You can fire companies far easier - just stop dealing with them. Hard to do when a proportional handful of them provide the vast majority of products on the market.
Still better than government. In America, the majority of political "products on the market" are provided by just two political parties. I have far more power to choose when I go to the grocery store than when I go to the polling booth. And, unlike the political "market", I don't have to eat the groceries I didn't buy.
The political parties aren't supposed to give you a diverse range of choices. They're supposed to give you a narrow range of choices that is carefully tailored towards winning elections, and in a country as large and diverse in America that necessarily means lots of blandness. If you want to have more power then choosing Bland D or Bland R you have to join one of the huge 150+ coalitions and vote in primaries.
This is not the UK. Influencing policy is not supposed to be easy. It is supposed to be work. That's why most states have two houses to vote for, plus a separate Executive, plus multiple Cabinet-level guys. It's the political equivalent of a CLI. You get lots of power to choose the Republican for Governor but the Democrat for running elections, but you have to learn the system. OTOH in the UK you vote for an MP who votes for the PM. If the MP is part of a parliament that likes the PM your job is done for five years.
Even more interestingly, this survey was conducted in The United Kingdom. If the same survey was done in America, it would likely have a very different result.
It would depend on who you asked, and how you phrased the question. Everybody hates Congress. Obama's below water, but only 10-12 points. The Judiciary is revered. In general you'd probably have a lower governmental-trust number then the UK, because in America distrust of those in power is considered a badge of patriotism by a large subculture. A similar subculture consistently aligns itself with business.
So if you ask the question and include Congress everybody (including fucking Castro in some surveys) wins. Private business wins by dozens. If you mention Obama (but not Congress) it's probably pretty close, but the anti-corporate types probably make up for Obama being underwater. If you make it about the Judiciary of course the government wins.
As someone who doesn't dislike ads, why would I do any of that?
You're basically arguing that since you hate ads, and really love that you can do an hour's work to stop them completely, clearly everyone else has to hate ads and want to spend that hour blocking them. I'm not you. It's not defeat for me to keep the ads on my system because I don't really want them off my system.
Hell, if I didn't keep these ads on it wouldn't result in a better life for people like you. Those ads are what pay the bills at internet sites. Slashdot is not a charity. It would probably go under if most slashdotters blocked the ads. Reddit is not a charity. Yeah in theory they could find other ways to make money, but in practice most of those ways (ie: selling Reddit-themed merchandise) require them to advertise, which means that a) you've made your future internet happiness dependent entirely on some new business model that could fail to get rid of ads, and b) you haven't actually gotten rid of any ads. My apathy towards internet advertising is subsidizing your internet use.
The thing you have to keep in mind is that non-targeted ads aren't better. Most people just ignore web ads, so no ad is gonna have a response rate that breaks the single-digits. Most don't hit 1%.
If one guy in 50 who looked at car sites who needs a new car then flooding all 50 guys with car ads is really smart business.
People keep saying that "most of" the spying is for economic reasons, and then they provide zero examples.
There've been examples of spying being useful to corporations (one bribe from AirBus to the Saudis was exposed by the NSA), but that was also a very good example of the NSA supporting our official bribes-suck policy. When they find examples of Americans paying bribes they tens to turn it over to law enforcement, whereas the French would simply ignore it. There've been plenty of examples of bullying corporations into spying on individuals. There've been examples of spying on foreign government organizations that wouldn't be government organizations in the US (like Petrobras in Brazil). But the shit that people routinely warn American businessmen in China to be careful about just hasn't been revealed by Snowden's leaks.
It seems almost like anti-corporatist activists aren't bothering to read what Snowden's leaking, they're simply conflating the US and corporate interests and assuming that the NSA clearly has to spy on behalf of those corporations.
The government is run by the corporations. See revolving door, and campaign contributions for a start. When hemp threatened the business model of someone, millions of lives were ruined. Laws like the DMCA were not thought up out of the blue by the government Personally I see it as a size thing as much as anything. The bigger the corporation or government, the more the potential threat.
You do realize that's because in the US there are basically two kinds of institution: for-profit businesses organized as corporations and the government? If you lose an election you can't just go get a job at the Catholic Church, academia is tiny, political parties don't have policy shops, etc. You either have to go on unemployment or work for something funded mostly by for-profit corporations.
And you're not acknowledging the implication of your logic. If every sizable corporation is a threat, then keeping corporations small won't help. 10,000 corps will just be 10,000 tiny little tyrants. It'll be just like slavery. Some will be benign, others will be terrible, but even the benign ones won't be very good.
What you need is a controllable threat that can bully all 10,000 tiny little tyrants.
That's the Feds, and that's why we have elections.
One recent example is how Orbitz puts higher priced hotels at the top of the list for people using macintoshes. The real risk to each and every one of us is their ability to figure out your mental weaknesses and use them against you so that you spend more money than you should. It is the Big Data version of bikini models in beer commercials. Lots of people like to think they are immune to advertising - but nobody is 100% immune to millions of dollars worth of research on manipulation of the human mind.
That still sounds like it's not a big deal compared to what the government could do to you.
No it's not. But then nothing's like what the government can legally do to you, because the entire point of having a government is that it has the powers to stop anyone else from breaking the law. Nobody's found an example of the government using this data against someone who was not actually committing a felony. The guy the EFF is trying to get off for sending $8,000 to Al Shabab actually did that shit, and it is actually a felony, which his lawyers have admitted in court. The EFF's entire argument is that his right to privacy was violated, which is their way of saying he should get away without punishment because the Feds have no right to know he did it.
If you look at the history of oppression in the US you actually find this is pretty typical. The Feds have the theoretical power to really oppress everyone if they wanted, but since they're basically agents of the entire country and it's extremely unusual for the entire country to agree someone is worthy of oppression without all 50 states doing a great job of it's relatively rare for the Feds to be the first-line oppressors. This is particularly true when oppression involves US Citizens. Blacks people, for example, are arguably the most oppressed people in the US. And they haven't had to worry about the Feds since the 1850s. Drug users have to fear the Feds, but the overwhelming majority of imprisoned/convicted/etc. drug users are at the state level. ID requirements to vote are 100% done at the state-level, and can get really fucked up (for example, in Ohio even if you have a passport your vote can't be counted unless you bring a bill with your address on it to the City Clerk's office, and they won't know your vote can't be counted unless you read the 6-point font page of legalese they hand you while sending you to the provisional ballot line, as someone who doesn't get paper bills sent to my house this means I can vote but I cannot have my vote counted).
It just seems to me that those defining "oppression" as "The Federal government has my data" are analogous to the people of the 1880s who defined oppression as "the Federal government is telling the South what to do." They might succeed in stopping oppression as they define it, but in the meantime there's a whole lot of other shit going on that they don;t seem to care about because it's just states and what could states do?
It's a bit of a stretch near term, but you can't see a day where health care costs to the taxpayers are used to justify a system to "audit" the purchases of individuals to determine their health risks? It's inevitable. A funny thing about taxes, people want to have a say in how the money is used. Look at welfare and the amount of people that want drugs tests.
Considering that's exactly what private companies were doing before ObamaCare, no it's not a stretch. But as I just pointed out, your nightmare scenario is exactly what happened before ObamaCare, therefore you are arguing in favor of ObamaCare. Why do you think all these healthy-living upper-middle-class to middle-class people are experiencing rate shock? Their insurer looked deeply into their private lives, concluded "that chick's never gonna get sick, so I should charge her peanuts," Now the insurer can't do that, so the healthy-living-family's premium has to cover things they will never get (like diabetes), and the ObamaCare subsidies didn't cover them because they made too much money, which means their costs went up.
OTOH, it is a stretch to conclude that the US Government will act like a private business, and screw over a significant proportion of voters. Canada has an even more left-wing health payment regime then the US. The UK is left of both countries. In both countries almost everything is paid for by the government, including your 250 lb, smoking aunt's $30k a year costs. The Germans and Dutch actually have something very much like ObamaCare. Yet nobody in any of these countries argues you should charge smokers their true cost to the health system, largely because smokers would be really fucking pissed off and vote against the government.
Especially a government that now has access to your healthcare... I mean, heaven forbid I go browse to a tobacco website and be red flagged for health reasons.
Do you realize that the government is a huge organization with multiple departments? And that, in the US, they are specifically designed NOT to talk to each-other without a lot of Congressional or Judicial oversight? For example, in theory the KKK could easily have used it's control of local Sheriffs to kill 100% of black people with the list of black people provided by the Census Bureau, but they never actually did that shit because local sheriffs do not have access to the Census.
Do you realize that under ObamaCare the government has no reason to care whether you smoke? Most Americans aren't using a government-provided (ie: VA, Medicare, etc.) policy, most aren't using the health care exchanges where subsidized policies exist, and that even many on the Exchange who use unsubsidized policies cost the government $0? And that all information linking you to your policy is kept on servers which the NSA does not have access to? The NSA has been accused of many things, but they haven't hacked the IRS yet.
We got trade schools. All over. They're called Community Colleges.
We don't have many apprenticeships. That's not because the community colleges hate the idea, it's because an apprenticeship is a long-term contract where an employer agrees to give something to an employee, which means the next HR guy couldn't come in and arbitrarily re-arrange everything, and American businessman really fucking freak out when they lose the ability to re-arrange everything on 10 seconds notice. More importantly it's very hard to convince shareholders they should be paying apprentices to learn when the rest of the industry isn't.
As for pro-degree-having discrimination, keep in mind that at heart American businessman is a coward. He has never met anyone who lost a discrimination lawsuit, but he's convinced that the one time he hires Candidate A (who is less qualified on paper, but killed at the interview and has great work experience), over Candidate B (who is great on paper, but only interviews OK, and has worse work experience) Candidate B will turn out to be a gay Latino Jew and the company will lose the lawsuit. So the guy whose better on paper almost always gets the job.
If you want a higher education system where people can just show and shine without going through the rigamarole (ie: completing High School, testing, admission, paying $20k, etc.) then a lot of people will try. Since that rigamarole is actually useful in determining who would be a good student a lot of them will be bad students. They won't be prepared to do homework, they will have other time commitments, they'll turn out to be pretty damn smart (say IQ 120), but not as smart as they thought (IQ 130), etc.
But apparently everyone actually in higher ed assumes that some guy works 60 hours a week, should pass at exactly the same rate as the kid who managed to get a 4.0 from all his teachers in high school and spends all his time on Academics.
So fracking produces oil cheaper then the oil sands, and it produces more oil then the oil sands, but it isn't taking off solely because nobody in North Dakota is smart enough to take an 18-wheeler to the Keystone pipeline's start in Alberta? It seems to me that we're getting plenty of oil from ND without building a pipe-line, which makes your insistence that anyone who opposes the pipeline opposes fracking in ND pure BS.
The rest of your post is an excellent example of straw-man construction. I never claimed we should eliminate gasoline use, I claimed that enacting a policy that encourages more of it is fucking stupid. My argument is that if we encourage gasoline use to rise in the short term, in the long term we will be fucking ourselves because we won't be able to afford to keep the economy running in 2030. I'm opposing a policy that increases our gasoline use precisely because I think we can't run our economy without gasoline, and in 2030 we won't be able to afford an economy that is based on everyone having a car that gets less then 50 MPG.
What you really don't seem to get is that oil is a global commodity. If ND's frackers are allowed to sell oil to India at $167 a barrel they will do so, and unless you are willing to pay $168 per barrel (which would mean you're paying $4 a gallon just for the oil) the car-centered life-style you just defended so eloquently will end. Period. Pretty much your only hopes are that a) that bacteria that shits oil will work, and/or b) Chevy Volt and electric cars get better. b) won't happen unless somebody spends money on them.
In other words pumping oil will not save your lifestyle. If a) happens pumping is an expensive waste because bacteria colonies are cheap. Why pay ExxonMobile engineers $150k to find oil when you can pay HS-educated immigrants minimum wage to tend vats? If b) happens it will be because somebody put a lot of money into making the Volt's engine work better, not because we fracked the Backen shale 5% faster.
If I had to guess, I'd assume that the actual town of Casselton has two employees. A full-time cop, and a part-time cop for when the full-time guy is on vacation. So they probably don't even have a guy who could read all the reports from the rail companies about every train.
What they probably actually want is for their volunteer fire Chief to be able to read the report when something goes wrong. Then he'll know what his guys are getting into, and he knows if he should call the Governor for reinforcements.
I have no idea if the volunteer Fire Chief actually has the time to learn enough to digest all the info that's in the report, but small town governments don't actually have much to do except bitch about might-bes, and in a state like ND the governor's job is to make small towns happy, so they'll get their reports eventually.
I know somebody whose response to everything is to blame it on a conspiracy to murder people by denying them cheap energy is not terribly rational, but I'll humor you because I'm bored.
I'm one of the people who opposed the pipeline. If I opposed cheap energy my response to this wouldn't be "shit, some asshole fucked up, that sucks, I wonder which company the asshole worked for," it would be "It is impossible to transport oil by rail safely, therefore Obama should immediately ban all crude oil shipments from rail lines." This would totally fuck the rail companies, but since every rail car magically becomes an 18-wheeler, instead of having 1-2 engineers per train you'd have 100 Teamsters, which would also advance my goal of increasing working class employment and boosting Union membership. Moreover since some percentage of those Teamsters would get drunk/have unavoidable accidents/just plain fuck up within a couple months I'd have the perfect excuse to ban trucks from driving oil around.
Hell, just look at your definitions. $70-$80 a barrel is the break-even point for any company operating in the Alberta Tar Sands. The Tar Sands are literally the only place in the entire fucking world that could use the pipeline you're talking about. $70 a barrel is quadruple the price oil was in the Clinton years. Oil is not cheap anymore. We're near peak oil. Supply is not gonna go up very fast. When it does it won;t be cheap supply, it will be expensive, deep-water drilling or expensive extraction from the tar sands. The Chinese are demanding cheap train rides home for factory worker's in the Chinese New Year, which is not precisely unreasonable, the Indians will be demanding the same thing if their economic growth continues, which means demand is skyrocketing.
This means that if you actually support cheap energy, rather then simply supporting your ability to convince ExxonMobile to pay you six figures, you are ambivalent towards any policy that increases oil consumption anywhere. We have too goddamn much oil consumption for oil to be cheap, and it is literally physically impossible for us to increase supply at the Clinton-era rate of $15-$20 a barrel. OTOH Solar is new tech. It will improve. It's already price competitive with oil. In the short-term we're gonna have to spend money to develop the tech. But if we don't 50 years from now there will be no such thing as cheap energy, therefore if you support cheap energy you necessarily support more renewables.
According to the article only one of the trains belonged to BNSF.
I would not be surprised to find out that the other train belonged to one of the short lines that takes over routes that big lines can't afford to run profitably. They manage to pull it off by running with decades-old equipment, which means that the safety equipment is decades-old, and the engineer (who is being paid less then he'd make at the big line) is expected to be so good he makes up for that. That's pretty much what happened with that Quebec incident.
What apparently happened is that a grain train derailed and hit the oil train. Apparently only one of the trains belonged to a major carrier which can afford the latest safety equipment. I suspect that a) the derailing grain train was the one that didn't belong to BNSF, or b) the oil train wasn't supposed to be on that track at the same time as another train was on the other track due to high risk of derailment.
North American railroads are actually quite advanced at doing what they do, which is move ridiculous amounts of freight very long distances very cheaply. Diesel is cheap, electrification is expensive because it means you have to add power equipment of some kind to every mile of track, therefore they don't use electric motive power. Diesel dominance makes electrification even more expensive because your second-hand locomotive market is all diesel. Mechanics all have extensive training on Diesel engines, some of which transfers over to electric, but some doesn't. Any employee you poach from another road because he's got decades of experience you can;t get from a fresh-faced college kid has that experience with diesels. There are virtually no North American vendors selling electric motive power. The fact that government doesn't support railroads anymore means this won't change. It's not like the bond market would actually give a rail executive enough money to electrify all his track, re-train his mechanics, etc. just because he thinks it will pay off in 25 years.
Speed of any kind is expensive. It leads to wear on mechanical parts, which need to be replaced more often. It requires higher grades of track. Accidents (mostly derailments) are worse because you have more momentum at greater speeds; which in turn means your insurance rates go up. And if you're a transportation company in a country that pays jet pilots $20k, still has a postal monopoly that delivers to every house in the country within a week, and also has multiple package companies that pride themselves on doing it tomorrow, there just isn't much demand for fast freight. So instead of investing money in figuring out how to get your locomotives to break 100 MPH, you invest money in reliability at 30 MPH. If your double tracks are only running 150% of the trains of your single tracks you don't invest money in marketing to get them up to capacity, you invest money in increasing your single tracks capacity so that you can tear up the double-track and stop maintaining it.
That would be a much more convincing argument if there were any fatalities at four of the five rail accidents you mentioned.
If your definition of "dangerous" is killing people all you've got against rail pipelines is one accident, and since there's only one of it you can't prove it wasn't a freak accident.
It depends on how mainstream you mean when you say "mainstream." If you mean 15-year-olds then an extended religion metaphor is not gonna be at all useful. But you ain't gonna convince 15-year-olds to read any metaphor on UNIX History.
OTOH, in the US every mainstream Church is gonna teach it's parishioners about Martin Luther. Anyone interested in history at all is probably interested in European History, and European history is really hard to understand if you don't have some basic outline of Church history in your head. It's pretty useful in understanding a lot of very recent history/current events in places like Northern Ireland. Which means that anyone in the US who aspires to be recognized as an intellectual is gonna recognize the name Martin Luther, and know that did something which split up the Church. They don't necessarily know more then that, but hey.
Since all wanna-be intellectuals know the basics, a metaphor like this will allow anyone who might actually want to know UNIX history to learn about it.
That doesn't help as much as they say it would for two reasons.
1) If he's smart he's doing almost all his recruiting in-person, not carrying a cell phone, etc. The NSA can't intercept communications you never make.
2) Who isn't recruiting for something? Political parties, churches, secular clubs, salesman, etc. recruit all the time. So a generic "recruiter" pattern is no good. Way too many false positives. If our Evildoer is part of some large organization with a manual for recruiting, the NSA knows the manual, the pattern could be useful. But in Stage 1 of the rebellion the pattern simply doesn't exist because the NSA doesn't have any prior instances of this particular group organizing Evildoing to create their pattern from.
SigInt guys like the NSA tell the funders that they make the HumInt guys obsolete, and to an extent they're right. There's info you can get from signals very easily that a hum,an could not fund out. But if you don;t even know what signal to look for SigInt is useless.
I did not agree with you. You said the constitution was about protecting slavery and stealing land from the indians which is is not. In fact, it specificaly says in the constitution that if the government takes property from someone, it needs to pay them just compensation and the constitution actually had provisions in it that could stop slavery over time.
The interesting thing is that to disagree with me you have to make shit up. There was no Constitutional provision allowing the Federal government to stop slavery. There was a provision that allowed the Feds to stop the import of new slaves, but we already had litterally millions of slaves so stopping imports didn't make us a significantly freer country.
I wasn't saying the Constitution didn't do that stuff. I was saying that the point of the Constitution is not to protect freedom. Most of the things you mention reduce freedom by small but measurable amounts by forcing state governments to obey the Feds, despite the fact that states are closer to their people the Feds are.
The constitution does not force the states to do anything, they voluntarily surrendered those portions of sovereignty to the federal government when it was constituted and they ratified their accession to the new government. Any state that didn't want to participate didn't have to and there were two states that didn't bother even ratifying their accession until after the first congress was assembled. There is no forcing there.
So the fact they agreed to be bullied magically means it's not bullying?
And you'll note that all the things you mention helped America's WASP Middle Class conquer Indian territory (with an Army led by Mad Anthony Wayne),
lol.. this is rich. In the early years of the nation, the lands that became states were already held by the people who became part of the country. In the years to come, the lands were either purchased from governing entities or settled by settlers outside of the US and then added after the fact. The land disputes with the Indians happened largely after claims on the land were made and it was sold like with California and Arizona/New Mexico. This entire concept of stealing land from Indians is BS fluff anyways. It is dribble that idiots trot out when they don't have an intellectual argument about the numerous unique events that had happened in the past.
You really are enamored with our propaganda, aren't you?
The Treaty of Greenville was agreed to after we beat the Indians in a war. It gave us the southern 2/3 or so of Ohio. It happened six years after the Constitution was ratified, and would have happened sooner if our Army hadn't sucked. We didn't convince the Indians to give up on the rest of the Northwest territory by clever legitimate Real Estate deals, we did it by crushing them in the War of 1812. All the stuff you're talking about happened decades after the last Founding Father died.
You might as well say Jane Dickenson who was a elderly widow and mother of 2 in Canada helped protect slavery in the US because she did nothing to stop it too. Its just as big of a fallacy because she had absolutely no power to do anything either.
Did Jane pass a Fugitive Slave Act, and then bully states into enforcing it? Did she refuse to allow the wrongfully enslaved the ability to prove they were actually freeman? Did she allow numerous new states to join the union with slavery in their State Constitutions?
Note that you actually just proved my point with that analogy. If the Constitution is designed so the Feds CAN'T end slavery then it is (by definition) protecting slavery. They just didn't want to admit it.
The advantage of a decentralized election system is that it is difficult for a vast national conspiracy to secretly rig.
The disadvantages are that a) local conspiracies are very good at rigging results, and b) the big parties can manipulate them openly. For examples of a) you mostly have Democratic machines in big cities, but they mostly rig other local elections. If they start rigging national elections they risk pissing off important people in DC, so if your read "Boss" the Daley machine makes sure a local Republican candidate loses the Attorney General's race but does nothing to help Nixon. For examples of b) you have Democrats allowing making it easy vote, particularly on Sundays when working class African Americans can actually have a day off to go the polls, and Republicans making it more difficult. Note that this means local GOP elected officials are, by definition, trying to keep themselves in power by keeping people who oppose them from voting.
Overall I'd prefer the model everyone else uses, with a painfully ethical apolitical bureaucracy running things, but Americans have an extreme tendency to assume apolitical bureaucracies are simply cover for political conspiracies led by their enemies so that probably won't work here.
That the Russian Army could do them without getting out of it's pajamas, and that we wouldn't necessarily know it was the Russian Army for a couple days after they totally destroyed our power grid and got up to whatever mischief they were planning on getting up to while we were busy with the power grid.
I'll admit that's an unlikely scenario, but a big part of the reason we have political leaders is so somebody can look into these unlikely doomsday scenarios and figure out how to make them even less likely.
I'm not sure I'd supported spending hundreds of my tax dollars to stop the scenario, but $10-$20 (which works out to $3-$6 Billion) seems reasonable.
Keep in mind that in the US state oppression is almost always done by the actual states. Especially oppression of US Citizens. The only exception was Japanese internment, and even that was probably a lot kinder then whatever California would have come up with on it's own.
The reason is that we are a large, diverse country with numerous elected local governments. It's very difficult to go from nothing to winning national power, so you generally have multiple states in your pocket before you even think about gaining access to the Federal tools of oppression. There's a reason that most of the Civil Rights movement was aimed at a) convincing states to stop being evil, or b) convincing the Fed to bully states into stopping being evil.
I am very skeptical of any American who says he's both a) pro-freedom, and b) does not acknowledge that in the US half the battle for freedom is making sure the Feds are strong enough to bully states.
Keep in mind that, at this very minute, several states are actively trying to keep people who disagree with their governors from voting through a variety of means. These include Voter ID, eliminating early voting the Sunday before the election (because black do it), etc. If you think that the NSA having your data is a greater threat to your freedom then your Governor actively trying to stop people from voting him out of office you are a fool.
Since an attack on substations would need to several somewhat-coordinated teams to be effective, and would require some intelligence as to where is most vulnerable, it's exactly the sort of attack the NSA thinks they can catch.
Depends on how good the bad guys are at Radio Discipline. If they never use radios/cell phones/email/etc. to talk about their plans the NSA can't catch them.
They probably can't go completely radio silent, but they can definitely use code-words.
The big problem little organizations like this have in pulling off their first attack is finding enough qualified people to do it without accidentally picking up an informant who will inform his FBI handler that your numerous texts about "finding a place for the party" are actually coded messages for finding the first target of your guerrilla war campaign.
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You can fire companies far easier - just stop dealing with them.
Hard to do when a proportional handful of them provide the vast majority of products on the market.
Still better than government. In America, the majority of political "products on the market" are provided by just two political parties. I have far more power to choose when I go to the grocery store than when I go to the polling booth. And, unlike the political "market", I don't have to eat the groceries I didn't buy.
The political parties aren't supposed to give you a diverse range of choices. They're supposed to give you a narrow range of choices that is carefully tailored towards winning elections, and in a country as large and diverse in America that necessarily means lots of blandness. If you want to have more power then choosing Bland D or Bland R you have to join one of the huge 150+ coalitions and vote in primaries.
This is not the UK. Influencing policy is not supposed to be easy. It is supposed to be work. That's why most states have two houses to vote for, plus a separate Executive, plus multiple Cabinet-level guys. It's the political equivalent of a CLI. You get lots of power to choose the Republican for Governor but the Democrat for running elections, but you have to learn the system. OTOH in the UK you vote for an MP who votes for the PM. If the MP is part of a parliament that likes the PM your job is done for five years.
Even more interestingly, this survey was conducted in The United Kingdom. If the same survey was done in America, it would likely have a very different result.
It would depend on who you asked, and how you phrased the question. Everybody hates Congress. Obama's below water, but only 10-12 points. The Judiciary is revered. In general you'd probably have a lower governmental-trust number then the UK, because in America distrust of those in power is considered a badge of patriotism by a large subculture. A similar subculture consistently aligns itself with business.
So if you ask the question and include Congress everybody (including fucking Castro in some surveys) wins. Private business wins by dozens. If you mention Obama (but not Congress) it's probably pretty close, but the anti-corporate types probably make up for Obama being underwater. If you make it about the Judiciary of course the government wins.
As someone who doesn't dislike ads, why would I do any of that?
You're basically arguing that since you hate ads, and really love that you can do an hour's work to stop them completely, clearly everyone else has to hate ads and want to spend that hour blocking them. I'm not you. It's not defeat for me to keep the ads on my system because I don't really want them off my system.
Hell, if I didn't keep these ads on it wouldn't result in a better life for people like you. Those ads are what pay the bills at internet sites. Slashdot is not a charity. It would probably go under if most slashdotters blocked the ads. Reddit is not a charity. Yeah in theory they could find other ways to make money, but in practice most of those ways (ie: selling Reddit-themed merchandise) require them to advertise, which means that a) you've made your future internet happiness dependent entirely on some new business model that could fail to get rid of ads, and b) you haven't actually gotten rid of any ads. My apathy towards internet advertising is subsidizing your internet use.
You're welcome.
The thing you have to keep in mind is that non-targeted ads aren't better. Most people just ignore web ads, so no ad is gonna have a response rate that breaks the single-digits. Most don't hit 1%.
If one guy in 50 who looked at car sites who needs a new car then flooding all 50 guys with car ads is really smart business.
People keep saying that "most of" the spying is for economic reasons, and then they provide zero examples.
There've been examples of spying being useful to corporations (one bribe from AirBus to the Saudis was exposed by the NSA), but that was also a very good example of the NSA supporting our official bribes-suck policy. When they find examples of Americans paying bribes they tens to turn it over to law enforcement, whereas the French would simply ignore it. There've been plenty of examples of bullying corporations into spying on individuals. There've been examples of spying on foreign government organizations that wouldn't be government organizations in the US (like Petrobras in Brazil). But the shit that people routinely warn American businessmen in China to be careful about just hasn't been revealed by Snowden's leaks.
It seems almost like anti-corporatist activists aren't bothering to read what Snowden's leaking, they're simply conflating the US and corporate interests and assuming that the NSA clearly has to spy on behalf of those corporations.
The government is run by the corporations. See revolving door, and campaign contributions for a start.
When hemp threatened the business model of someone, millions of lives were ruined. Laws like the DMCA were not thought up out of the blue by the government
Personally I see it as a size thing as much as anything. The bigger the corporation or government, the more the potential threat.
You do realize that's because in the US there are basically two kinds of institution: for-profit businesses organized as corporations and the government? If you lose an election you can't just go get a job at the Catholic Church, academia is tiny, political parties don't have policy shops, etc. You either have to go on unemployment or work for something funded mostly by for-profit corporations.
And you're not acknowledging the implication of your logic. If every sizable corporation is a threat, then keeping corporations small won't help. 10,000 corps will just be 10,000 tiny little tyrants. It'll be just like slavery. Some will be benign, others will be terrible, but even the benign ones won't be very good.
What you need is a controllable threat that can bully all 10,000 tiny little tyrants.
That's the Feds, and that's why we have elections.
One recent example is how Orbitz puts higher priced hotels at the top of the list for people using macintoshes. The real risk to each and every one of us is their ability to figure out your mental weaknesses and use them against you so that you spend more money than you should. It is the Big Data version of bikini models in beer commercials. Lots of people like to think they are immune to advertising - but nobody is 100% immune to millions of dollars worth of research on manipulation of the human mind.
That still sounds like it's not a big deal compared to what the government could do to you.
No it's not. But then nothing's like what the government can legally do to you, because the entire point of having a government is that it has the powers to stop anyone else from breaking the law. Nobody's found an example of the government using this data against someone who was not actually committing a felony. The guy the EFF is trying to get off for sending $8,000 to Al Shabab actually did that shit, and it is actually a felony, which his lawyers have admitted in court. The EFF's entire argument is that his right to privacy was violated, which is their way of saying he should get away without punishment because the Feds have no right to know he did it.
If you look at the history of oppression in the US you actually find this is pretty typical. The Feds have the theoretical power to really oppress everyone if they wanted, but since they're basically agents of the entire country and it's extremely unusual for the entire country to agree someone is worthy of oppression without all 50 states doing a great job of it's relatively rare for the Feds to be the first-line oppressors. This is particularly true when oppression involves US Citizens. Blacks people, for example, are arguably the most oppressed people in the US. And they haven't had to worry about the Feds since the 1850s. Drug users have to fear the Feds, but the overwhelming majority of imprisoned/convicted/etc. drug users are at the state level. ID requirements to vote are 100% done at the state-level, and can get really fucked up (for example, in Ohio even if you have a passport your vote can't be counted unless you bring a bill with your address on it to the City Clerk's office, and they won't know your vote can't be counted unless you read the 6-point font page of legalese they hand you while sending you to the provisional ballot line, as someone who doesn't get paper bills sent to my house this means I can vote but I cannot have my vote counted).
It just seems to me that those defining "oppression" as "The Federal government has my data" are analogous to the people of the 1880s who defined oppression as "the Federal government is telling the South what to do." They might succeed in stopping oppression as they define it, but in the meantime there's a whole lot of other shit going on that they don;t seem to care about because it's just states and what could states do?
It's a bit of a stretch near term, but you can't see a day where health care costs to the taxpayers are used to justify a system to "audit" the purchases of individuals to determine their health risks? It's inevitable. A funny thing about taxes, people want to have a say in how the money is used. Look at welfare and the amount of people that want drugs tests.
Considering that's exactly what private companies were doing before ObamaCare, no it's not a stretch. But as I just pointed out, your nightmare scenario is exactly what happened before ObamaCare, therefore you are arguing in favor of ObamaCare. Why do you think all these healthy-living upper-middle-class to middle-class people are experiencing rate shock? Their insurer looked deeply into their private lives, concluded "that chick's never gonna get sick, so I should charge her peanuts," Now the insurer can't do that, so the healthy-living-family's premium has to cover things they will never get (like diabetes), and the ObamaCare subsidies didn't cover them because they made too much money, which means their costs went up.
OTOH, it is a stretch to conclude that the US Government will act like a private business, and screw over a significant proportion of voters. Canada has an even more left-wing health payment regime then the US. The UK is left of both countries. In both countries almost everything is paid for by the government, including your 250 lb, smoking aunt's $30k a year costs. The Germans and Dutch actually have something very much like ObamaCare. Yet nobody in any of these countries argues you should charge smokers their true cost to the health system, largely because smokers would be really fucking pissed off and vote against the government.
Especially a government that now has access to your healthcare... I mean, heaven forbid I go browse to a tobacco website and be red flagged for health reasons.
Do you realize that the government is a huge organization with multiple departments? And that, in the US, they are specifically designed NOT to talk to each-other without a lot of Congressional or Judicial oversight? For example, in theory the KKK could easily have used it's control of local Sheriffs to kill 100% of black people with the list of black people provided by the Census Bureau, but they never actually did that shit because local sheriffs do not have access to the Census.
Do you realize that under ObamaCare the government has no reason to care whether you smoke? Most Americans aren't using a government-provided (ie: VA, Medicare, etc.) policy, most aren't using the health care exchanges where subsidized policies exist, and that even many on the Exchange who use unsubsidized policies cost the government $0? And that all information linking you to your policy is kept on servers which the NSA does not have access to? The NSA has been accused of many things, but they haven't hacked the IRS yet.
We got trade schools. All over. They're called Community Colleges.
We don't have many apprenticeships. That's not because the community colleges hate the idea, it's because an apprenticeship is a long-term contract where an employer agrees to give something to an employee, which means the next HR guy couldn't come in and arbitrarily re-arrange everything, and American businessman really fucking freak out when they lose the ability to re-arrange everything on 10 seconds notice. More importantly it's very hard to convince shareholders they should be paying apprentices to learn when the rest of the industry isn't.
As for pro-degree-having discrimination, keep in mind that at heart American businessman is a coward. He has never met anyone who lost a discrimination lawsuit, but he's convinced that the one time he hires Candidate A (who is less qualified on paper, but killed at the interview and has great work experience), over Candidate B (who is great on paper, but only interviews OK, and has worse work experience) Candidate B will turn out to be a gay Latino Jew and the company will lose the lawsuit. So the guy whose better on paper almost always gets the job.
Really weird.
If you want a higher education system where people can just show and shine without going through the rigamarole (ie: completing High School, testing, admission, paying $20k, etc.) then a lot of people will try. Since that rigamarole is actually useful in determining who would be a good student a lot of them will be bad students. They won't be prepared to do homework, they will have other time commitments, they'll turn out to be pretty damn smart (say IQ 120), but not as smart as they thought (IQ 130), etc.
But apparently everyone actually in higher ed assumes that some guy works 60 hours a week, should pass at exactly the same rate as the kid who managed to get a 4.0 from all his teachers in high school and spends all his time on Academics.
So fracking produces oil cheaper then the oil sands, and it produces more oil then the oil sands, but it isn't taking off solely because nobody in North Dakota is smart enough to take an 18-wheeler to the Keystone pipeline's start in Alberta? It seems to me that we're getting plenty of oil from ND without building a pipe-line, which makes your insistence that anyone who opposes the pipeline opposes fracking in ND pure BS.
The rest of your post is an excellent example of straw-man construction. I never claimed we should eliminate gasoline use, I claimed that enacting a policy that encourages more of it is fucking stupid. My argument is that if we encourage gasoline use to rise in the short term, in the long term we will be fucking ourselves because we won't be able to afford to keep the economy running in 2030. I'm opposing a policy that increases our gasoline use precisely because I think we can't run our economy without gasoline, and in 2030 we won't be able to afford an economy that is based on everyone having a car that gets less then 50 MPG.
What you really don't seem to get is that oil is a global commodity. If ND's frackers are allowed to sell oil to India at $167 a barrel they will do so, and unless you are willing to pay $168 per barrel (which would mean you're paying $4 a gallon just for the oil) the car-centered life-style you just defended so eloquently will end. Period. Pretty much your only hopes are that a) that bacteria that shits oil will work, and/or b) Chevy Volt and electric cars get better. b) won't happen unless somebody spends money on them.
In other words pumping oil will not save your lifestyle. If a) happens pumping is an expensive waste because bacteria colonies are cheap. Why pay ExxonMobile engineers $150k to find oil when you can pay HS-educated immigrants minimum wage to tend vats? If b) happens it will be because somebody put a lot of money into making the Volt's engine work better, not because we fracked the Backen shale 5% faster.
If I had to guess, I'd assume that the actual town of Casselton has two employees. A full-time cop, and a part-time cop for when the full-time guy is on vacation. So they probably don't even have a guy who could read all the reports from the rail companies about every train.
What they probably actually want is for their volunteer fire Chief to be able to read the report when something goes wrong. Then he'll know what his guys are getting into, and he knows if he should call the Governor for reinforcements.
I have no idea if the volunteer Fire Chief actually has the time to learn enough to digest all the info that's in the report, but small town governments don't actually have much to do except bitch about might-bes, and in a state like ND the governor's job is to make small towns happy, so they'll get their reports eventually.
I know somebody whose response to everything is to blame it on a conspiracy to murder people by denying them cheap energy is not terribly rational, but I'll humor you because I'm bored.
I'm one of the people who opposed the pipeline. If I opposed cheap energy my response to this wouldn't be "shit, some asshole fucked up, that sucks, I wonder which company the asshole worked for," it would be "It is impossible to transport oil by rail safely, therefore Obama should immediately ban all crude oil shipments from rail lines." This would totally fuck the rail companies, but since every rail car magically becomes an 18-wheeler, instead of having 1-2 engineers per train you'd have 100 Teamsters, which would also advance my goal of increasing working class employment and boosting Union membership. Moreover since some percentage of those Teamsters would get drunk/have unavoidable accidents/just plain fuck up within a couple months I'd have the perfect excuse to ban trucks from driving oil around.
Hell, just look at your definitions. $70-$80 a barrel is the break-even point for any company operating in the Alberta Tar Sands. The Tar Sands are literally the only place in the entire fucking world that could use the pipeline you're talking about. $70 a barrel is quadruple the price oil was in the Clinton years. Oil is not cheap anymore. We're near peak oil. Supply is not gonna go up very fast. When it does it won;t be cheap supply, it will be expensive, deep-water drilling or expensive extraction from the tar sands. The Chinese are demanding cheap train rides home for factory worker's in the Chinese New Year, which is not precisely unreasonable, the Indians will be demanding the same thing if their economic growth continues, which means demand is skyrocketing.
This means that if you actually support cheap energy, rather then simply supporting your ability to convince ExxonMobile to pay you six figures, you are ambivalent towards any policy that increases oil consumption anywhere. We have too goddamn much oil consumption for oil to be cheap, and it is literally physically impossible for us to increase supply at the Clinton-era rate of $15-$20 a barrel. OTOH Solar is new tech. It will improve. It's already price competitive with oil. In the short-term we're gonna have to spend money to develop the tech. But if we don't 50 years from now there will be no such thing as cheap energy, therefore if you support cheap energy you necessarily support more renewables.
Slashdot frequently has a day or so lag between interesting things happening and them being posted.
According to the article only one of the trains belonged to BNSF.
I would not be surprised to find out that the other train belonged to one of the short lines that takes over routes that big lines can't afford to run profitably. They manage to pull it off by running with decades-old equipment, which means that the safety equipment is decades-old, and the engineer (who is being paid less then he'd make at the big line) is expected to be so good he makes up for that. That's pretty much what happened with that Quebec incident.
What apparently happened is that a grain train derailed and hit the oil train. Apparently only one of the trains belonged to a major carrier which can afford the latest safety equipment. I suspect that a) the derailing grain train was the one that didn't belong to BNSF, or b) the oil train wasn't supposed to be on that track at the same time as another train was on the other track due to high risk of derailment.
North American railroads are actually quite advanced at doing what they do, which is move ridiculous amounts of freight very long distances very cheaply. Diesel is cheap, electrification is expensive because it means you have to add power equipment of some kind to every mile of track, therefore they don't use electric motive power. Diesel dominance makes electrification even more expensive because your second-hand locomotive market is all diesel. Mechanics all have extensive training on Diesel engines, some of which transfers over to electric, but some doesn't. Any employee you poach from another road because he's got decades of experience you can;t get from a fresh-faced college kid has that experience with diesels. There are virtually no North American vendors selling electric motive power. The fact that government doesn't support railroads anymore means this won't change. It's not like the bond market would actually give a rail executive enough money to electrify all his track, re-train his mechanics, etc. just because he thinks it will pay off in 25 years.
Speed of any kind is expensive. It leads to wear on mechanical parts, which need to be replaced more often. It requires higher grades of track. Accidents (mostly derailments) are worse because you have more momentum at greater speeds; which in turn means your insurance rates go up. And if you're a transportation company in a country that pays jet pilots $20k, still has a postal monopoly that delivers to every house in the country within a week, and also has multiple package companies that pride themselves on doing it tomorrow, there just isn't much demand for fast freight. So instead of investing money in figuring out how to get your locomotives to break 100 MPH, you invest money in reliability at 30 MPH. If your double tracks are only running 150% of the trains of your single tracks you don't invest money in marketing to get them up to capacity, you invest money in increasing your single tracks capacity so that you can tear up the double-track and stop maintaining it.
That would be a much more convincing argument if there were any fatalities at four of the five rail accidents you mentioned.
If your definition of "dangerous" is killing people all you've got against rail pipelines is one accident, and since there's only one of it you can't prove it wasn't a freak accident.
It depends on how mainstream you mean when you say "mainstream." If you mean 15-year-olds then an extended religion metaphor is not gonna be at all useful. But you ain't gonna convince 15-year-olds to read any metaphor on UNIX History.
OTOH, in the US every mainstream Church is gonna teach it's parishioners about Martin Luther. Anyone interested in history at all is probably interested in European History, and European history is really hard to understand if you don't have some basic outline of Church history in your head. It's pretty useful in understanding a lot of very recent history/current events in places like Northern Ireland. Which means that anyone in the US who aspires to be recognized as an intellectual is gonna recognize the name Martin Luther, and know that did something which split up the Church. They don't necessarily know more then that, but hey.
Since all wanna-be intellectuals know the basics, a metaphor like this will allow anyone who might actually want to know UNIX history to learn about it.
That doesn't help as much as they say it would for two reasons.
1) If he's smart he's doing almost all his recruiting in-person, not carrying a cell phone, etc. The NSA can't intercept communications you never make.
2) Who isn't recruiting for something? Political parties, churches, secular clubs, salesman, etc. recruit all the time. So a generic "recruiter" pattern is no good. Way too many false positives. If our Evildoer is part of some large organization with a manual for recruiting, the NSA knows the manual, the pattern could be useful. But in Stage 1 of the rebellion the pattern simply doesn't exist because the NSA doesn't have any prior instances of this particular group organizing Evildoing to create their pattern from.
SigInt guys like the NSA tell the funders that they make the HumInt guys obsolete, and to an extent they're right. There's info you can get from signals very easily that a hum,an could not fund out. But if you don;t even know what signal to look for SigInt is useless.
I did not agree with you. You said the constitution was about protecting slavery and stealing land from the indians which is is not. In fact, it specificaly says in the constitution that if the government takes property from someone, it needs to pay them just compensation and the constitution actually had provisions in it that could stop slavery over time.
The interesting thing is that to disagree with me you have to make shit up. There was no Constitutional provision allowing the Federal government to stop slavery. There was a provision that allowed the Feds to stop the import of new slaves, but we already had litterally millions of slaves so stopping imports didn't make us a significantly freer country.
The constitution does not force the states to do anything, they voluntarily surrendered those portions of sovereignty to the federal government when it was constituted and they ratified their accession to the new government. Any state that didn't want to participate didn't have to and there were two states that didn't bother even ratifying their accession until after the first congress was assembled. There is no forcing there.
So the fact they agreed to be bullied magically means it's not bullying?
lol.. this is rich. In the early years of the nation, the lands that became states were already held by the people who became part of the country. In the years to come, the lands were either purchased from governing entities or settled by settlers outside of the US and then added after the fact. The land disputes with the Indians happened largely after claims on the land were made and it was sold like with California and Arizona/New Mexico. This entire concept of stealing land from Indians is BS fluff anyways. It is dribble that idiots trot out when they don't have an intellectual argument about the numerous unique events that had happened in the past.
You really are enamored with our propaganda, aren't you?
The Treaty of Greenville was agreed to after we beat the Indians in a war. It gave us the southern 2/3 or so of Ohio. It happened six years after the Constitution was ratified, and would have happened sooner if our Army hadn't sucked. We didn't convince the Indians to give up on the rest of the Northwest territory by clever legitimate Real Estate deals, we did it by crushing them in the War of 1812. All the stuff you're talking about happened decades after the last Founding Father died.
You might as well say Jane Dickenson who was a elderly widow and mother of 2 in Canada helped protect slavery in the US because she did nothing to stop it too. Its just as big of a fallacy because she had absolutely no power to do anything either.
Did Jane pass a Fugitive Slave Act, and then bully states into enforcing it? Did she refuse to allow the wrongfully enslaved the ability to prove they were actually freeman? Did she allow numerous new states to join the union with slavery in their State Constitutions?
Note that you actually just proved my point with that analogy. If the Constitution is designed so the Feds CAN'T end slavery then it is (by definition) protecting slavery. They just didn't want to admit it.
The advantage of a decentralized election system is that it is difficult for a vast national conspiracy to secretly rig.
The disadvantages are that a) local conspiracies are very good at rigging results, and b) the big parties can manipulate them openly. For examples of a) you mostly have Democratic machines in big cities, but they mostly rig other local elections. If they start rigging national elections they risk pissing off important people in DC, so if your read "Boss" the Daley machine makes sure a local Republican candidate loses the Attorney General's race but does nothing to help Nixon. For examples of b) you have Democrats allowing making it easy vote, particularly on Sundays when working class African Americans can actually have a day off to go the polls, and Republicans making it more difficult. Note that this means local GOP elected officials are, by definition, trying to keep themselves in power by keeping people who oppose them from voting.
Overall I'd prefer the model everyone else uses, with a painfully ethical apolitical bureaucracy running things, but Americans have an extreme tendency to assume apolitical bureaucracies are simply cover for political conspiracies led by their enemies so that probably won't work here.
That the Russian Army could do them without getting out of it's pajamas, and that we wouldn't necessarily know it was the Russian Army for a couple days after they totally destroyed our power grid and got up to whatever mischief they were planning on getting up to while we were busy with the power grid.
I'll admit that's an unlikely scenario, but a big part of the reason we have political leaders is so somebody can look into these unlikely doomsday scenarios and figure out how to make them even less likely.
I'm not sure I'd supported spending hundreds of my tax dollars to stop the scenario, but $10-$20 (which works out to $3-$6 Billion) seems reasonable.
Keep in mind that in the US state oppression is almost always done by the actual states. Especially oppression of US Citizens. The only exception was Japanese internment, and even that was probably a lot kinder then whatever California would have come up with on it's own.
The reason is that we are a large, diverse country with numerous elected local governments. It's very difficult to go from nothing to winning national power, so you generally have multiple states in your pocket before you even think about gaining access to the Federal tools of oppression. There's a reason that most of the Civil Rights movement was aimed at a) convincing states to stop being evil, or b) convincing the Fed to bully states into stopping being evil.
I am very skeptical of any American who says he's both a) pro-freedom, and b) does not acknowledge that in the US half the battle for freedom is making sure the Feds are strong enough to bully states.
Keep in mind that, at this very minute, several states are actively trying to keep people who disagree with their governors from voting through a variety of means. These include Voter ID, eliminating early voting the Sunday before the election (because black do it), etc. If you think that the NSA having your data is a greater threat to your freedom then your Governor actively trying to stop people from voting him out of office you are a fool.
Since an attack on substations would need to several somewhat-coordinated teams to be effective, and would require some intelligence as to where is most vulnerable, it's exactly the sort of attack the NSA thinks they can catch.
Depends on how good the bad guys are at Radio Discipline. If they never use radios/cell phones/email/etc. to talk about their plans the NSA can't catch them.
They probably can't go completely radio silent, but they can definitely use code-words.
The big problem little organizations like this have in pulling off their first attack is finding enough qualified people to do it without accidentally picking up an informant who will inform his FBI handler that your numerous texts about "finding a place for the party" are actually coded messages for finding the first target of your guerrilla war campaign.