You remember when they were extremely pissed off about PRISM, one of the NSA's phone-data collection programs? And how within a day it came out they were worse?
This was at least better then that time when their response to the Rwandan genocide was to prevent anything useful; from happening at the UN until everyone was already dead, and then sending in their troops to protect the murderers from rebels in a "safe zone". See the rebels were mostly English-speakers who'd grown up in Uganda, whereas the government were French-speakers who'd gone to the same schools as the French Elite, so clearly the best interests of the French state were served by supporting the government.
I am really not surprised the French State is shocked and saddened by other state's surveillance on it, and thinks the only possible solution is to authorize it's surveillance of everyone else. It's kinda an MO. The only thing I can say in their defense is the American government would probably be just as bad. Altho we'd do it with less style.
On your last note, which I just realized I forgot to respond to, I have to say conversations like this are one of the reasons I stay on Slashdot.http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=7546871&cid=49982255#
Why would Russia need to worry about the Chinese? China has no territorial ambitions in North Asia, and their territorial ambitions in the South China Sea don;t threaten Russia. Moreover, why would Russia's response to a new threat in the West be "oh shit, we can't do anything about it or we'll be weak in the East," and not "let's kill this sucker fast?"
And I think you're under-stating the magnitude of the strategic shift if the US was thrown out of Germany and Europe responded by beginning to form an EUDF. In that case instead of being neutral (and thus a useful venue for Russia and buffer to St. Petersburg) Finland becomes the front line. And a guy who got his start as Deputy Mayor of St. Petersburg definitely cares whether that front line is Lapland or Karelia.
As for Putin's skill, I think we'll have to wait a bit to see how that plays out. From my point of view he fucked up his Eurasian Union, managed to get a consolation prize in Crimea, which provoked an unprecedented degree of European unity, and set up a bloody DonBass rebellion that he could not turn off if he wanted to. I can't quite figure out how it advances his interests. in particular he can;t expect the Russophiles to win a new Ukrainian election unless the Donbbass votes, which means the Ukraine-Russia-unity dream is dead.
He's a survivor, and he could easily see something I don't, but I'm actually more impressed with Merkel (and Obama, altho he hasn't taken the lead so she gets the credit) then Putin. He doesn't seem to have had a backup plan to Yanukovych, and his cobbled-together rebellions seem more aimed at making Ukraine pay for disobeying then advancing his long-term interests.
1. It seems like this has been argued out.
2. The US has plenty of pols who appeal to working-class males who have been screwed by the new economy. Quite a few have been around for a long time. They're still populists. Scott Walker is one of them.
3. I lived through Occupy. It spent months pampered by the Administration because their goals and framing ("the 99% vs. the 1%", characterizing the GOP position on the debt ceiling as immoral, etc.) were pretty much what Obama wanted. They only had problems when they tried to leave the park on protest marches without a permit. If it had been suppressed at all there would have been violence in several parts of the country, particularly the West Coast, which has an active anarchist community that likes to hijack random protests and turn them into violent rioting.
It petered out largely because a movement run on consensus, with no concrete goals, tends not to survive very long when the powers-that-be swear up and down they support it's goals.
3. If Yanukovych'd sent in the tanks on day one he'd probably have won. Did you mean to imply that he wasn't responsible for the snipers? Because it beggers belief that someone could have snipers running around Kiev for months, killing 100 people, without the police figuring the plot out; unless the police were the snipers. And Yanukovych himself recently said ""But the members of the security forces fulfilled their duties according to existing laws. They had the right to use weapons."
I was unclear when I used the phrase "allies," I wasn't referring to the protesters. They don't have that legal status, and probably never will. I was referring to our NATO Allies, who were kinda freaked out by the gunfire at protesters who just wanted to join the EU.
On the Chinese, in some ways you're right. but they did burn those fleets, and if you let every country go back in time and fight a war to restore what they lost in the 1525 things become problematic. For example, how many countries could claim you as a province? Moreover it wasn't the Filipinos who mistreated the Chinese in the late 19th century. There's a reason the UN is expressly designed to make China's current actions illegal.
But an income check is a bit more suspicious. Particularly when they set the income level (33.3% on rent) above the level of back-end ratio that lets you get a mortgage. It's technically below the mortgage payment level (that maxes out at 28%, not 36%), but 28% of your income plus property tax/repairs/etc. is usually more then 33.3%.
And it's hard for me to think of a good business reason to require a renter with an $1,100 monthly payment have more income then a homeowner with an $1,100 payment.
Good plan for the Baby Boomers and older Gen-Xers.
The rest of us have slight problem because we're below replacement rate on kids, have been for decades, with the exception of '06 and '07. Mexicans bailed us out in terms of population growth in the past few decades, but that isn't happening anymore, partly because their birth rate is way down.
I'm from the rust belt. My hometown of Detroit's in a region that's had a slowly declining population for decades, and pretty much the only way to make money in housing is a) be a slum-lord, b) buy in a gentrifying neighborhood downtown before everyone notices, or c) buy when an exurb is first developed for $200k and then sell four years later for $500k to somebody with three kids about to enter the excellent elementary school. I'm in Cleveland now, and real estate prices are not going up. My stepmom insists on buying, because she has incredibly strong nesting instincts, and she's broken even on both houses, in one case after putting a quarter million into the house.
For you up in Alaska things will probably stay fine. You've got a small population base, a large potential market of outdoorsey-types, and much improving weather due to global warming. But in the lower 48, tho, the economy has changed. There are fewer people, they prefer newer housing stock; so demand for the house you bought 40 years ago is down. Supply of houses people want that are not like your house is up because the Great Recession tanked construction costs. The debt load on the people you;d be selling to (generally college-educated adults, because most people who buy homes are college-educated adults) is way up so their ability to make mortgage payments is way down, etc.
Landlords are businesses. Most don't do an income test before letting someone rent anymore then Apple or Sprint do. The ones that do are mostly doing it because it's a legal way to keep the riff-raff from moving in and ruining your building's NPR-listening vibe with a bunch of twangy country or loud-ass hip-hop.
60% is high, and I suspect the OP either has a really shitty-job (part-timers here in Cleveland making $10k pretty are either living with mom or paying 60% a month in rent), he refuses to live any place that tolerates said country and/or hip-hop, or both. Even in NYC and London you generally find a place for $500 a month if you're not picky about sharing bathrooms.
On the odds of Russia attacking Finland, the issue isn't about what you think or what I think. It's what Putin thinks. And Putin does not think of himself as leader of a small unimportant state that has to take the hand it's dealt by the world. If the US declines, and Finland starts talks with lots of other European states to form a defensive alliance, he could very well try to take it out.
1. It's pitiful. The Airbus 400M is a glorified tactical transport, and it's not in service. Your EU Defense Force would need to develop a real strategic transport, and buy roughly 50 of them, to actually have a chance of getting troops where they needed to be in anything like a timely manner.
2. Like I said I'll believe it when I see it. They're populists, and populist voters are not known for keeping their heads when their leader tries to tell them to be flexible just this one time and spend money on somebody else. When you're the only country in Europe that demands Greece put up collateral, you lose a lot of credibility in my book; and the Finns Party is the reason you guys lost that credibility.
3. There was no attempt to overthrow the US government in September of '08, which is when the economic troubles hit here, largely because the election was in November. The Occupy Wall Street protests were tolerated until they petered out, largely they had no concrete goal to organize around. Literally one hundred Euromaiden protesters died in various clashes with Yanukovych's police.
Don't get me wrong, when you call it unconstitutional and illegal I agree. But most European leaders faced with massive street protests would not respond with snipers. When any state is using it's legal powers to suppress protests against it's political leadership arguments based on that state's legal powers lose most of their moral force. As their ally we had to act against our own interests and support the revolt.
The South China Sea is similar. If the Chinese had made a sober decision to deny us the area they could have negotiated a treaty with the other states in the region allowing them the lion's share of it, and then bullied the hold-outs.
On the South China Sea, if the Chinese were likely to actually negotiate their boundary don't you think they would have told somebody else what they thought the boundary should be? They've got a poorly drawn map, at a very large scale, which is not a fruitful point for starting territorial negotiations. Thus a group of states that are not particularly well-disposed to the US Military (the Vietnamese famously threw us out, the Filipinos also did so but less dramatically) want a US presence to balance the Chinese presence.
Your analysis of America's rise to hegemony is quite Eurocentric. From our point of view we have no realistic reason to fear for the survival of the US. Haven't since 1867 brought the end of British North America. Thus our foreign policy is not tinged by the hint of desperation that affects damn near everyone else. We have a huge country, and our economy is one of the best in human history. If you want our help (ie: you're Indonesia facing down China, or the poor Koreans) we'll be happy to help. If you don't (ie: you're Iraq under Maliki) we'll be somewhat pissed but we'll leave the country and won't engage in any particularly Machiavellian skullduggery against you.
For us the point of being a hegemon is that a) it allows us to engage in our hobby of promoting US-Style Democracy, and b) it allows us to force free trade agreements on all the little states that are dependent on us for their security. Admittedly, it's mostly b)*. We've actually been trying to encourage you Euros to form a second hegemon since WW2, but you're all so wedded to the idea of individual nation-states associated with each tiny-little language and veto-power over every-damn-thing that it doesn't work too well.
Like I said, good luck succeeding where FDR, Truman, Eisenhower, JFK, LBJ, that
For the record, the two governments are Indonesia and Australia, not East Timor and Australia. Whitlam was saying that despite public opinion he would support the Indonesians in whatever they wanted to continue to trade with the Indonesians.
For the record, Whitlam was also one of the most left-wing PMs Australia ever had. So in theory a moderate, neutral, East Timor with a Constitution based on the US model would have been right up his alley.
Like I said, even if you can find a source that indicates Suharto paid Ford, what Suharto was asking for was just the kind of thing we did in '75.
Your scenario is that NATO is so weakened European states think they need to band together to replace it. Under those circumstances Russia is likely to consider NATO weakened, and also has an interest in ensuring nothing replaces it, or that what replaces it is more analogous to the Warsaw pact then the EU. If the Finns are trying to start a new EU Alliance the Russians have a clear interest in stopping them, and the ability to do so because there's no NATO. The 10% number is a guess that's supposed to reflect that's it's actually possible, but not particularly likely.
1. Let's say the EU Alliance decided to get German tanks to Ukraine. How would they do that quickly without fairly significant strategic airlift capability? BTW, the French needed a ride from the US Strategic Airlift command to get to Mali because they don't have C-17 Globemasters of their own. They also borrowed one from Sweden's contribution to the NATO Heavy Airlift Wing. I'm not saying you'd need to spend 4%, but 2% would be a minimum.
2. This is the Finns Party you're talking about. They say they'll pay taxes, and send Finns into harm's way, to keep African immigrants from making it to the UK, but I don't believe them. They have no economic interest in keeping Muslims out of London, and they remind too much of the Tea Party for me to conclude they'll ever agree to spend money on anyone but themselves.
As for the Poles, there's a few mistakes in your post. The Presidential twin died in the plane crash. The Prime Ministerial one is the guy who blames Putin for his brother's death. And you're ignoring much of Europe's policy towards Russia. For example, without the Poles and Balts it's likely a German and French-dominated EU lets Putin crush Euromaiden.
As for the US Role in that fight, non-Americans really do not seem to understand that pretty much the entire fucking point of becoming a hegemon is you don't have to manipulate anybody. Everybody is trying to manipulate you into doing what they want, so you mostly sit on your fat ass, and your manipulation is limited to nodding sagely when one of their plots would advance your interests. Take this case.
We don't have to play up anybody's fear of Russia, because the Poles, Estonians, Czechs, etc. are all doing it for us. They are doing a better job then we ever could because nobody thinks that a Pole who grew up under Communism is being a Machievellan asshole when he says he doesn't trust Russia and explains why.
In this case we probably didn't even want to do that much, because our President (whose father-figure was an Indonesian, and whose Indonesian half-sister is the only living relative he treats as a relative) really wants Europe to stabilize the fuck up so he can weave an alliance-structure in Asia that will protect Democracy, free trade, and the American Way.
In other words, he's like almost every other President whose been dragged into a deeply complex linguistical-legalistical-political-sociological-bullshitical dispute on the continent. He wants Euromaiden to work because he's stuck with the Poles, Germans, etc. and they all prefer a world where Ukraine's protesters create a new Democratic EU member to a world where everyone in the square gets crushed by Red Army tanks. Thus all plots presented to him (as hegemon) oppose the Russians, and he's got to support one that will likely not start a nuclear fucking war.
So Obama can't be trolling for donations from Cubans because they're too Republican, but he can be trolling for donations from the even-more Republican farm lobby?
As for the treaty becoming the "law of the land," law of the land means jack-squat in terms of criminal penalties unless there's a statute. That is how criminal penalties work Which means they have to pass the statute. Which you can oppose.
As for Iraq, we were asking for exactly what we have in Germany and Japan. If you are a foreign nation, and you want to host US Troops, you have to agree that your courts do not have jurisdiction over those troops. That was the hold-up. You're making the last-minute Iraqi re-approval of the deal up out of whole clothe. To quote Wikipedia: "[in October of 2011, two months prior to the end of the previous agreement] U.S. asked Iraq to take a stand on the question of immunity for troops, hoping to remove what had always been the biggest challenge. However, they misread Iraqi politics and the Iraqi public. Having watched the Arab Spring sweep across the region and still haunted by the traumas of this and previous wars, the Iraqis were unwilling to accept anything that infringed on their sovereignty."
The world's worse then ever is a common GOP talking point, but it ignores the fact that a) in 2008 George Bush had so alienated our European allies that they gave Obama the Nobel fucking Peace Prize pretty much entirely based on him not being Bush, b) many of the problems in the Arab world were caused by Dubya's inability to control Iraq once he conquered it, and his poor response to the Arab Spring. Libya, Syria, and northern Iraq all started to fall apart on his watch, not Obama's, c) Dubya "looked into Putin's eyes and saw his soul," etc.
Look I'm not arguing that decades from now people will argue over whether Obama was better then Lincoln, but they sure as hell ain't gonna argue that he was worse then either Bush.
But I live in what you people (aka: the ones who spell it arse) would call a very small flat, basically a bedsit plus a 10 by 12 bedroom. I got one desk. It does not have room for two monitors a printer and two towers. To have the desktop space for all the electronical doohickeys and thingamabobs that people are saying I should have I'd need to get rid of a bunch of shit and acquire a much bigger desk. Which would require getting rid of something (probably a book-case).
The folks that have that kind of setup just laying around tend not to be the one these courses say they're aimed at. That guy would be fine with C for Dummies and a little help getting a CLI compiler setup, figuring out how to get it to run his programs in his GUI, etc. The courses say they're aimed at the nontraditional college student, and those folks would probably be buying their first desktop ever just to take the class..
Even the geeks who can't code yet, but have lots of electronical shit from way back when sitting around, aren't likely to have all the cables they need for two machines at once, desk space for both, etc.
So their Prime Minister had their President arrested for being insufficiently Marxist, and you're arguing they weren't Communist?
As for Australia, you do realize that Whitlam did lose his position as Prime Minister, in a plot that probably had some CIA involvement? And that this happened on the 12th of November 1975, whereas East Timor didn't become independent until a few weeks later? And that, moreover, Whitlam opposed East Timorese independence in the first place?
That kind of thing is the reason that I'm very reluctant to trust your memory without some documentation to back it up.
You opened with "It is as if he just decided to reward some rich donors by opening trade to exploit a new poor country." If he wanted to do that he wouldn't be opening trade with Cuba at all. You get more donors (and much more consistant donors) by threatening to bomb Havana back into the stone age.
No you do not. Most of those donors (older Cuban Americans) are republican and would not donate to Obama or the democrats anyways.
And nobody else donates based on Cuba policy.
He's focusing on things he can do without GOP help that will make him look like a smart, important leader in the history books. The President who ended the dispute with Cuba looks good in the history books.
So this is for show? You mean like how we got our of Iraq was more or less just for show too.. That turned out well. One thing for certain though, the democrats tried to claim Iraq was another Vietnam, now they have turned it into one... Advisers out the ass.. I'm sure this will go swimmingly well too.
And how could we have stayed in?
Bush recognized them as sovereign with a Parliamentary system. Their PM wanted us out. What was Obama supposed to do? Magic psychic powers?
With something like this the 'spec' is going to have to be highly changeable, because it's a bilateral relationship. That means they get to change their minds.
He hasn't even been able to articulate a coherent goal. It's like there is no spec at all. You even had to say wait until it is done- then it should make sense and the most you can provide as proof is your faith that he might actually accomplish something that is not a complete failure.
I kinda thought "end the sanctions" was a pretty coherent goal. Seemed pretty coherent to me.
I'll tell you the same thing I told all those idiotic Aanti-NSA Activists trying to fix the problem through the Courts: You need Congress to pass a statute. I love the Electronic Frontier Foundation in theory, but the only thing they actually seem to be good at is convincing people to give them money and then wasting it on things that are not Congress.
If these countries want to freely trade with us our copyright laws and theirs have to match. Otherwise they'd send up DVDs of public domain Mickey Mouse in Fantasia, and Disney would freak out, and everyone who had their 401k in Disney would freak out, and Congress has never ever ever disobeyed the orders of people who own 401ks. Since we're fucking huge we're not gonna change our law to comply with Singapore's.
Did you miss the part where the treaty changes our law and puts jail time for sharing copyrights material?
Dude, you remember ACTA? How Obama said "I don't need to get this ratified because it's already enacted in statutes?"
Same thing applies. There's no statute sending you to jail now for violating copyright then a treaty agreeing to send you to jail for violating copyright is a dead letter until Congress passes a statute.
And posts like this are another reason I think the EFF is great in theory, but stupid in practice. People go to their website, read a comprehensive description of the issue, and come away spouting obvious nonsense..
For fucks sake, Napster or whatever is popular now would have half you idiots in jail now. You would be convicted felons had this TPP became law of the land. And you think it's the right thing to do because of investments?
Who said whether I think it's a good thing to do?
This vote's on fast-track authority, which is when Congress can't amend it. It gets an up-or-down vote.
In this environment I suspect that means it's more likely to fail, because instead of saying "I'll vote for it if this symbolic amendment passes," you have to say "no."
The easiest way to maximize political donations is find a group with lots of money who only really care about one issue, and be their guy. In extreme cases the "group" can be one guy. Just ask Newt Gingrich about Sheldon Adelson.
By opening up to Cuba Obama pretty much guarantees that Cubans of a certain generation (ie: the one most likely to have $2,500 to donate to a campaign) hate him, and doesn't court anyone else.
I'm lost, if he makes them hate him, how does that prevent them from donating to anyone else? Or do you mean by doing what they don't want, they will not be able to undo it so their interest in politics will dwindle?
You opened with "It is as if he just decided to reward some rich donors by opening trade to exploit a new poor country." If he wanted to do that he wouldn't be opening trade with Cuba at all. You get more donors (and much more consistant donors) by threatening to bomb Havana back into the stone age.
If I understand what you are trying to say here, wouldn't it be the same as saying opening relations with Cuba and removing the embargo was done just to damage republicans?
Dude, this is the second half of his last term.
He's focusing on things he can do without GOP help that will make him look like a smart, important leader in the history books. The President who ended the dispute with Cuba looks good in the history books.
The political considerations would have been that a) his voters thought the embargo was dumb decades ago, and b) younger Cubans want to see grandma more often.
We're talking about while they're finalizing the details. They can;'t even give us the broad strokes of the eventual agreement yet because they don;t know exactly what will work for both sides at the negotiating table. That's the equivalent of judging a software program by how it looks halfway through Alpha when nobody is even sure what the final featureset will be.
Very few people even bother writing software without a spec that lists goals and concepts. People do no sit down and start writing code in hopes that it turns into something useful. There is a spec they aspire to, a goal in mind and it is generally clearly articulate-able before any coding starts. Government policy should be no different. It's bad form to just enter into something hoping it turns out good. But after seeing his leading from behind strategy that brought us ISIS and Ukraine, I understand why you think so. I just don't think you should be so optimistic about the outcomes. Nothing he has approached like this has turned out well for anyone involved so far.
There's a spec, but it's subject to change depending on what works. If it turns out you can't get feature A working without busting the memory budget you change the spec.
With something like this the 'spec' is going to have to be highly changeable, because it's a bilateral relationship. That means they get to change their minds.
Which is a lot easier to do with fast-track authority then without.
But it wouldn't be a free trade deal then..lol.
Most business today is information, and information is what's protected by copyright. So you need both copyright and patents in the deal.
Yes and strict jail time and so on too I guess. Some things are just wrong.
I'll tell you the same thing I told all those idiotic Aanti-NSA Activists trying to fix the problem through the Courts: You need Congress to pass a statute. I love the Electronic Frontier Foundation in theory, but the only thing they actually seem to be good at is convincing people to give them money and then wasting it on things that ar
If he wanted to maximize donations he'd keep the embargo in place. There's a lot of wealthy Cubans in Miami.
What does wealthy cubans have to do with it? The amount of people who donate is much larger than a sub groups of people who typically swing republican anyways.
The easiest way to maximize political donations is find a group with lots of money who only really care about one issue, and be their guy. In extreme cases the "group" can be one guy. Just ask Newt Gingrich about Sheldon Adelson.
By opening up to Cuba Obama pretty much guarantees that Cubans of a certain generation (ie: the one most likely to have $2,500 to donate to a campaign) hate him, and doesn't court anyone else.
I suspect that once the deals with Cuba are finalized his policy towards them will look a lot more coherent.
Maybe it is a bad policy to begin with if you have to wait until it's finished before seeing how it comes together. It's like a kid trying to repair a computer thinking if he clicks on enough buttons or runs scandisk enough times, it will eventually appear to be running better. Even a blind squirrel finds a nut I guess.
We're talking about while they're finalizing the details. They can;'t even give us the broad strokes of the eventual agreement yet because they don;t know exactly what will work for both sides at the negotiating table. That's the equivalent of judging a software program by how it looks halfway through Alpha when nobody is even sure what the final featureset will be.
Before that it was smog created in the countryside by Mao's disasterous attempt to turn every farm into a steel mill.
So we shouldn't worry about smog when outsourcing to third world countries?
Not as much as we do in our own country.
When you're low on the development totem pole you've got a lot of problems much more pressing then air quality. You've got high infant mortality, poor healthcare, you probably have some famines, etc.
Which means are options regarding smog and the third works are three-fold:
1) Bomb them to the stone age whenever it looks like they're developing so they can't pollute.
2) Help them develop quickly enough that they get it out of their system soon.
3) Bitch about it when the develop slowly and jeep polluting for decades.
You don't get people who can afford to care about the environment until you get a certain level of economic development, and you don't get that amount of development without a lot of international trade.
Or you can make it a condition of trade and have your cake and eat it too.
Which is a lot easier to do with fast-track authority then without.
But it is less trade, and you do have a lot less influence with countries you have no free trade agreement with.
You mean we can exploit countries we have a free trade agreement with easier. Like with ford moving jobs to Mexico because it's cheaper which wouldn't be possible without NAFTA. It's like this, if they want to trade, they will either just trade or negotiate deals in order to do so. If it's a matter of exploiting those countries to offshore out pollution and take advantage of the cheaper labor, then free trade is a must else you lose all benefits of off-shoring trying to deal with duties and so on reimporting the crap.
That's what this is really about. And I wouldn't call it exactly free trade either. from what we can tell from the leaked documents so far, there is quite a lot of baggage like encryption laws, copyright and patent laws and so on that are wrapped up in this.
Most business today is information, and information is what's protected by copyright. So you need both copyright and patents in the deal.
I'm not the only one whose refusing to crack open a book on this thread. And pardon me if "some guy I met on the internet told me that 25 years ago another guy told him everything I know about a subject I've been researching for half my life is wrong" is not a convincing argument.
And you really need to research the period a bit. Everyone was in one camp or another. The old Portuguese government was in the US anti-Communist camp, which meant the rebel movements in all it's colonies got their arms and support from states in the Communist camp. When the Carnation Revolution happened the Portuguese switched camps, and rather then turning some of their loyalists into local Prime Ministers (as the UK had done when it created a bevy of mostly-pro-capitalist states a decade before) they turned over power to the Communist-supplied rebels.
Take it from a Detroiter, actually making stuff is not the way to get rich in this world. In fact being good at making shit is a bad thing in a global economy, because they'll pay you really good until the Mexicans get to be 3/4 as good as you, and at that point you're a) fired and b) unemployable. because nobody believes you'll take the 50% pay cut that would make you competitive with Mexico.
Moreover those companies have roots that go back a long way. Most of the big ones you mention were major players on the by the end of WW1. Siemens, Phillips, and Ericsson under their current names, BAE has roots in Marconi and Vickers, and indirectly Sopwith (most of their employees went to Hawker when that company went bankrupt in 1920).
None of them are really the kind of company the article is talking about: game-changing, industry-killing and new. Those seem to pop up every 5-10 years in the Valley, but almost never anywhere else. Not in your hometown, not in my hometown, not in Ottawa Ontario, not in LA Southern California, only in Northern California.
And I suspect it's partly a social infrastructure issue. People willing to work 80 hours a week for a few years for virtually no money in hopes their start-up becomes Google congregate there. Lenders willing to finance their dreams are only located there. Governments in the area are willing to ignore certain regulations if they'd get in the way of the start-up dream.
Then you get to Europe and not only do they not have the people to staff such companies (because they all moved to SanFran), or the Venture Capitalists to fund the ventures; they also tend to fight economic change until they've figured out how to incorporate it into their social safety nets. For a couple examples: a) the newest transformative technology (Big Data) freaks people the fuck out so nobody's allowed to experiment, b) European governments spend a ridiculous amount of time trying to convince Google to pay their newspapers for a service that generates no revenue (Google News), c) it's difficult to see how Germany would let you work 80 hours a week in exchange for stock options even if you were 22 and you really wanted to, etc. etc. etc.
So you're creating a Defense Union of European Democratic states tight on Putin's border, Russia is clearly not gonna be a member of the club, and even if it was asked to join it wouldn't be important enough to dominate the club, and he's not gonna try to stop that shit? Don't get me wrong. I'm not saying invasion would be inevitable, or that you guys would lose. But even a 10% chance of an invasion that cost you as much as the Winter War did is the kind of risk Finns don't take very often. And to be honest with you, I wish we were smart enough to avoid that kind of risk more often.
1. If you're Europe's size you need some force projection. You need enough ships to keep the other guy from landing on your massive coastline. You need strategic transport aircraft or your tanks based in Estonia are no use to counter threats to Greece or Portugal. You probably don't need our budget (which is, IIRC a full 4% of GDP) partly because your overall economy is bigger and partly because you don't need to project force to Guam, but OTOH Germany's 1.3% ain't doing it and the French (at 2%) hitch an awful lot of rides on the US Air Force.
2. I didn't say you implied that. I said that for your idea to work that Europeans need to think of defending each-other as really important. Important enough to pay a fairly significant tax (and this is gonna be at least couple points of VAT, even if the EU Force has German-levels of spending) even when their local national leadership thinks the war is a dumb idea. For example, I sincerely doubt the Finns Party would be happy paying a 3% VAT to defend Italy. And they're in government.
As for Ukraine, this is actually an issue that illustrates point #2. For the Pole Euromaiden was a core national interest. Several other fairly large countries agreed, and just about everybody thought that something should be done. Which means any EU-Alliance would probably have been extremely aggressive, because the only country with a national interest in keeping Putin happy and no national interest in keeping the Russian-bloc-border with the EU-bloc closer to the Azov then the Danube is Finland.
BTW, if the US actually had the capability to create that crises we'd have done it in Moscow. Obama's been trying to "Pivot to Asia" for years, and conflicts involving the Middle East and Putin just keep distracting him.
The difficulty with this point-of-view is that the Democratic solution to help the poor (and screw the rich) is exactly the set of policies that Republicans honestly believe have screwed the poor while helping the rich. And vice versa.
Which means that left-wing guys start increasing regulation, jacking up the minimum wage, increasing labor protections, jacking up the tax rate on the top just to take some air out of their budgets, spending the result on the working class to pout some more air into their budgets, etc. This is the solution set I personally agree with.
OTOH the GOP would gut lots of regulations. They'd get rid of regulations protecting the environment from resource extraction industries, which even I have to admit would give a lot of working-class people very well-paying (if not particularly safe) jobs. They'd use the money to buy shit they like, which tend to be made by other working-class people (they tend not to eat locally-sourced Kale grown by a Philosophy PhD), which would increase the total working class wages by a significant amount, particularly in regions like the Iron Range and Appalachia. OTOH this gutting of regulations would mean that working class wages would fall in other sectors, particularly unionized sectors like manufacturing, and that supports for the working class folks who didn't get the natural resource jobs would go down, etc. I think that would dumb, counter-productive, and make the problem worse. But that doesn't mean that Republicans and their allies in the Conservative movement don;t honestly believe gutting regulation and firing half the Federal Bureaucracy would not solve inequality.
In other words, the fact that we tend to argue about tiny little changes to the system (is: a 39.6% tax rate for one bracket vs. a 35% rate) is mostly an artifact of Checks and Balances. If you say "let's settle at 37.3%," then the Democrats're fine but the Republicans are livid because they hate all tax increases on principle. If you say "ok instead of cutting domestic mining regulations to nothing we'll cut them 50%" the GOP is over-joyed, but the Democrats're livid. There's no real compromise available without a huge amount of bitching about tiny-ass-little changes and brinksmanship from both sides.
Who suggested you were a liar? I suggested that either your memory is faulty or the Timorese memory was faulty. If I wanted to engage in any form of ad hominem you'd know you crumple-encrusted nerf-herding son-of-a-Lannister.
And as I said before, I'm googling on the subject of Timor but not on the subject of the decolonization of the last Portuguese colonies. The whole process was basically designed to give power to folks who didn't like the US Foreign policy stance, and those folks were inevitably either a) Marxists or b) about to be purged by the Marxists they'd thought of as their friends.
The only information we can find from the actual period seems to imply that an awful lot of the Timorese independence leaders were in category b).
"Narrower" means of your tendencies were used. In your example if you frequently searched for shit on Caterpillar tractors it would show black caterpillar tractors. If you frequently searched for CAT Scan machines it might return those. For shit m,ost people like (ie: cat videos) you'd have to broaden your search by increasing the loosey-goosey factor.
I'm paying $575 in suburban Cleveland, which is £362; so £500 (roughly $795) isn't that unreasonable for a place where a) salaries are much higher, b) there are many more types of job available, and c) public transit is much better. Moreover, I'm American. You Brits would freak out at having to drive 10 miles before you get to the train station and then take half-hour on the train to get to work; but that's only a 40 minute commute. State-side that's average.
And you're exaggerating. There are quit e a few £400 spots available.
Slashdot Mirror
You remember when they were extremely pissed off about PRISM, one of the NSA's phone-data collection programs? And how within a day it came out they were worse?
This was at least better then that time when their response to the Rwandan genocide was to prevent anything useful; from happening at the UN until everyone was already dead, and then sending in their troops to protect the murderers from rebels in a "safe zone". See the rebels were mostly English-speakers who'd grown up in Uganda, whereas the government were French-speakers who'd gone to the same schools as the French Elite, so clearly the best interests of the French state were served by supporting the government.
I am really not surprised the French State is shocked and saddened by other state's surveillance on it, and thinks the only possible solution is to authorize it's surveillance of everyone else. It's kinda an MO. The only thing I can say in their defense is the American government would probably be just as bad. Altho we'd do it with less style.
On your last note, which I just realized I forgot to respond to, I have to say conversations like this are one of the reasons I stay on Slashdot.http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=7546871&cid=49982255#
Why would Russia need to worry about the Chinese? China has no territorial ambitions in North Asia, and their territorial ambitions in the South China Sea don;t threaten Russia. Moreover, why would Russia's response to a new threat in the West be "oh shit, we can't do anything about it or we'll be weak in the East," and not "let's kill this sucker fast?"
And I think you're under-stating the magnitude of the strategic shift if the US was thrown out of Germany and Europe responded by beginning to form an EUDF. In that case instead of being neutral (and thus a useful venue for Russia and buffer to St. Petersburg) Finland becomes the front line. And a guy who got his start as Deputy Mayor of St. Petersburg definitely cares whether that front line is Lapland or Karelia.
As for Putin's skill, I think we'll have to wait a bit to see how that plays out. From my point of view he fucked up his Eurasian Union, managed to get a consolation prize in Crimea, which provoked an unprecedented degree of European unity, and set up a bloody DonBass rebellion that he could not turn off if he wanted to. I can't quite figure out how it advances his interests. in particular he can;t expect the Russophiles to win a new Ukrainian election unless the Donbbass votes, which means the Ukraine-Russia-unity dream is dead.
He's a survivor, and he could easily see something I don't, but I'm actually more impressed with Merkel (and Obama, altho he hasn't taken the lead so she gets the credit) then Putin. He doesn't seem to have had a backup plan to Yanukovych, and his cobbled-together rebellions seem more aimed at making Ukraine pay for disobeying then advancing his long-term interests.
1. It seems like this has been argued out.
2. The US has plenty of pols who appeal to working-class males who have been screwed by the new economy. Quite a few have been around for a long time. They're still populists. Scott Walker is one of them.
3. I lived through Occupy. It spent months pampered by the Administration because their goals and framing ("the 99% vs. the 1%", characterizing the GOP position on the debt ceiling as immoral, etc.) were pretty much what Obama wanted. They only had problems when they tried to leave the park on protest marches without a permit. If it had been suppressed at all there would have been violence in several parts of the country, particularly the West Coast, which has an active anarchist community that likes to hijack random protests and turn them into violent rioting.
It petered out largely because a movement run on consensus, with no concrete goals, tends not to survive very long when the powers-that-be swear up and down they support it's goals.
3. If Yanukovych'd sent in the tanks on day one he'd probably have won. Did you mean to imply that he wasn't responsible for the snipers? Because it beggers belief that someone could have snipers running around Kiev for months, killing 100 people, without the police figuring the plot out; unless the police were the snipers. And Yanukovych himself recently said ""But the members of the security forces fulfilled their duties according to existing laws. They had the right to use weapons."
I was unclear when I used the phrase "allies," I wasn't referring to the protesters. They don't have that legal status, and probably never will. I was referring to our NATO Allies, who were kinda freaked out by the gunfire at protesters who just wanted to join the EU.
On the Chinese, in some ways you're right. but they did burn those fleets, and if you let every country go back in time and fight a war to restore what they lost in the 1525 things become problematic. For example, how many countries could claim you as a province? Moreover it wasn't the Filipinos who mistreated the Chinese in the late 19th century. There's a reason the UN is expressly designed to make China's current actions illegal.
What the US is looking
I said I knew little about East Timor.
But then you brought Whitlam into it, and since I've studies the powers of Governors-General pretty extensively I know that one cold.
Credit checks are fine.
But an income check is a bit more suspicious. Particularly when they set the income level (33.3% on rent) above the level of back-end ratio that lets you get a mortgage. It's technically below the mortgage payment level (that maxes out at 28%, not 36%), but 28% of your income plus property tax/repairs/etc. is usually more then 33.3%.
And it's hard for me to think of a good business reason to require a renter with an $1,100 monthly payment have more income then a homeowner with an $1,100 payment.
Good plan for the Baby Boomers and older Gen-Xers.
The rest of us have slight problem because we're below replacement rate on kids, have been for decades, with the exception of '06 and '07. Mexicans bailed us out in terms of population growth in the past few decades, but that isn't happening anymore, partly because their birth rate is way down.
I'm from the rust belt. My hometown of Detroit's in a region that's had a slowly declining population for decades, and pretty much the only way to make money in housing is a) be a slum-lord, b) buy in a gentrifying neighborhood downtown before everyone notices, or c) buy when an exurb is first developed for $200k and then sell four years later for $500k to somebody with three kids about to enter the excellent elementary school. I'm in Cleveland now, and real estate prices are not going up. My stepmom insists on buying, because she has incredibly strong nesting instincts, and she's broken even on both houses, in one case after putting a quarter million into the house.
For you up in Alaska things will probably stay fine. You've got a small population base, a large potential market of outdoorsey-types, and much improving weather due to global warming. But in the lower 48, tho, the economy has changed. There are fewer people, they prefer newer housing stock; so demand for the house you bought 40 years ago is down. Supply of houses people want that are not like your house is up because the Great Recession tanked construction costs. The debt load on the people you;d be selling to (generally college-educated adults, because most people who buy homes are college-educated adults) is way up so their ability to make mortgage payments is way down, etc.
Landlords are businesses. Most don't do an income test before letting someone rent anymore then Apple or Sprint do. The ones that do are mostly doing it because it's a legal way to keep the riff-raff from moving in and ruining your building's NPR-listening vibe with a bunch of twangy country or loud-ass hip-hop.
60% is high, and I suspect the OP either has a really shitty-job (part-timers here in Cleveland making $10k pretty are either living with mom or paying 60% a month in rent), he refuses to live any place that tolerates said country and/or hip-hop, or both. Even in NYC and London you generally find a place for $500 a month if you're not picky about sharing bathrooms.
On the odds of Russia attacking Finland, the issue isn't about what you think or what I think. It's what Putin thinks. And Putin does not think of himself as leader of a small unimportant state that has to take the hand it's dealt by the world. If the US declines, and Finland starts talks with lots of other European states to form a defensive alliance, he could very well try to take it out.
1. It's pitiful. The Airbus 400M is a glorified tactical transport, and it's not in service. Your EU Defense Force would need to develop a real strategic transport, and buy roughly 50 of them, to actually have a chance of getting troops where they needed to be in anything like a timely manner.
2. Like I said I'll believe it when I see it. They're populists, and populist voters are not known for keeping their heads when their leader tries to tell them to be flexible just this one time and spend money on somebody else. When you're the only country in Europe that demands Greece put up collateral, you lose a lot of credibility in my book; and the Finns Party is the reason you guys lost that credibility.
3. There was no attempt to overthrow the US government in September of '08, which is when the economic troubles hit here, largely because the election was in November. The Occupy Wall Street protests were tolerated until they petered out, largely they had no concrete goal to organize around. Literally one hundred Euromaiden protesters died in various clashes with Yanukovych's police.
Don't get me wrong, when you call it unconstitutional and illegal I agree. But most European leaders faced with massive street protests would not respond with snipers. When any state is using it's legal powers to suppress protests against it's political leadership arguments based on that state's legal powers lose most of their moral force. As their ally we had to act against our own interests and support the revolt.
The South China Sea is similar. If the Chinese had made a sober decision to deny us the area they could have negotiated a treaty with the other states in the region allowing them the lion's share of it, and then bullied the hold-outs.
On the South China Sea, if the Chinese were likely to actually negotiate their boundary don't you think they would have told somebody else what they thought the boundary should be? They've got a poorly drawn map, at a very large scale, which is not a fruitful point for starting territorial negotiations. Thus a group of states that are not particularly well-disposed to the US Military (the Vietnamese famously threw us out, the Filipinos also did so but less dramatically) want a US presence to balance the Chinese presence.
Your analysis of America's rise to hegemony is quite Eurocentric. From our point of view we have no realistic reason to fear for the survival of the US. Haven't since 1867 brought the end of British North America. Thus our foreign policy is not tinged by the hint of desperation that affects damn near everyone else. We have a huge country, and our economy is one of the best in human history. If you want our help (ie: you're Indonesia facing down China, or the poor Koreans) we'll be happy to help. If you don't (ie: you're Iraq under Maliki) we'll be somewhat pissed but we'll leave the country and won't engage in any particularly Machiavellian skullduggery against you.
For us the point of being a hegemon is that a) it allows us to engage in our hobby of promoting US-Style Democracy, and b) it allows us to force free trade agreements on all the little states that are dependent on us for their security. Admittedly, it's mostly b)*. We've actually been trying to encourage you Euros to form a second hegemon since WW2, but you're all so wedded to the idea of individual nation-states associated with each tiny-little language and veto-power over every-damn-thing that it doesn't work too well.
Like I said, good luck succeeding where FDR, Truman, Eisenhower, JFK, LBJ, that
For the record, the two governments are Indonesia and Australia, not East Timor and Australia. Whitlam was saying that despite public opinion he would support the Indonesians in whatever they wanted to continue to trade with the Indonesians.
For the record, Whitlam was also one of the most left-wing PMs Australia ever had. So in theory a moderate, neutral, East Timor with a Constitution based on the US model would have been right up his alley.
Like I said, even if you can find a source that indicates Suharto paid Ford, what Suharto was asking for was just the kind of thing we did in '75.
Your scenario is that NATO is so weakened European states think they need to band together to replace it. Under those circumstances Russia is likely to consider NATO weakened, and also has an interest in ensuring nothing replaces it, or that what replaces it is more analogous to the Warsaw pact then the EU. If the Finns are trying to start a new EU Alliance the Russians have a clear interest in stopping them, and the ability to do so because there's no NATO. The 10% number is a guess that's supposed to reflect that's it's actually possible, but not particularly likely.
1. Let's say the EU Alliance decided to get German tanks to Ukraine. How would they do that quickly without fairly significant strategic airlift capability? BTW, the French needed a ride from the US Strategic Airlift command to get to Mali because they don't have C-17 Globemasters of their own. They also borrowed one from Sweden's contribution to the NATO Heavy Airlift Wing. I'm not saying you'd need to spend 4%, but 2% would be a minimum.
2. This is the Finns Party you're talking about. They say they'll pay taxes, and send Finns into harm's way, to keep African immigrants from making it to the UK, but I don't believe them. They have no economic interest in keeping Muslims out of London, and they remind too much of the Tea Party for me to conclude they'll ever agree to spend money on anyone but themselves.
As for the Poles, there's a few mistakes in your post. The Presidential twin died in the plane crash. The Prime Ministerial one is the guy who blames Putin for his brother's death. And you're ignoring much of Europe's policy towards Russia. For example, without the Poles and Balts it's likely a German and French-dominated EU lets Putin crush Euromaiden.
As for the US Role in that fight, non-Americans really do not seem to understand that pretty much the entire fucking point of becoming a hegemon is you don't have to manipulate anybody. Everybody is trying to manipulate you into doing what they want, so you mostly sit on your fat ass, and your manipulation is limited to nodding sagely when one of their plots would advance your interests. Take this case.
We don't have to play up anybody's fear of Russia, because the Poles, Estonians, Czechs, etc. are all doing it for us. They are doing a better job then we ever could because nobody thinks that a Pole who grew up under Communism is being a Machievellan asshole when he says he doesn't trust Russia and explains why.
In this case we probably didn't even want to do that much, because our President (whose father-figure was an Indonesian, and whose Indonesian half-sister is the only living relative he treats as a relative) really wants Europe to stabilize the fuck up so he can weave an alliance-structure in Asia that will protect Democracy, free trade, and the American Way.
In other words, he's like almost every other President whose been dragged into a deeply complex linguistical-legalistical-political-sociological-bullshitical dispute on the continent. He wants Euromaiden to work because he's stuck with the Poles, Germans, etc. and they all prefer a world where Ukraine's protesters create a new Democratic EU member to a world where everyone in the square gets crushed by Red Army tanks. Thus all plots presented to him (as hegemon) oppose the Russians, and he's got to support one that will likely not start a nuclear fucking war.
So Obama can't be trolling for donations from Cubans because they're too Republican, but he can be trolling for donations from the even-more Republican farm lobby?
As for the treaty becoming the "law of the land," law of the land means jack-squat in terms of criminal penalties unless there's a statute. That is how criminal penalties work Which means they have to pass the statute. Which you can oppose.
As for Iraq, we were asking for exactly what we have in Germany and Japan. If you are a foreign nation, and you want to host US Troops, you have to agree that your courts do not have jurisdiction over those troops. That was the hold-up. You're making the last-minute Iraqi re-approval of the deal up out of whole clothe. To quote Wikipedia:
"[in October of 2011, two months prior to the end of the previous agreement] U.S. asked Iraq to take a stand on the question of immunity for troops, hoping to remove what had always been the biggest challenge. However, they misread Iraqi politics and the Iraqi public. Having watched the Arab Spring sweep across the region and still haunted by the traumas of this and previous wars, the Iraqis were unwilling to accept anything that infringed on their sovereignty."
The world's worse then ever is a common GOP talking point, but it ignores the fact that a) in 2008 George Bush had so alienated our European allies that they gave Obama the Nobel fucking Peace Prize pretty much entirely based on him not being Bush, b) many of the problems in the Arab world were caused by Dubya's inability to control Iraq once he conquered it, and his poor response to the Arab Spring. Libya, Syria, and northern Iraq all started to fall apart on his watch, not Obama's, c) Dubya "looked into Putin's eyes and saw his soul," etc.
Look I'm not arguing that decades from now people will argue over whether Obama was better then Lincoln, but they sure as hell ain't gonna argue that he was worse then either Bush.
I don't know about a cardboard box.
But I live in what you people (aka: the ones who spell it arse) would call a very small flat, basically a bedsit plus a 10 by 12 bedroom. I got one desk. It does not have room for two monitors a printer and two towers. To have the desktop space for all the electronical doohickeys and thingamabobs that people are saying I should have I'd need to get rid of a bunch of shit and acquire a much bigger desk. Which would require getting rid of something (probably a book-case).
The folks that have that kind of setup just laying around tend not to be the one these courses say they're aimed at. That guy would be fine with C for Dummies and a little help getting a CLI compiler setup, figuring out how to get it to run his programs in his GUI, etc. The courses say they're aimed at the nontraditional college student, and those folks would probably be buying their first desktop ever just to take the class..
Even the geeks who can't code yet, but have lots of electronical shit from way back when sitting around, aren't likely to have all the cables they need for two machines at once, desk space for both, etc.
So their Prime Minister had their President arrested for being insufficiently Marxist, and you're arguing they weren't Communist?
As for Australia, you do realize that Whitlam did lose his position as Prime Minister, in a plot that probably had some CIA involvement? And that this happened on the 12th of November 1975, whereas East Timor didn't become independent until a few weeks later? And that, moreover, Whitlam opposed East Timorese independence in the first place?
That kind of thing is the reason that I'm very reluctant to trust your memory without some documentation to back it up.
No you do not. Most of those donors (older Cuban Americans) are republican and would not donate to Obama or the democrats anyways.
And nobody else donates based on Cuba policy.
So this is for show? You mean like how we got our of Iraq was more or less just for show too.. That turned out well. One thing for certain though, the democrats tried to claim Iraq was another Vietnam, now they have turned it into one... Advisers out the ass.. I'm sure this will go swimmingly well too.
And how could we have stayed in?
Bush recognized them as sovereign with a Parliamentary system. Their PM wanted us out. What was Obama supposed to do? Magic psychic powers?
He hasn't even been able to articulate a coherent goal. It's like there is no spec at all. You even had to say wait until it is done- then it should make sense and the most you can provide as proof is your faith that he might actually accomplish something that is not a complete failure.
I kinda thought "end the sanctions" was a pretty coherent goal. Seemed pretty coherent to me.
Did you miss the part where the treaty changes our law and puts jail time for sharing copyrights material?
Dude, you remember ACTA? How Obama said "I don't need to get this ratified because it's already enacted in statutes?"
Same thing applies. There's no statute sending you to jail now for violating copyright then a treaty agreeing to send you to jail for violating copyright is a dead letter until Congress passes a statute.
And posts like this are another reason I think the EFF is great in theory, but stupid in practice. People go to their website, read a comprehensive description of the issue, and come away spouting obvious nonsense..
For fucks sake, Napster or whatever is popular now would have half you idiots in jail now. You would be convicted felons had this TPP became law of the land. And you think it's the right thing to do because of investments?
Who said whether I think it's a good thing to do?
This vote's on fast-track authority, which is when Congress can't amend it. It gets an up-or-down vote.
In this environment I suspect that means it's more likely to fail, because instead of saying "I'll vote for it if this symbolic amendment passes," you have to say "no."
I'm lost, if he makes them hate him, how does that prevent them from donating to anyone else? Or do you mean by doing what they don't want, they will not be able to undo it so their interest in politics will dwindle?
You opened with "It is as if he just decided to reward some rich donors by opening trade to exploit a new poor country."
If he wanted to do that he wouldn't be opening trade with Cuba at all. You get more donors (and much more consistant donors) by threatening to bomb Havana back into the stone age.
If I understand what you are trying to say here, wouldn't it be the same as saying opening relations with Cuba and removing the embargo was done just to damage republicans?
Dude, this is the second half of his last term.
He's focusing on things he can do without GOP help that will make him look like a smart, important leader in the history books. The President who ended the dispute with Cuba looks good in the history books.
The political considerations would have been that a) his voters thought the embargo was dumb decades ago, and b) younger Cubans want to see grandma more often.
Very few people even bother writing software without a spec that lists goals and concepts. People do no sit down and start writing code in hopes that it turns into something useful. There is a spec they aspire to, a goal in mind and it is generally clearly articulate-able before any coding starts. Government policy should be no different. It's bad form to just enter into something hoping it turns out good. But after seeing his leading from behind strategy that brought us ISIS and Ukraine, I understand why you think so. I just don't think you should be so optimistic about the outcomes. Nothing he has approached like this has turned out well for anyone involved so far.
There's a spec, but it's subject to change depending on what works. If it turns out you can't get feature A working without busting the memory budget you change the spec.
With something like this the 'spec' is going to have to be highly changeable, because it's a bilateral relationship. That means they get to change their minds.
But it wouldn't be a free trade deal then..lol.
Yes and strict jail time and so on too I guess. Some things are just wrong.
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/...
I'll tell you the same thing I told all those idiotic Aanti-NSA Activists trying to fix the problem through the Courts:
You need Congress to pass a statute. I love the Electronic Frontier Foundation in theory, but the only thing they actually seem to be good at is convincing people to give them money and then wasting it on things that ar
What does wealthy cubans have to do with it? The amount of people who donate is much larger than a sub groups of people who typically swing republican anyways.
The easiest way to maximize political donations is find a group with lots of money who only really care about one issue, and be their guy. In extreme cases the "group" can be one guy. Just ask Newt Gingrich about Sheldon Adelson.
By opening up to Cuba Obama pretty much guarantees that Cubans of a certain generation (ie: the one most likely to have $2,500 to donate to a campaign) hate him, and doesn't court anyone else.
Maybe it is a bad policy to begin with if you have to wait until it's finished before seeing how it comes together. It's like a kid trying to repair a computer thinking if he clicks on enough buttons or runs scandisk enough times, it will eventually appear to be running better. Even a blind squirrel finds a nut I guess.
We're talking about while they're finalizing the details. They can;'t even give us the broad strokes of the eventual agreement yet because they don;t know exactly what will work for both sides at the negotiating table. That's the equivalent of judging a software program by how it looks halfway through Alpha when nobody is even sure what the final featureset will be.
So we shouldn't worry about smog when outsourcing to third world countries?
Not as much as we do in our own country.
When you're low on the development totem pole you've got a lot of problems much more pressing then air quality. You've got high infant mortality, poor healthcare, you probably have some famines, etc.
Which means are options regarding smog and the third works are three-fold:
1) Bomb them to the stone age whenever it looks like they're developing so they can't pollute.
2) Help them develop quickly enough that they get it out of their system soon.
3) Bitch about it when the develop slowly and jeep polluting for decades.
Or you can make it a condition of trade and have your cake and eat it too.
Which is a lot easier to do with fast-track authority then without.
You mean we can exploit countries we have a free trade agreement with easier. Like with ford moving jobs to Mexico because it's cheaper which wouldn't be possible without NAFTA. It's like this, if they want to trade, they will either just trade or negotiate deals in order to do so. If it's a matter of exploiting those countries to offshore out pollution and take advantage of the cheaper labor, then free trade is a must else you lose all benefits of off-shoring trying to deal with duties and so on reimporting the crap.
That's what this is really about. And I wouldn't call it exactly free trade either. from what we can tell from the leaked documents so far, there is quite a lot of baggage like encryption laws, copyright and patent laws and so on that are wrapped up in this.
Most business today is information, and information is what's protected by copyright. So you need both copyright and patents in the deal.
I'm not the only one whose refusing to crack open a book on this thread. And pardon me if "some guy I met on the internet told me that 25 years ago another guy told him everything I know about a subject I've been researching for half my life is wrong" is not a convincing argument.
And you really need to research the period a bit. Everyone was in one camp or another. The old Portuguese government was in the US anti-Communist camp, which meant the rebel movements in all it's colonies got their arms and support from states in the Communist camp. When the Carnation Revolution happened the Portuguese switched camps, and rather then turning some of their loyalists into local Prime Ministers (as the UK had done when it created a bevy of mostly-pro-capitalist states a decade before) they turned over power to the Communist-supplied rebels.
Take it from a Detroiter, actually making stuff is not the way to get rich in this world. In fact being good at making shit is a bad thing in a global economy, because they'll pay you really good until the Mexicans get to be 3/4 as good as you, and at that point you're a) fired and b) unemployable. because nobody believes you'll take the 50% pay cut that would make you competitive with Mexico.
Moreover those companies have roots that go back a long way. Most of the big ones you mention were major players on the by the end of WW1. Siemens, Phillips, and Ericsson under their current names, BAE has roots in Marconi and Vickers, and indirectly Sopwith (most of their employees went to Hawker when that company went bankrupt in 1920).
None of them are really the kind of company the article is talking about: game-changing, industry-killing and new. Those seem to pop up every 5-10 years in the Valley, but almost never anywhere else. Not in your hometown, not in my hometown, not in Ottawa Ontario, not in LA Southern California, only in Northern California.
And I suspect it's partly a social infrastructure issue. People willing to work 80 hours a week for a few years for virtually no money in hopes their start-up becomes Google congregate there. Lenders willing to finance their dreams are only located there. Governments in the area are willing to ignore certain regulations if they'd get in the way of the start-up dream.
Then you get to Europe and not only do they not have the people to staff such companies (because they all moved to SanFran), or the Venture Capitalists to fund the ventures; they also tend to fight economic change until they've figured out how to incorporate it into their social safety nets. For a couple examples: a) the newest transformative technology (Big Data) freaks people the fuck out so nobody's allowed to experiment, b) European governments spend a ridiculous amount of time trying to convince Google to pay their newspapers for a service that generates no revenue (Google News), c) it's difficult to see how Germany would let you work 80 hours a week in exchange for stock options even if you were 22 and you really wanted to, etc. etc. etc.
So you're creating a Defense Union of European Democratic states tight on Putin's border, Russia is clearly not gonna be a member of the club, and even if it was asked to join it wouldn't be important enough to dominate the club, and he's not gonna try to stop that shit? Don't get me wrong. I'm not saying invasion would be inevitable, or that you guys would lose. But even a 10% chance of an invasion that cost you as much as the Winter War did is the kind of risk Finns don't take very often. And to be honest with you, I wish we were smart enough to avoid that kind of risk more often.
1. If you're Europe's size you need some force projection. You need enough ships to keep the other guy from landing on your massive coastline. You need strategic transport aircraft or your tanks based in Estonia are no use to counter threats to Greece or Portugal. You probably don't need our budget (which is, IIRC a full 4% of GDP) partly because your overall economy is bigger and partly because you don't need to project force to Guam, but OTOH Germany's 1.3% ain't doing it and the French (at 2%) hitch an awful lot of rides on the US Air Force.
2. I didn't say you implied that. I said that for your idea to work that Europeans need to think of defending each-other as really important. Important enough to pay a fairly significant tax (and this is gonna be at least couple points of VAT, even if the EU Force has German-levels of spending) even when their local national leadership thinks the war is a dumb idea. For example, I sincerely doubt the Finns Party would be happy paying a 3% VAT to defend Italy. And they're in government.
As for Ukraine, this is actually an issue that illustrates point #2. For the Pole Euromaiden was a core national interest. Several other fairly large countries agreed, and just about everybody thought that something should be done. Which means any EU-Alliance would probably have been extremely aggressive, because the only country with a national interest in keeping Putin happy and no national interest in keeping the Russian-bloc-border with the EU-bloc closer to the Azov then the Danube is Finland.
BTW, if the US actually had the capability to create that crises we'd have done it in Moscow. Obama's been trying to "Pivot to Asia" for years, and conflicts involving the Middle East and Putin just keep distracting him.
The difficulty with this point-of-view is that the Democratic solution to help the poor (and screw the rich) is exactly the set of policies that Republicans honestly believe have screwed the poor while helping the rich. And vice versa.
Which means that left-wing guys start increasing regulation, jacking up the minimum wage, increasing labor protections, jacking up the tax rate on the top just to take some air out of their budgets, spending the result on the working class to pout some more air into their budgets, etc. This is the solution set I personally agree with.
OTOH the GOP would gut lots of regulations. They'd get rid of regulations protecting the environment from resource extraction industries, which even I have to admit would give a lot of working-class people very well-paying (if not particularly safe) jobs. They'd use the money to buy shit they like, which tend to be made by other working-class people (they tend not to eat locally-sourced Kale grown by a Philosophy PhD), which would increase the total working class wages by a significant amount, particularly in regions like the Iron Range and Appalachia. OTOH this gutting of regulations would mean that working class wages would fall in other sectors, particularly unionized sectors like manufacturing, and that supports for the working class folks who didn't get the natural resource jobs would go down, etc. I think that would dumb, counter-productive, and make the problem worse. But that doesn't mean that Republicans and their allies in the Conservative movement don;t honestly believe gutting regulation and firing half the Federal Bureaucracy would not solve inequality.
In other words, the fact that we tend to argue about tiny little changes to the system (is: a 39.6% tax rate for one bracket vs. a 35% rate) is mostly an artifact of Checks and Balances. If you say "let's settle at 37.3%," then the Democrats're fine but the Republicans are livid because they hate all tax increases on principle. If you say "ok instead of cutting domestic mining regulations to nothing we'll cut them 50%" the GOP is over-joyed, but the Democrats're livid. There's no real compromise available without a huge amount of bitching about tiny-ass-little changes and brinksmanship from both sides.
That's a very amero-centric viewpoint.
India and Nigeria are both incredibly diverse, and yet mono-racial.
Who suggested you were a liar? I suggested that either your memory is faulty or the Timorese memory was faulty. If I wanted to engage in any form of ad hominem you'd know you crumple-encrusted nerf-herding son-of-a-Lannister.
And as I said before, I'm googling on the subject of Timor but not on the subject of the decolonization of the last Portuguese colonies. The whole process was basically designed to give power to folks who didn't like the US Foreign policy stance, and those folks were inevitably either a) Marxists or b) about to be purged by the Marxists they'd thought of as their friends.
The only information we can find from the actual period seems to imply that an awful lot of the Timorese independence leaders were in category b).
Best guess?
"Narrower" means of your tendencies were used. In your example if you frequently searched for shit on Caterpillar tractors it would show black caterpillar tractors. If you frequently searched for CAT Scan machines it might return those. For shit m,ost people like (ie: cat videos) you'd have to broaden your search by increasing the loosey-goosey factor.
I'm paying $575 in suburban Cleveland, which is £362; so £500 (roughly $795) isn't that unreasonable for a place where a) salaries are much higher, b) there are many more types of job available, and c) public transit is much better. Moreover, I'm American. You Brits would freak out at having to drive 10 miles before you get to the train station and then take half-hour on the train to get to work; but that's only a 40 minute commute. State-side that's average.
And you're exaggerating. There are quit e a few £400 spots available.