It could easily be for the worse, and most likely won't be any better, but it will change.
Most likely, there will be no significant change to speak of. Maybe some cosmetic tweaks. Certainly new promises which will be broken on day one. Almost definitely a populace who will continue to fail to demand real change.
Or Unthinkable in which, after Samuel L Jackson tortures a guy for the whole film it turns out he didn't go far enough. Having slashed the detainees wife's throat before his eyes, they stopped short at doing same to his kids. Moral of the story, torture works but only as long as you're willing to go all the way. Sickening.
Like the Wiki leaks film, it'll basically be a type of COINTELPRO propaganda piece intended to frame the discussion around the leaks to suit the big media/corp/gov't agenda.
Well yeah, that's obviously a possibility. Although Greenwald seems to maintain a more or less positive relationship with Snowden, which is markedly different from the wikileaks film (which I didn't care for, though I still think Benedict Cumberbatch did pretty well) where Assange basically hated the script even before the movie was out.
Actually I was in disagreement with your assertion that Pax Americana was somehow not a kind of empire in how it operates in the world the last couple decades, I didn't mention all out war.
But you're not wrong in that, since the end if the Cold War, there have been fewer "nation-vs-nation" wars, as you put it (which were not really that, even during the Cold War, but mostly proxy wars between both superpowers). "Standing armies" does not mean what it used to, before there was a single superpower.
But notice that military spending has not diminished as one might have expected, rather it has risen since the early 90s. It is as much as the rest of the planet combined, to the extent that their budgets are accountable at all, that is. Find a world map of US military installations. The reason that actual, explicit coercion is rare is simply that lesser nations can't afford to let it come that far. That makes the coercion more efficient, yes, but not less "empire" like.
That doesn't make the present situation peaceful in any meaningful way though, for great numbers of people. That there were no formal war declarations and massive infantry battles doesn't actually make the history of, say, Haiti, Colombia, Chile, Argentina, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Guatemala, all that much less bloody. That is what imperial enforcement looks like, not Waterloo.
Market economics are the alternative to fighting for resources. Instead of grabbing what you want by force, you just buy it. The market based world order of the Pax Americana is far more peaceful than the age of imperialism and mercantilism that preceded it.
What is this peace you speak of? Imperialism is far from over, the current situation is hardly different from the Spanish, British, or even the Ronan empires in any interesting way. It always amounts to wielding an overwhelming asymmetry in military might to maintain a steady flow of wealth from the rest if the world to the homeland.
The amazing thing is that so few there seem to have any idea what kind of dick they are being as a nation, or to what extent their comfort (often even a luxury that ought to be embarrassing, frankly) is underwritten by misery and poverty in lesser places.
Precisely. In fact, blame Hollywood at least as much as Washington. There's way more fictional terrorists and serial killers and so on than real ones. And they need the public to be much more afraid than is actually warranted, or they might push back against some of this madness.
I reserve a dedicated level of contempt especially for their fusion: the military-entertainment complex. Pentagon sponsoring series and films -- with strings attached of course so effectively outsourced propaganda -- has a much broader effect than just those productions. Companies might keep their content government-friendly for fear of missing out on future projects' funding.
Does your home country care about everyone in the world equally, or do they attempt to protect the interests of their citizens first and foremost?
The latter, of course. But there is a bit of a gap between "care about everyone in the world equally" on the one hand, and "foreigners count for nothing so it's okay to obliterate them with Hellfire from our comfy chair."
The meek shall inherit the Earth, once the strong are finished taking everything they want.
That's cute. Also, a self fulfilling prophecy if enough of us fall for it. The strong will not always be strong, or able to keep what they took. You reap what you sow, karma is a bitch.
The way drones are currently employed in extrajudicial killing (a.k.a. murder), typically inside sovereign nations not at war with the US, is just as illegal when it targets US citizen as it is when it targets anybody else.
Not to mention the vast majority of drone victims who are not even suspected of anything but being in the wrong place at the wrong time.
This is a pretty reliable method of creating new terrorists.
Granted, this was a long time ago, but not much has changed, has it?
Actually, that same bank, among others, was recently found guilty of pretty much similar crimes. But other than a slap on the wrist, nothing happened because:
the Justice Department, for the first time, admitted why it decided to go soft on this particular kind of criminal. It was worried that anything more than a wrist slap for HSBC might undermine the world economy. "Had the U.S. authorities decided to press criminal charges," said Assistant Attorney General Lanny Breuer at a press conference to announce the settlement, "HSBC would almost certainly have lost its banking license in the U.S., the future of the institution would have been under threat and the entire banking system would have been destabilized."
And here's a man trying to BUY THEM BACK. Get off your asses and HELP HIM.
I appreciate that that is the goal -- but how realistic is it, exactly, post-Citizens United and post-McCutcheon? Even before this rampant corruption was declared legal and released from what nominal limits there were, statistical research by some Princeton boffins indicated that democracy is not functioning in practice and the US is a plutocracy or oligarchy in all but name.
Don't get me wrong, I wish Lawrence Lessig all luck with this endeavour. Who know, maybe the public has finally had enough. Although, naming it "Mayday" is likely to make rightwingers (meaning D and R alike) simply cry commie in stead of adressing the issues.
One very interesting source of accounts on US/UK spy relations can be found in the novels of John LeCarrre. Especially the earlier ones, the Smiley trilogy for instance. It's fiction of course, but very well-informed, and written by a former spook.
The economic power of the US is not strongly tied to fossil fuels.
But the problem is that the few people/corporations whose economic power is tied to fossil fuels are spending so much of it on distorting and undermining political process. As in TFS.
The US uses them heavily but so does every other industrialized nation on earth. Nations whose economic output is primarily tied to fossil fuel mining (like Saudi Arabia) should in theory worry about such things but the US could relatively easily switch to new sources of power within reasonably short time scales. Most of the economic output of the US is not based on mining or distribution of fossil fuels.
Such a switch would begin by throwing a wrench in the gears of those who are heavily dependent on fossil fuels not being significantly replaced any time soon. Not all that easy, it would seem.
Exactly what do you think is going to replace fossil fuels that is not going to be available in the US? Seriously, I'm all for replacing fossil fuels with cleaner sources of energy but there is NOTHING out there presently or in the reasonably likely future that is likely to do more than dent the use of fossil fuels for at least the next 30-40 years.
Well if enough people fall for the FUD, that is a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy.
statistics is what advertisers use to target ads, given access to people's personal information can draw mathematical relationships between habbits and demographics, and between demographics and desires, and strengths and weaknesses.
In fact, statistics is the one branch of mathematics that basically everyone in higher education comes across. Much to the chagrin of non-technical majors the world over. Which is too bad, because with zero intuition it is a really hard subject.
But yes, mathematics touches on basically everything we do in IT, and I for one welcome this call for a debate about how ethical questions come into play for e.g. cryptographers.
If everyone in the world switched from eating meat to eating vegan substitutes (which is more environmentally friendly), you're going to end up with a massive animal welfare crisis on your hands. All those cows, pigs, sheep, chickens etc are no longer going to be wanted by mankind.
I think I see what you mean. But the words "animal welfare crisis" seem pretty adequate to describe the way our meat ends up on our plates right now.
Personally I am a meat lover of the hypocrite kind: if I had to slaughter my own, I'd be a vegetarian tomorrow. So I have this sort if compromise where I only eat meat maybe two or three days a week, and then I choose the more expensive kind which is supposed to be from animals which could be argued to have had a half decent life.
Actually I'm not sure why that, like so many other things, could not improve considerably with practice. I know I read a lot faster now than back when I had just learned how to.
Friend of mine claims that practicing juggling improves memory (only for future memories). Something about strengthening the cooperation between left and right parts of the brain. Could be bollocks, of course, but the point stands -- lots of things can be trained, sometimes apparently far fetched methods somehow just work.
If you don't pay for the service, YOU are the product.
If you don't have anything interesting to say, YOU parrot catchphrases that have long since lost whatever miniscule amount of meaning they may have once had.
Sure it's a cliche remark. But the reason why it is cliche is that it fits many situations adequately. Cool thing about the truth: it can't be exaggerated.
I don't expect they could do this legally without stating it somewhere in small print, which is what I gather they've done just now?
If it were done illegally there would have to have been some kind of criminal conspiracy between Verizon (in this case) as supply and its advertising partners as the demand of such a black market.
Surely that would have blown before long, at least if the market were large enough to risk it at all. Although, come to think of it, the LIBOR thing ran for quite a while...
By the way, how is it that this kind of double speak, in official company communiques, passes largely unnoticed:
Slashdot Mirror
No, 2016 will change something.
It could easily be for the worse, and most likely won't be any better, but it will change.
Most likely, there will be no significant change to speak of. Maybe some cosmetic tweaks. Certainly new promises which will be broken on day one. Almost definitely a populace who will continue to fail to demand real change.
Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.
TFS and TFA are both ridiculously vague.
How exactly does this work, in terms of jurisdiction? Is this a case for the ICC? WTO?
Or is it now (officially) the position of USJ that its jurisdiction covers the whole planet?
This guy should simply trademark his name, then sue everybody using it in the wrong way/wrong places.
Worked wonders for Scientology, that.
Or Unthinkable in which, after Samuel L Jackson tortures a guy for the whole film it turns out he didn't go far enough. Having slashed the detainees wife's throat before his eyes, they stopped short at doing same to his kids. Moral of the story, torture works but only as long as you're willing to go all the way. Sickening.
Like the Wiki leaks film, it'll basically be a type of COINTELPRO propaganda piece intended to frame the discussion around the leaks to suit the big media/corp/gov't agenda.
Well yeah, that's obviously a possibility. Although Greenwald seems to maintain a more or less positive relationship with Snowden, which is markedly different from the wikileaks film (which I didn't care for, though I still think Benedict Cumberbatch did pretty well) where Assange basically hated the script even before the movie was out.
Actually I was in disagreement with your assertion that Pax Americana was somehow not a kind of empire in how it operates in the world the last couple decades, I didn't mention all out war.
But you're not wrong in that, since the end if the Cold War, there have been fewer "nation-vs-nation" wars, as you put it (which were not really that, even during the Cold War, but mostly proxy wars between both superpowers). "Standing armies" does not mean what it used to, before there was a single superpower.
But notice that military spending has not diminished as one might have expected, rather it has risen since the early 90s. It is as much as the rest of the planet combined, to the extent that their budgets are accountable at all, that is. Find a world map of US military installations. The reason that actual, explicit coercion is rare is simply that lesser nations can't afford to let it come that far. That makes the coercion more efficient, yes, but not less "empire" like.
That doesn't make the present situation peaceful in any meaningful way though, for great numbers of people. That there were no formal war declarations and massive infantry battles doesn't actually make the history of, say, Haiti, Colombia, Chile, Argentina, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Guatemala, all that much less bloody. That is what imperial enforcement looks like, not Waterloo.
Market economics are the alternative to fighting for resources. Instead of grabbing what you want by force, you just buy it. The market based world order of the Pax Americana is far more peaceful than the age of imperialism and mercantilism that preceded it.
What is this peace you speak of? Imperialism is far from over, the current situation is hardly different from the Spanish, British, or even the Ronan empires in any interesting way. It always amounts to wielding an overwhelming asymmetry in military might to maintain a steady flow of wealth from the rest if the world to the homeland.
The amazing thing is that so few there seem to have any idea what kind of dick they are being as a nation, or to what extent their comfort (often even a luxury that ought to be embarrassing, frankly) is underwritten by misery and poverty in lesser places.
Actually, John Conway and Simon Kochen at IAS have a really interesting argument about free will. Lecture videos here.
Well they have serious problems with even
0. The assumptions on which their model is based.
FTFS:
They say that the process of integrating information is equivalent to compressing it. [...] By assuming that the process of memory is non-lossy [...]
Precisely. In fact, blame Hollywood at least as much as Washington. There's way more fictional terrorists and serial killers and so on than real ones. And they need the public to be much more afraid than is actually warranted, or they might push back against some of this madness.
I reserve a dedicated level of contempt especially for their fusion: the military-entertainment complex. Pentagon sponsoring series and films -- with strings attached of course so effectively outsourced propaganda -- has a much broader effect than just those productions. Companies might keep their content government-friendly for fear of missing out on future projects' funding.
Fear is the mind killer.
Does your home country care about everyone in the world equally, or do they attempt to protect the interests of their citizens first and foremost?
The latter, of course. But there is a bit of a gap between "care about everyone in the world equally" on the one hand, and "foreigners count for nothing so it's okay to obliterate them with Hellfire from our comfy chair."
The meek shall inherit the Earth, once the strong are finished taking everything they want.
That's cute. Also, a self fulfilling prophecy if enough of us fall for it. The strong will not always be strong, or able to keep what they took. You reap what you sow, karma is a bitch.
Does it, though? It says
authorizes the use of United States Armed Forces against those responsible for the attacks on September 11, 2001.
It seems a bit of a stretch to claim that all drone strikes the past 12-13 years were specifically aimed at those responsible for 9/11.
Also, the fact that one nation's government decides something is legal carries zero weight in terms of international law.
You must not be american or you could not even utter such an obvious non-sense.
Because not only are Americans the only ones capable of making sense, they are also unable to utter non-sense?
Is this state of affairs amoral? Yes. Should it be as you say? Yes. But it isn't and wishing so won't make it so.
So.. You basically agree but believe it should not be pointed out? I am honestly not sure what your point is.
The way drones are currently employed in extrajudicial killing (a.k.a. murder), typically inside sovereign nations not at war with the US, is just as illegal when it targets US citizen as it is when it targets anybody else.
Not to mention the vast majority of drone victims who are not even suspected of anything but being in the wrong place at the wrong time.
This is a pretty reliable method of creating new terrorists.
Because our government would never allow a bank which financed drug dealers and fomented revolution to do business in the US, right?
Granted, this was a long time ago, but not much has changed, has it?
Actually, that same bank, among others, was recently found guilty of pretty much similar crimes. But other than a slap on the wrist, nothing happened because:
the Justice Department, for the first time, admitted why it decided to go soft on this particular kind of criminal. It was worried that anything more than a wrist slap for HSBC might undermine the world economy. "Had the U.S. authorities decided to press criminal charges," said Assistant Attorney General Lanny Breuer at a press conference to announce the settlement, "HSBC would almost certainly have lost its banking license in the U.S., the future of the institution would have been under threat and the entire banking system would have been destabilized."
And here's a man trying to BUY THEM BACK. Get off your asses and HELP HIM.
I appreciate that that is the goal -- but how realistic is it, exactly, post-Citizens United and post-McCutcheon? Even before this rampant corruption was declared legal and released from what nominal limits there were, statistical research by some Princeton boffins indicated that democracy is not functioning in practice and the US is a plutocracy or oligarchy in all but name.
Don't get me wrong, I wish Lawrence Lessig all luck with this endeavour. Who know, maybe the public has finally had enough. Although, naming it "Mayday" is likely to make rightwingers (meaning D and R alike) simply cry commie in stead of adressing the issues.
One very interesting source of accounts on US/UK spy relations can be found in the novels of John LeCarrre. Especially the earlier ones, the Smiley trilogy for instance. It's fiction of course, but very well-informed, and written by a former spook.
The economic power of the US is not strongly tied to fossil fuels.
But the problem is that the few people/corporations whose economic power is tied to fossil fuels are spending so much of it on distorting and undermining political process. As in TFS.
The US uses them heavily but so does every other industrialized nation on earth. Nations whose economic output is primarily tied to fossil fuel mining (like Saudi Arabia) should in theory worry about such things but the US could relatively easily switch to new sources of power within reasonably short time scales. Most of the economic output of the US is not based on mining or distribution of fossil fuels.
Such a switch would begin by throwing a wrench in the gears of those who are heavily dependent on fossil fuels not being significantly replaced any time soon. Not all that easy, it would seem.
Exactly what do you think is going to replace fossil fuels that is not going to be available in the US? Seriously, I'm all for replacing fossil fuels with cleaner sources of energy but there is NOTHING out there presently or in the reasonably likely future that is likely to do more than dent the use of fossil fuels for at least the next 30-40 years.
Well if enough people fall for the FUD, that is a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy.
Thanks for the tip! I might actually watch that some time. Also, let me throw this back at you.
statistics is what advertisers use to target ads, given access to people's personal information can draw mathematical relationships between habbits and demographics, and between demographics and desires, and strengths and weaknesses.
In fact, statistics is the one branch of mathematics that basically everyone in higher education comes across. Much to the chagrin of non-technical majors the world over. Which is too bad, because with zero intuition it is a really hard subject.
But yes, mathematics touches on basically everything we do in IT, and I for one welcome this call for a debate about how ethical questions come into play for e.g. cryptographers.
If everyone in the world switched from eating meat to eating vegan substitutes (which is more environmentally friendly), you're going to end up with a massive animal welfare crisis on your hands. All those cows, pigs, sheep, chickens etc are no longer going to be wanted by mankind.
I think I see what you mean. But the words "animal welfare crisis" seem pretty adequate to describe the way our meat ends up on our plates right now.
Personally I am a meat lover of the hypocrite kind: if I had to slaughter my own, I'd be a vegetarian tomorrow. So I have this sort if compromise where I only eat meat maybe two or three days a week, and then I choose the more expensive kind which is supposed to be from animals which could be argued to have had a half decent life.
Reading for speed compromises comprehension.
Actually I'm not sure why that, like so many other things, could not improve considerably with practice. I know I read a lot faster now than back when I had just learned how to.
Friend of mine claims that practicing juggling improves memory (only for future memories). Something about strengthening the cooperation between left and right parts of the brain. Could be bollocks, of course, but the point stands -- lots of things can be trained, sometimes apparently far fetched methods somehow just work.
If you don't pay for the service, YOU are the product.
If you don't have anything interesting to say, YOU parrot catchphrases that have long since lost whatever miniscule amount of meaning they may have once had.
Sure it's a cliche remark. But the reason why it is cliche is that it fits many situations adequately. Cool thing about the truth: it can't be exaggerated.
They haven't been doing that all along anyway?
I don't expect they could do this legally without stating it somewhere in small print, which is what I gather they've done just now?
If it were done illegally there would have to have been some kind of criminal conspiracy between Verizon (in this case) as supply and its advertising partners as the demand of such a black market.
Surely that would have blown before long, at least if the market were large enough to risk it at all. Although, come to think of it, the LIBOR thing ran for quite a while...
By the way, how is it that this kind of double speak, in official company communiques, passes largely unnoticed:
we will soon use an anonymous, unique identifier
?
Yeah, one NATO country invading a NATO country, that would work out well...
Technically, Article 5 would then require the US to help defend the Netherlands against itself :-)