of people have is that it is almost inevitable. That's just not true, and from what you're saying we agree on this, so I don't know why you felt the need to act like I was wrong for saying it is played up, then going on to say it happens to very specific groups in very specific places. So, uh, how is that not played up when everybody always immediately jumps to "Ohhhh! Butt rape!" when they hear "prison"?
Prison rape is played up in the states. Of all the people I've talked to in and out of prison, you almost never see that kind of thing unless its consensual. They always play it as rape though because getting caught having sex with another inmate will get you a pretty hefty punishment, and definitely doesn't sit well with a lot of the other inmates.
No, that's not it. Girls love to be talked to that way, they dont' like seeing other girls talked about that way when they aren't. The problem with geeks doing it is that they're overtly creepy and unable to bluff enough "casual" interest to cover the scent of their all-too-eager interest.
Women stay away because guys intimidate them and don't respect their intelligence, it has nothing to do with sexual jokes.
Yeah, I think Congressmen make more than the average salary. Independently wealthy would have to take a pay cut to get in there, most average people would get a pay raise.
I know in the past I've argued with you over politics, but damn if you don't make a lot of sense in this story. It's a damned shame that your extremely interesting and informative posts are sitting at +1, when inane comments with nothing but strawmen are sitting at +4.
Why is it that all of a sudden reducing government (which has only grown over the years) is tantamount to becoming anarchy? Some nutjobs do believe in almost no government, most of us believe in a weaker federal government because what people in California want doesn't matter to people in Ohio, and what people in Ohio want doesn't matter to people in Florida. Example: Federal law has it that we can't use marijuana for medicinal purposes. California is in violation of that law, but most Californians don't care, and a lot of people outside of California would like to move there specifically for that. Wouldn't it make sense that people outside of California not have a say in what happens in California? This kind of bullshit happens all the time. It's about granularity. Small democracies work way, way better than big ones. It makes no sense to have the biggest, most diverse, least related group of voters doing the most powerful governing.
The federal government, as the least representative government of any specific person does a whole hell of a lot it was never intended to do. It's not a matter if government should do it, it's a matter of if a government so far removed should do it. If every single person in Montana wanted to opt out of Social Security in favor of their own locally run version, where do the assholes in the rest of the states get off telling them how to run their lives? If you want to be a dictator to the minority, instead of respect differences of opinion, maybe you should leave. Your ideas of how the government should be run are further out of touch with our laws than small government fans. You obviously don't have the support to change the laws or the constitution would have been ammended to make a lot of these illegal, overreaching programs legal, so you get out. There is nothing stopping any state from implementing any of the federal programs for themselves, they just want to impose it on everybody else whether they agree to it or not so they can get the benefit of other state's resources. That is the evil of strong central government, that is the purpose of the electoral college, and that is why changes to the constitution require more than a simple majority. But you can get around all of that by simply ignoring the constitution, and that's what we as a country have done. Somehow the people that don't support it want to send us back to a third world country? No, not at all. But I guess it's easier for you to cover your ears and scream than to challenge your own beliefs.
Re:Holy Hipster overload batman
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OK Go Goes HTML5
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I read it, and I agree. You have my support. Thanks for calling them like you see them.
But bah whatever, you posted anon and probably won't check for replies...
I share your same conflict. But Rupert Murdochs ability to broadcast his views is caused by his financial success, and the reception of his ideas keeps him a financial success. He deals in information and ideas. Conflating that to influencing an election in a disproportionate manner isn't that far from saying the charismatic should not be able to influence an election more than anybody else. Freedom of speech is critical to a well-functioning democracy, and those who's speech makes sense to people, and make an effort to communicate it to the most people are the ways speech impacts a democracy.
Rupert Murdoch's views and the views he shows on his networks makes sense to people, if it didn't it wouldn't influence them. He has made an effort to communicate it, he runs a media empire. He is not a media monopoly, especially in the days of the internet, so I don't see a problem here. Many people hate Fox News, many people watch it. If you choose not to watch Fox News you aren't without news entirely.
The whole argument of Rupert Murdoch influencing elections and nobody voted for him is transparent, and the same could be said of any political activist. I was just trying to show that his influence comes from people watching and reading his products, and the money he makes from that allows him to do more of it. That is an effect of democracy, the people are presented with information, they evaluate it, they make a decision.
As an aside, I'm not sure how I feel about everybody getting a vote either. It is a sticky situation. I think with a perfect metric of what is "informed" it would make the most sense to only allow the informed to vote, but lacking a perfect metric as we are it does seem immoral to even try.
Nobody is saying not to pay the restaurant, the Republican side is there will be no default, to pay the restaurant, we have to stop paying for netflix. Obama is saying we won't pay the restaurant knowing full well that we could pay the restaurant and take the much less severe consequences of having our netflix account cancelled. Thing is, no netflix isn't as scary as having the cops all over you, so it doesn't work as a political tool as well. Who's playing politics again?
What I meant was that we won't default either way, and using default as a scarecrow on either side is a huge problem. They should all be saying "We absolutely will not default. We will sell assets if we have to, but the United States does not default and we never will, and when we reach our decision on what to do to fix our deficits (taxes + spending cuts or just spending cuts), it will be because we as a nation refuse to not pay our bills, and any kind of sacrifices we make will prove our trustworthiness. Instead we get political posturing on who's fault it might be if we do default. And that is absolutely harmful to our markets.
Those are extremely good points. However, there is also the problem that the democratic controlled congress stopped approving budgets in this same timeframe. Meanwhile lots of laws since the medicare drug program and TARP are going to add to the deficit, and this spending is just going to happen without congressional approval of an overall budget. The fact that those programs were passed and that money was spent is more of a reason to not add more spending on top of it, which has happened. They passed those programs and now they want to make cuts because you can't keep spending that way. Using the debt ceiling as leverage to get the cuts they know need to happen seems to be taking responsibility for the spending they voted for by backing unpopular cuts as opposed to just laying low and hoping the problem goes away.
I didn't realize the oceans were struggling to survive at all. I thought they were getting more powerful and increasing in size, claiming more and more of man's land as its own.
Slashdot Mirror
Right, it depends on what the definition of multitasking is. When I think multitask I think single core processor. My focus is the processor and it can only really do one thing at a time, but I can do things that don't require thought along side things that do require thought, like holding a conversation while stirring soup (or sending audio data to the soundcard to play while the processor handles input). The focus can switch from one thing to another in such a way that you aren't slowing the original task by performing the other because you would otherwise just be waiting, like a thread blocking while it waits on a response from the network. In reality you can call thread.Sleep(timeout) and allow the processor to do other tasks, checking periodically to see if the original task is ready to be continued when the timeout expires.
With this interpretation, being good at multitasking means you are good at organizing your operations so you can minimize the time you are blocking needlessly, and good at estimating the timeout value to check back on other tasks, and prioritizing the tasks so the most important ones are completed in a timely manner, and knowing when the time to switch from one task to another will not exceed the amount of time you would be wasting while waiting for the first task to complete. It does not mean that you are good at dictating a letter while you write a blog post simultaneously.
Sure, I'd like to believe you but I'm pretty sure most of these thoughts came from a brain.
Yes, the problem I've always had with poetry is that the meanings I get are often very, very different from the rest of my peers. I usually say something rational based on the content and the world when asked about the meaning of a poem that makes perfect sense to me, and get very lukewarm responses. Then somebody else will say they take the meaning as something wild-assed derived from a feeling they had when they read it, not based entirely within the context, and logically not sound. If their answer really reflected the meaning of the text, then the text is full of broken metaphors, and this is called clever, or a good observation.
No, it's not. It's a tangent sprung up from the original topic. If you are going use a poem to start a discussion, fine. I understand that. But when you ask about the meaning of a poem in a classroom it often sounds like stoners guessing at the meaning of life, based not on what they've seen of the world, but whatever damned thing pops in to their mind. When they reach an idea that sounds "deep" they conclude that must be the meaning. It doesn't make sense.
I like the emphasis, it should be in the original article. It really makes it sound way nuttier.
I can agree that the problem of living too long is a problem. However, I would say the solution to that would be to raise the age at which you can collect social security to be the life expectancy of the nation. Then we can pay less to it mandatorily and are free to supplement with our own retirement funds.
Makerbot prints a makerbot.
So, sure, we can get rid of social security and medicare and medicaid. That's likely, at some point, to really make your life difficult. That's a huge cost to you - you lose a big benefit. What do you get? Do your taxes go down? To you get to keep more of your money? No. You don't. The benefit of getting rid of social security and medicare and medicaid is that the richest Americans can continue to pay 15% taxes on their capital gains and dividends while the rest of us pay up to a marginal 43% combined on income and payroll taxes.
If they got rid of social security, medicare and medicaid everybody's taxes most certainly would go down, as they are seperate taxes from income tax. I don't need you to tell me what the rich are trying to do to me, I have my own beliefs that extend beyond this narrow conversation. One of which is I believe we should abolish taxes on wages, increase capital gains taxes and adopt a consumption tax for all spending above the poverty line. I'm not being duped by the rich in to supporting their low taxes, I'm expressing ideas on how I think a free society should govern itself. One of those things should be you are free to save for your own retirement. I support medicare and medicaid, but I am not a fan of social security, and the fact that the wealthy might want to save money off of eliminating it has no relationship to my opinion.
When people have an accident and can not continue to work that, I think, is the perfect cause for charity. Medical care for all the people who can't afford it is a good role for the government. Fewer people are incapacitated to the point where they can't work and people love to help that cause. The working poor are a less cuddly breed and people would be reluctant to help, and medical expenses are extremely variable and based on chance, that is why government is more appropriate there. Regular living expenses for somebody who can't work are consistent, predictable and less urgent.
Above all, though, I want everybody to be aware that these entitlement are every bit based on their personal values as every other "intrusive" law, including smoking bans, 6 foot rules at strip clubs, anti-gambling laws and drug laws. The only difference is that they "won". The values underpinning Social Security, medicare and medicaid are the values that reflect society, and people pushing the values that "lost" should not be looked down on for speaking their mind and trying to be active in their government. The religious especially are looked down on for their political views, as being oppressive. Well guess what? Some people feel oppressed by Social Security and having to give to welfare. That's the point I was trying to make. Not that Social Security is bad (which I do think) but that those programs are a product of tyranny of the majority; it'd be nice to live in a society where enough people believed in the programs that they want to force on everybody else that they could support them without the participation of those who oppose it.
Social Security would never be practical if not for the forced participation of those who do not need it. That is the only reason it has to be a law, and I want people to know it. Of course some laws have to be that way, but you should never forget what you're doing. If you forget, you lose sight of where the limit should be and you won't see the abuse when it happens.
Well, first of all the first paragraph was dripping in sarcasm. The point is secularism and religion and their effects on the government are not that different. I was trying to prove the point that everybody has values they try to force on other people through the government. You've decided that helping people out is the proper thing to do, so you want to make laws to make that happen. Christians think fetus-saving is the proper thing to do, so they want to make laws to make that happen. Some people think keeping people off of drugs is the proper thing to do, so they want to make laws to make that happen.
Then you come along "but-but-but! But! My ideas are right! It should be my values that are laws!" Well good for you, you are at the same standing as everybody else. Wouldn't it be nice if you could voluntarily do the things you think are right so long as you aren't using force? The cultural stigma of being a selfish jackass who never gives to charity, or more importantly gives his time to charity, is less of an offense than somebody who doesn't tip their waitress. That's the real problem. And how did we get that way? You're told you can just throw money at the problem. Just throw money at it, it works with everything. Our taxes will solve all of our problems. It's pathetic that we live in a society where the only way we can give to charity is when we vote the money out of other people's hands.
This is in no way a defense of Christians, it's just an attack on our culture. People can be good people when you give them the responsibility to do so. We campaign for laws the way we should campaign for social changes. Social changes, not legal changes. Any legalities not supported by society will be broken from the start. Big shocker that we have such a broken legal system, isn't it?
Uh, what?! You mean that an auction house using real money, just like any other auction house using real money on the internet, might actually require people to note the income on their taxes? Quick! Somebody tell everybody who ever used eBay the government is saddling up to ride in on them at dawn! It's about to get real ugly!
Always prompt, always satisfying.
I wish you would stop pushing your morals on the rest of us. You're just as bad as the Christians, deciding what you think is right and using force to make us all fall in line. All this "Love thy brother" and "treat others as you wish to be treated" nonsense is straight from the Bible too! It's disgusting.
Personally, I'm of the belief that social security and government programs of the sort are society's way of abdicating responsibility for their neighbors. "It's not my fault my neighbor is starving, its the governments!" It's a lot easier not to be involved in charities if you feel like you've been forced to give to one every time you get paid.
Uh, tax consumption above the poverty line, and raise the capital gains tax? How come 401(k)s are nothing but a smart idea, but privatized social security is a sugar-coated satan sandwich? Even without eliminating wage taxes you could even set it up so that money placed in an approved retirement fund that would replace social security will be tax free until you start drawing from the account... Many employers may even help to contribute if they know the money is going toward retirement. If you combine a consumption tax with employer contributions and eliminate the payroll taxes, people will want to save and will have the means to do so themselves.
But a consumption tax is regressive! Oh, that's right. Because the wealthy not spending their money will do what with it? Spend it or invest it. If they spend it, they get taxed. If they invest it, their gains are taxed. If they just sit on it.... well then it's not doing them any good, is it?
Well seeing as how I've been in prison myself and did quite a bit of research on it, and spent a lot of time on forums where former and soon-to-be inmates post on topics just like this, I'll take my research over your assertions. And I'm not saying there is never any prison rape, I'm just saying it is exaggerated. A very low percentage of people in prison are raped, the impression a lot of people have is that it is almost inevitable. That's just not true, and from what you're saying we agree on this, so I don't know why you felt the need to act like I was wrong for saying it is played up, then going on to say it happens to very specific groups in very specific places. So, uh, how is that not played up when everybody always immediately jumps to "Ohhhh! Butt rape!" when they hear "prison"?
Prison rape is played up in the states. Of all the people I've talked to in and out of prison, you almost never see that kind of thing unless its consensual. They always play it as rape though because getting caught having sex with another inmate will get you a pretty hefty punishment, and definitely doesn't sit well with a lot of the other inmates.
No, that's not it. Girls love to be talked to that way, they dont' like seeing other girls talked about that way when they aren't. The problem with geeks doing it is that they're overtly creepy and unable to bluff enough "casual" interest to cover the scent of their all-too-eager interest.
Women stay away because guys intimidate them and don't respect their intelligence, it has nothing to do with sexual jokes.
Yeah, I think Congressmen make more than the average salary. Independently wealthy would have to take a pay cut to get in there, most average people would get a pay raise.
If Texas got serious about secession, I would move there. I'm already half considering it as it is.
I know in the past I've argued with you over politics, but damn if you don't make a lot of sense in this story. It's a damned shame that your extremely interesting and informative posts are sitting at +1, when inane comments with nothing but strawmen are sitting at +4.
Why is it that all of a sudden reducing government (which has only grown over the years) is tantamount to becoming anarchy? Some nutjobs do believe in almost no government, most of us believe in a weaker federal government because what people in California want doesn't matter to people in Ohio, and what people in Ohio want doesn't matter to people in Florida. Example: Federal law has it that we can't use marijuana for medicinal purposes. California is in violation of that law, but most Californians don't care, and a lot of people outside of California would like to move there specifically for that. Wouldn't it make sense that people outside of California not have a say in what happens in California? This kind of bullshit happens all the time. It's about granularity. Small democracies work way, way better than big ones. It makes no sense to have the biggest, most diverse, least related group of voters doing the most powerful governing.
The federal government, as the least representative government of any specific person does a whole hell of a lot it was never intended to do. It's not a matter if government should do it, it's a matter of if a government so far removed should do it. If every single person in Montana wanted to opt out of Social Security in favor of their own locally run version, where do the assholes in the rest of the states get off telling them how to run their lives? If you want to be a dictator to the minority, instead of respect differences of opinion, maybe you should leave. Your ideas of how the government should be run are further out of touch with our laws than small government fans. You obviously don't have the support to change the laws or the constitution would have been ammended to make a lot of these illegal, overreaching programs legal, so you get out. There is nothing stopping any state from implementing any of the federal programs for themselves, they just want to impose it on everybody else whether they agree to it or not so they can get the benefit of other state's resources. That is the evil of strong central government, that is the purpose of the electoral college, and that is why changes to the constitution require more than a simple majority. But you can get around all of that by simply ignoring the constitution, and that's what we as a country have done. Somehow the people that don't support it want to send us back to a third world country? No, not at all. But I guess it's easier for you to cover your ears and scream than to challenge your own beliefs.
I read it, and I agree. You have my support. Thanks for calling them like you see them. But bah whatever, you posted anon and probably won't check for replies...
I share your same conflict. But Rupert Murdochs ability to broadcast his views is caused by his financial success, and the reception of his ideas keeps him a financial success. He deals in information and ideas. Conflating that to influencing an election in a disproportionate manner isn't that far from saying the charismatic should not be able to influence an election more than anybody else. Freedom of speech is critical to a well-functioning democracy, and those who's speech makes sense to people, and make an effort to communicate it to the most people are the ways speech impacts a democracy.
Rupert Murdoch's views and the views he shows on his networks makes sense to people, if it didn't it wouldn't influence them. He has made an effort to communicate it, he runs a media empire. He is not a media monopoly, especially in the days of the internet, so I don't see a problem here. Many people hate Fox News, many people watch it. If you choose not to watch Fox News you aren't without news entirely.
The whole argument of Rupert Murdoch influencing elections and nobody voted for him is transparent, and the same could be said of any political activist. I was just trying to show that his influence comes from people watching and reading his products, and the money he makes from that allows him to do more of it. That is an effect of democracy, the people are presented with information, they evaluate it, they make a decision.
As an aside, I'm not sure how I feel about everybody getting a vote either. It is a sticky situation. I think with a perfect metric of what is "informed" it would make the most sense to only allow the informed to vote, but lacking a perfect metric as we are it does seem immoral to even try.
Nobody is saying not to pay the restaurant, the Republican side is there will be no default, to pay the restaurant, we have to stop paying for netflix. Obama is saying we won't pay the restaurant knowing full well that we could pay the restaurant and take the much less severe consequences of having our netflix account cancelled. Thing is, no netflix isn't as scary as having the cops all over you, so it doesn't work as a political tool as well. Who's playing politics again?
What I meant was that we won't default either way, and using default as a scarecrow on either side is a huge problem. They should all be saying "We absolutely will not default. We will sell assets if we have to, but the United States does not default and we never will, and when we reach our decision on what to do to fix our deficits (taxes + spending cuts or just spending cuts), it will be because we as a nation refuse to not pay our bills, and any kind of sacrifices we make will prove our trustworthiness. Instead we get political posturing on who's fault it might be if we do default. And that is absolutely harmful to our markets.
Those are extremely good points. However, there is also the problem that the democratic controlled congress stopped approving budgets in this same timeframe. Meanwhile lots of laws since the medicare drug program and TARP are going to add to the deficit, and this spending is just going to happen without congressional approval of an overall budget. The fact that those programs were passed and that money was spent is more of a reason to not add more spending on top of it, which has happened. They passed those programs and now they want to make cuts because you can't keep spending that way. Using the debt ceiling as leverage to get the cuts they know need to happen seems to be taking responsibility for the spending they voted for by backing unpopular cuts as opposed to just laying low and hoping the problem goes away.
I didn't realize the oceans were struggling to survive at all. I thought they were getting more powerful and increasing in size, claiming more and more of man's land as its own.