In all seriousness, Microsoft is failing because they have been busy abandoning their core principles since Windows 7 was released. I'm fine with experimenting with new interfaces, but you have to leave options for people who are comfortable with your old UI paradigm or no one will bother to make the transition if you're not in the same yuppie fanboy market as Apple.
Here's my advice, Microsoft: release 8.1, offer a "classic" shell, and stop pretending to be something you're not. If you lose your enterprise clients, you're going to be the next BlackBerry. Stop putzing around with internal C-level paranoid delusions and get back to work helping businesses accomplish their computing tasks.
The idea that technology can be partisan is evidence that your side is relying on something besides science. Get with the program, or don't. Either way, we all win.
Gay rights and reproductive rights are safe. They are the emotional platforms needed to rally the hysterical voters against the opposing candidate. They are brought up in every campaign and are very rarely acted on. The candidates need to save them for the next election because they are the only actual differences between the parties. (But the fact that they are never acted on means they can't really be counted as differences.)
So when Romney says that he wants to overturn Roe vs Wade and cut funding to Planned Parenthood, I'm supposed to vote for him because he is a liar and won't do anything? Are we voting for the guy most willing to be unethical?
Obama didn't end any wars that weren't already set to end. And he started the Libyan thing. And he's been ramping up aggression towards Iran. Romney may invade Iran sooner than Obama, but they'd both get us there eventually.
You obviously didn't read what I wrote. Yes, there are foreign policy problems with the Obama Administration. Meanwhile, Romney thinks the greatest threat to our country is Russia. Are you going to pick questionable foreign policy, or a foreign policy based on complete ignorance of foreign policy itself? The Obama Administration has backed Israel down from rash action in Iran, and as our client military state, Israel has little choice but to listen.
Reforming heath care is hardly a differentiating factor. Obamacare is Romneycare. It's the exact same thing. Obamacare isn't a single payer system, it's a mandate that everyone must do business with a cartel of for-profit insurance companies. Romney's just pissed that Obama didn't go too far enough.
Romneycare is the compromise proposed by Republicans in the late 90s when Clinton attempted to establish a single payer system. Obamacare has similarities, which were a compromise, but you didn't hear any kudos from the Republicans because the GOP establishment (not the voters) does not base policy on how well it helps working and middle class Americans. They base their policy on how much power it gives them to cut taxes for themselves and relax business regulations for their friends. And in this case, to their bizarre obsession with making things up about Obama. I'm so glad Mitch McConnel failed miserably at his goal of making Obama a one term president. I hope it sticks in his craw for the rest of his life for wasting taxpayer money and time on such a petty personal vendetta.
Anyway, that's why the financial service sector took a dive today -- they know with a second term and Elizabeth Warren taking office, the hammer will fall on all of the unethical corporate business practices that have been ruining our economy since 1980. I doubt Obama will go as far as I want him to go in punishing white collar criminals, but if Romney had been elected, they would have thrown a three day coke bender in every penthouse office in Manhattan in celebration of more free money.
I have no idea where your information comes from, but you should probably stop reading whatever is filling your head with nonsense. If you find yourself avoiding WikiPedia and every news source except for Drudge and Fox, you have only yourself to blame for constructing a fantasy world that never punishes you for being ignorant of the facts.
I read all sorts of sources including AJ. I just don't take it as gospel. My point stands.
No, it doesn't. Your assertion was that the United States did not invade Iraq for oil, but every single internal document is either aimed at excusing the invasion or at overturning the Iraqi constitution in order to open up their oil market. You are fucking wrong, and you're still wrong, despite your feigned ignorance aimed at winning this argument.
Even if that law was passed, it would have given "Western" nations no more of an advantage than the Chinese, Russians, and others who ended up getting the contracts. People like you love to go on about "conspriacies" without ever creating a concrete narrative as to how actions actually benefit the supposed conspirator. The net result of the Iraq was has been absolutely horriffic for the US. Our reputation as a nation is smashed to bits. The region has been destabilized. Iraq is soon to become yet another proxy state of Iran. Nobody will every believe us again about WMDs which gives every dictator with the will carte blanche to say "the US is lying again" while rushing unabated to the nuclear finish line. And on top of all of that we didn't even get any of the oil we supposedly did it all for. Jesus. If the conspirators are that incompetent, you really think it's out of the realm of possibility they were actually stupid enough to believe Saddam, suspicious as he was acting, didn't actually have WMDs.
Just because the conspiracy failed doesn't mean there wasn't a conspiracy. It would be like claiming that Moscow never had any intention of running things in Czechoslovakia if they were kicked out, or failed it any part of their plans. It's a childish way to escape the truth.
It's not like the CIA has a fantastic track record historically on predicting these sorts of things. We've missed the mark on every single nuclear advance of every single enemy without exception.
Holy fuck, are you actually that misinformed?
In the closing years of the cold war, Pakistan was considered to have great strategic importance. It provided Washington with a springboard into neighbouring Afghanistan - a route for passing US weapons and cash to the mujahideen, who were battling to oust the Soviet army that had invaded in 1979. Barlow says, "We had to buddy-up to regimes we didn't see eye-to-eye with, but I could not believe we would actually give Pakistan the bomb.
How could any US administration set such short-term gains against the long-term safety of the world?" Next he discovered that the Pentagon was preparing to sell Pakistan jet fighters that could be used to drop a nuclear bomb.
Barlow was relentless in exposing what he saw as US complicity, and in the end he was sacked and smeared as disloyal, mad, a drunk and a philanderer. If he had been listened to, many believe Pakistan might never have got its nuclear bomb; south Asia might not have been pitched into three near-nuclear conflagrations; and the nuclear weapons programmes of Iran, Libya and North Korea - which British and American intelligence now acknowledge were all secretly enabled by Pakistan - would never have got off the ground. "None of this need have happened," Robert Gallucci, special adviser on WMD to both Clinton and George W Bush, told us. "The vanquishing of Barlow and the erasing of his case kicked off a chain of events that led to all the nuclear-tinged stand-offs we face today. Pakistan is the number one threat to the world, and if it all goes off - a nuclear bomb in a US or European city- I'm sure we will find ourselves looking in Pakistan's direction."
Your really think it's just not possible Iraq is a result of stupidity and not malice? You have a lot more faith in our leadership than I do.
It's a combination of hubris, malice, and stupidity. You seem to live in a fantasy world of false dichotomies.
Perhaps you can explain then, if it was such a conspiracy, how the US managed to orchestrate the invasion
What kind of thinking person asks how the world's largest military power "managed" to "orchestrate" the invasion? It's what we do. We spend more than the rest of the world combined every single year on our military. So why are you asking how we managed to militarily overpower a nation with 30 million people that has been subject to sanctions and bombings from 1991 until our invasion in 2003?
and create a government without managing to get a simple law passed
A law that basically states that Iraq's resources are owned by foreign powers isn't a simple law. It's a declaration of ownership. Unsurprisingly, there was huge opposition to the law, and since the opposition was from real Iraqis and not puppets like Chalabi, the idea that Iraqis own Iraqi oil prevailed. Do not give credit to the United States government for their idiocy. Give credit to the Iraqis who had the fortitude to say no to an occupying power.
Perhaps you can explain how this law would have helped give "Western" nations an advantage over other countries.
The U.S. State Department's Oil and Energy Working Group, meeting between December 2002 and April 2003, also said that Iraq "should be opened to international oil companies as quickly as possible after the war." Its preferred method of privatization was a form of oil contract called a production-sharing agreement. These agreements are preferred by the oil industry but rejected by all the top oil producers in the Middle East because they grant greater control and more profits to the companies than the governments. The Heritage Foundation also released a report in March 2003 calling for the full privatization of Iraq's oil sector. One representative of the foundation, Edwin Meese III, is a member of the Iraq Study Group. Another, James J. Carafano, assisted in the study group's work.
For any degree of oil privatization to take place, and for it to apply to all the country's oil fields, Iraq has to amend its constitution and pass a new national oil law. The constitution is ambiguous as to whether control over future revenues from as-yet-undeveloped oil fields should be shared among its provinces or held and distributed by the central government.
In essence, the Bush Administration invaded to overturn the Iraqi Constitution, which states that Iraqis own Iraqi oil. They failed at the second part of their plan.
On a larger note, if you want to understand geopolitics, you're going to have to read and think with some regularity in order to understand what's going on in the world. Reading US centric newspapers to understand our role in the world is like reading Pravda in order to understand Russia's role in the world. It's a helpful input, but often has nothing to do with reality.
Dude, it's not my fault you can't read. From the article you linked:
Rather than giving foreign oil companies control over Iraqi reserves, as the U.S. had hoped to do with the Oil Law it failed to get the Iraqi parliament to pass, the oil companies were awarded service contracts lasting 20 years for seven of the 10 oil fields on offer -- the oil will remain the property of the Iraqi state, and the foreign companies will pump it for a fixed price per barrel.
You don't remember Rumsfeld saying that the war would last no longer than five weeks and cost no more than 50 billion? The Iraq War was the result of the dumbest executive branch in world history attempting to continue the policy of occupation in the Middle East. They failed miserably on every goal, and one of those goals was to gain control of oil fields for Western companies.
Their failure to achieve that goal does not mask the goal, or erase it from history. It simply exposes that the plan was doomed from the start, as it always has been. You cannot occupy another nation and take their resources without wiping them out, or eventually being thrown out. That's why we need to invest trillions of dollars on new energy research instead of occupation and nation building.
According to the US Energy Information Administration (EIA), Iraq's oil reserves of 112 billion barrels ranks second in the world, only behind Saudi Arabia. The EIA also estimates that up to 90 per cent of the country remains unexplored, due to decades of US-led wars and economic sanctions.
"Prior to the 2003 invasion and occupation of Iraq, US and other western oil companies were all but completely shut out of Iraq's oil market," oil industry analyst Antonia Juhasz told Al Jazeera. "But thanks to the invasion and occupation, the companies are now back inside Iraq and producing oil there for the first time since being forced out of the country in 1973."
Juhasz, author of the books The Tyranny of Oil and The Bush Agenda, said that while US and other western oil companies have not yet received all they had hoped the US-led invasion of Iraq would bring them, "They've certainly done quite well for themselves, landing production contracts for some of the world's largest remaining oil fields under some of the world's most lucrative terms."
But don't let reality change your worldview. See if there's any more western friendly propaganda in the rabbit hole you live in.
If you define 1953 as not so long ago you must be in it for the long run. Waiting for the return of Zoroaster?
In 1953 we overthrew their democratic government, and then for 26 years we sponsored a puppet government that tortured and killed dissidents. A direct result of that radicalization and suppression is the Islamic Revolution of 1979. Our further interference by arranging loans for Saddam Hussein to punish them with a war cost the lives of one million people, including those who died in the gas attacks at Halabja, in the Iran-Iraq War. That ended in 1988.
This is the problem with stupid, simplistic understandings of history. It has been a policy of the United States for over a century to control and occupy the Middle East with extreme forms of violence that have killed millions, and sanctions that have killed hundreds of thousands more. There is no difference between us and the methods of other colonial powers, except that instead of pretending that natives are savages that are not worthy of consideration, we are pretending that Arabs and Iranians are savages that are not worthy of consideration. We kill them, take control of their oil, and they should just learn to accept that their natural resources may be under their feet, but God has intended them to belong to us as veto power against our enemies, or just so we can burn through it ourselves.
As proof of this truism, without looking it up, name one nation that does not have a United States military presence inside of their national border, or inside of a neighboring nation. The same cannot be said for any other nation because the fact is and remains that we are a colonial power. That doesn't make us evil because we are America, but it does make us evil because we are an empire. Telling people how to live without giving them the opportunity to decide for themselves is simple tyranny, and it's wrong. It always has been, and it always will be, and there is never a legitimate principled foundation for taking away someone's right to choose their own path, especially when we take that right away from entire nations.
The one thing missing in the market is a waterproof or water resistant rugged touch phone. Offer it with and without cameras for corporate clients. Make it open, semi-upgradeable, and relatively inexpensive. Work with someone like arduino to develop an ecosystem of input devices that allow experimentation which simply isn't allowed on closed platforms like iOS. Offer a dock that has USB and HDMI outputs to turn it into a mini computer or just share media on a larger display.
Make it compatible with worldwide cell services, make it easy to swap SIM cards out, and easy to expand with SD cards or some other type of storage.
It could be done. But not with that schmuck running the place.
Since the rights of non-Muslims and women are far worse in Saudi Arabia, and they don't even pretend to have a democracy, why aren't we punishing them?
Remember, the American word for "democracy" really means "does as we tell them." There is no exception to that rule.
Also poorly handled. There's a wide range of vehicle capabilities as well as driver capabilities out there. And I would far more trust a race car driver in a brand new M3 going 80 than I would a 70 year old grandma in a chevy that barely passes inspection going 50. Yet the government solution is apparently to cap everyone somewhere around the realm of the lowest common denominator, a tactic which is failing fantastically in our schools as well. That rant aside, road safety is a far cry different from micromanaging foods and product purchases.
First, you're using hypothetical anecdotes instead of referring to highway safety data. Mortality for auto accidents has dropped precipitously since the government stepped in and enforced safety regulations, including things like seat belts and air bags that were maligned by fundamentalist libertarians when they were introduced. I'm sorry that you don't want to grow up and share that public space, but the rest of the country is full of adults who accept that compromise.
If you're going to try and malign public education, be prepared to lose that debate by a mile. The quality of education is the highest in nations that provide publicly funded education by law, like Finland, Germany, Denmark, Norway, etc. American schools are failing because of many reasons, but it can't be because they are run by a government.
No, in fact there is not. The government can educate as much as it damn well pleases without removing a single one of my freedoms.
You have confused freedom for convenience. No one is stopping you from giving yourself diabetes -- they're just saying you can't order enormous diabetes buckets at restaurants in New York City, in the same way it's illegal to over-serve alcohol. Society is recognizing that over-consumption of processed food is leading to many undesirable and enormously expensive health problems across the country, and our government is taking steps to reduce that problem because we can't afford to have a country that's too fat and too unhealthy to work or fight.
Unless you are against all forms of consumption taxes to regulate unhealthy behavior, I'm going to have to call bullshit on your entire argument. Regulation of excess soda sales in restaurants in New York City has zero effect on your freedom, but you think otherwise because you've been told to for partisan political purposes.
Handholding which light bulbs I use and what size cola I drink is out of line. This is why libertarianism is on the rise in this nation. We're fed up with the overreaches. I'll never know why people would choose large government over a multitude of medium-sized businesses.
I don't know why you are making this special exception for sodas and light bulbs. Government regulates how fast you go on the highway because otherwise more people would become injured and die, which increases health care costs and reduces production. They regulate how other products, such as cigarettes, are marketed so children aren't hooked to a habit that literally does nothing but kill people and suck money out of their pocket. It's no different from consumption taxes -- you increase the costs and the hassle for behaviors that are harmful to society in order to make society more healthy, more productive, and better for everyone except the producers who are looking to destroy lives in order to stick money in their pocket.
Sugary sodas offer zero nutritional or cultural value. It's a cocktail of glucose and caffeine designed to addict, and what's worse, billions of dollars are spent marketing that product which does have an effect. Corn subsidies have driven the cost of sodas so far down that it's often cheaper than water, and that leads to things like Dew Mouth in Appalachia, which is a serious health concern that carries heavy long term costs that will be paid for by someone -- probably you or your children, unless you're the sort of libertarian that wants people with diabetes to die in hospital parking lots, hoping they get lucky with some charitable care.
Do you want government to try and meaningfully reduce harmful habits in favor of investing that money in education or infrastructure, or do you want to watch your country eat and drink so much garbage pushed by corporations who make a living by exploiting addictive behaviors that it may literally bankrupt our healthcare system? There is a choice. Pretending that curbing unhealthy behavior crosses the line in the same city where Stop and Frisk illegally detains hundreds of thousands of citizens every year is a pretty pathetic one.
And my solution to a corrupt and tyrannical corporation is a more transparent and consumer-caring corporation. I fail to see how one unreasonable standard is better than the other. Human beings will always be greedy and self-serving. Knowing this, I'd rather they be beholden to my wallet rather than me be beholden to their army/tanks.
And how do you plan to get a more transparent and consumer-caring corporation? By saying pretty please with sugar on top? You can't threaten a monopoly with a boycott or a vote, unless you want to give up the product or service they are offering, which tends to be a problem when it's food, water, shelter, healthcare, transportation, etc. So for the things that actually matter, there's very little reason to entrust them to a private tyranny that does not even have to pretend to give a damn about you or your family.
My solution to a corrupt and tyrannical government is a more transparent and democratic government. According to your logic, you'd recommend that someone stop using condoms altogether if one of them broke.
Because its fundamentally not the job of a government to tell me how to live my life. Its job is to enforce law and order (keeping others from doing me harm), maintain basic infrastructure, and keep foreign countries from invading.
Im not sure where anyone got the idea that democracy should extend to voting on how I live my life, but that sounds awfully oppressive to me.
You are falling perfectly into the propaganda trap. I just told you the government took away your right to have a trial and your right to be free of being frisked every time you step out on a public street, and yet you're still talking about how convenient your soda consumption needs to be in order for you to be '"free" from the "oppression" of regulating the size of soda.
Do you really not understand the difference? I'm not asking in a rhetorical way... I believe if you think about it for a minute you'll reach the same conclusion.
I agree that regulating the size of soda is a bit ridiculous. But compared to the fact that we have lost half the bill of rights in the past 10 years, and millionaires and multinationals are paying 10% or less of their income in tax, and the destruction of our environment continues to cycle out of control so they can pocket more money, you should wonder why the corporate shills who deliver your news are more concerned about the size of soda in New York City than about anything that is actually important.
Or maybe it's us. Maybe they're just responding to our laziness. Maybe they are perfectly fulfilling their function to market the product that we want: soda size regulation is tyranny, because doing something about actual tyrannies might involve work or risk.
If there's public support for a law, it's not tyranny. It's a law in a democracy.
I find it strange that there's so much coverage of a simple law designed to reduce consumption of what amounts to a cup of poison that is enormously expensive for our society in the long run. If you really want to fill your body with empty calories and caffeine, you are free to do so. It's just slightly less convenient.
And now I get it. You can take away an American's right to due process. You can take away their right to be free of unreasonable searches and seizures. But don't make the ultimate mistake and deny their right to idiotic convenience.
If you're voting in a non-contested state, then I fully agree with voting for a third party candidate. If you are voting in a tossup state, you should take a moment to consider the very real possibility that the rights you enjoy won by earlier progressive movements could continue to be eradicated at a greater pace should you fail to pick the least evil of the two options we have in this election.
The major battles of the gay rights, reproductive rights, and civil rights movements were won decades ago
By which party?
One of the most serious civil rights issues we face today is the war on drugs
Romney's support among African Americans is statistically zero. His Latino support is better, but not by much. Are you trying to tell me that those two groups know less about their own situation than you do?
So you can spend your life paying attention to the superficial differences between Democrats and Republicans if you want. Your life is not likely to be substantially different if one side or the other is in power
If there's no difference, why not vote for the party with a track record of at least pretending like they give a damn?
He is proposing a 5 trillion dollar tax cut. He's claiming that he will close the gap in revenues by closing loopholes, but won't reference any specifics. Even if he eliminated all loopholes for the very wealthy, there would still be a shortfall that would have to be taxed on the rest of the population, and that's if the economy grows as he claims it will. Did the Bush Tax Cuts, military spending increases, and deregulation help the economy and the deficit from 2001 to 2009? Please provide references if you say that they did.
Additionally, you should have read more than the summary cherry picked for your political purposes.
We found that a tax reform plan that simultaneously met the first four goals would imply reduced tax burdens on families with income above $200,000. Meeting the fifth goal â" revenue neutrality â" would then imply increased tax burdens on other taxpayers, a necessary but perhaps unintended consequence. This was true even though we made the financing of the plan via tax expenditure reductions as progressive as possible by assuming that tax expenditures would be eliminated from the top down: first, we eliminated all available tax expenditures for those with income above $200,000; only if those revenues were insufficient to achieve revenue neutrality (which in fact they were) did we reduce tax expenditures for households with incomes below that level...
The basic logic of our central finding is captured in Figure 2 from our paper (attached here as well). The graph shows that cutting individual income tax rates by 20 percent from todayâ(TM)s levels would reduce tax burdens by $251 billion per year (in 2015) among households with income above $200,000. But, if we assume a strict interpretation of the second goal â" preserving and enhancing incentives for saving and investment (see footnote 2) â" there are only $165 billion of available tax expenditures to close in that group if tax rates are cut). As a result, to achieve revenue neutrality, the resulting $86 billion annual shortfall must be made up by raising taxes on the rest of the population.
We showed, in addition, that the same qualitative conclusions arise even when we added in feedback effects of tax changes on economic growth and revenues, using estimates of those effects that were developed by Harvard professor, and economic advisor to the Romney campaign, Greg Mankiw.
Over ten years that amounts to close to one trillion dollars, if and only if his prophesy about raising revenues comes true. And according to that same study:
We are not saying that the most likely way that tax expenditures would be reduced in the real world would be âoefrom the top down.â Instead, we show that even if tax expenditures were reduced in that most progressive manner, the Romney proposals as a whole imply a shift toward a less progressive tax system...
Estimates from the Congressional Budget Office and other sources indicate that the effects of tax cuts on the macroeconomy are likely to be small or even negative over the typical 10-year budget window, depending in part on how they are financed.
In revenue-neutral tax changes, the tax rate reductions can raise incentives to work, but the base- broadening measures increase the portion of Americansâ(TM) income that is subject to tax, and create incentives that would work in the other direction. At the end of the day, the net effects are likely to be small (Auerbach and Slemrod 199711, Brill and Viard 201112). A 2007 Treasury report that analyzed the effects of business tax changes on business competitiveness concluded the following: "Indeed, the Treasury Department estimates that the combined policy of base broadening and lowering the business tax rate to 28 percent might well have little or no effect on the level of real output in the long run because the economic gain from the lower corporate tax rate may well be largely offset by the economic cost of elimina
Everything you just said is true unless you don't care about gay rights, immigrant rights, reproductive rights, civil rights, publicly funded social programs, a modicum of union rights...
Even if you're a conservative, Romney can't be a good choice. He is promising a 5 trillion dollar tax cut as well as deep cuts to fundamental social programs that will not solve any problems, but kick the can down the road. And he's promising to increase "defense" spending. The last conservative President to attempt to balance the budget with a combination of social spending cuts, military cuts, and a reasonable top tax rate was Bill Clinton, who followed Bush Sr, who also raised taxes an attempt to pay down the doubling of the federal deficit brought about by Reaganite policies of the 80s -- tax cuts for the rich, huge defense spending, empire building, deregulation (remember the S&L crisis?), which also resulted in larger deficits.
When Bush Jr was in office, his Administration launched two wars, continued deregulation of Wall Street, and cut taxes to largely benefit the wealthy. Once again, the deficit soared, and the economy was wrecked by over-leveraged bets covered by the middle class. Romney is literally promising more of the same. So if you are going to vote, pay careful attention to the differences. Sometimes they are small, but of the five elections I have seen, the difference between Obama and Romney could not be more obvious.
I tried to get some account history for an old handle of mine, but they said they had no way of producing a single dump of comments for one individual.
It was a little distressing, but then I was comforted to realize that while we may have more information about the past, the past still finds a way to disappear.
But in a world with much more present and pressing issues like war, hunger, unemployment, recession, etc. you can't very well expect every newspaper to lead with a "Average Global Temps Expected to Rise By 1-2 Degrees Celsius Over the Next 50-100 years" headline.
This is why humanity is doomed. The stresses introduced by shrinking resources, exploding populations, the competition to control fossil fuel reserves, and increasingly unpredictable weather patterns are major causes of war, hunger, and economic distress, but we continue to address the symptoms rather than the disease causing them.
Bill Hicks said it best: "We are a virus with shoes." And it looks like we're in danger of killing our host.
My guess is that you just don't remember life before the TSA.
When I was a kid, my whole family could meet me at the gate where I arrived. Now, you're not allowed unless you have special permission. Before the TSA, you were allowed to keep your shoes on. You didn't have to disassemble your luggage on the conveyor belt. Security check lines were short. You didn't have to worry about spending hours in detention if they mistakenly had you on the no fly list, or if someone thought you looked suspicious, or if you had dark skin. Eighty and ninety year old individuals and children were never strip searched, and nor was anyone unless there was some serious suspicions about that person. Now we are all terrorists until proven innocent, which we can only do by giving up our Constitutional rights.
So, the reason there was no security theater outrage is because we didn't have to watch a TSA agent pat down a infant, or read about them requiring a 95 year old cancer patient to remove her adult diapers. Entire city blocks weren't shut down over suspicious packages, and we weren't spending billions of dollars on processes with dubious security value.
One reason the TSA is receiving funding instead of technologies to scan containers is because actually inspecting our imports would slow business down, and while giving up large parts of the Bill of Rights is just fine, the people who own our government through lobbyists would never allow a fraction of their profits to get eaten up by providing actual security measures. The other reason is because it subjects more people to the idea that terrorism is our greatest threat, and establishes the normalization of constant search, seizure, and fear whenever the government cares to abuse citizens. No Administration is going to give up that power without a fight.
The TSA has nothing to do with terrorism. It has to do with ratcheting up fear so the military industry can continue to suck half of our discretionary budget. It's a drop-in replacement for the cold war. We spend 4 times more than the entirety of the EU combined, or roughly 40-45% of the entire world budget.
The numbers are probably higher, but I can't find any statistics right now that include interest on past wars, paying for veterans benefits, and the various weapons research projects that are buried in other departments like the DoE.
Slashdot Mirror
No 4g wireless. Less space than a laptop. Lame.
In all seriousness, Microsoft is failing because they have been busy abandoning their core principles since Windows 7 was released. I'm fine with experimenting with new interfaces, but you have to leave options for people who are comfortable with your old UI paradigm or no one will bother to make the transition if you're not in the same yuppie fanboy market as Apple.
Here's my advice, Microsoft: release 8.1, offer a "classic" shell, and stop pretending to be something you're not. If you lose your enterprise clients, you're going to be the next BlackBerry. Stop putzing around with internal C-level paranoid delusions and get back to work helping businesses accomplish their computing tasks.
The idea that technology can be partisan is evidence that your side is relying on something besides science. Get with the program, or don't. Either way, we all win.
So when Romney says that he wants to overturn Roe vs Wade and cut funding to Planned Parenthood, I'm supposed to vote for him because he is a liar and won't do anything? Are we voting for the guy most willing to be unethical?
You obviously didn't read what I wrote. Yes, there are foreign policy problems with the Obama Administration. Meanwhile, Romney thinks the greatest threat to our country is Russia. Are you going to pick questionable foreign policy, or a foreign policy based on complete ignorance of foreign policy itself? The Obama Administration has backed Israel down from rash action in Iran, and as our client military state, Israel has little choice but to listen.
Romneycare is the compromise proposed by Republicans in the late 90s when Clinton attempted to establish a single payer system. Obamacare has similarities, which were a compromise, but you didn't hear any kudos from the Republicans because the GOP establishment (not the voters) does not base policy on how well it helps working and middle class Americans. They base their policy on how much power it gives them to cut taxes for themselves and relax business regulations for their friends. And in this case, to their bizarre obsession with making things up about Obama. I'm so glad Mitch McConnel failed miserably at his goal of making Obama a one term president. I hope it sticks in his craw for the rest of his life for wasting taxpayer money and time on such a petty personal vendetta.
Anyway, that's why the financial service sector took a dive today -- they know with a second term and Elizabeth Warren taking office, the hammer will fall on all of the unethical corporate business practices that have been ruining our economy since 1980. I doubt Obama will go as far as I want him to go in punishing white collar criminals, but if Romney had been elected, they would have thrown a three day coke bender in every penthouse office in Manhattan in celebration of more free money.
I have no idea where your information comes from, but you should probably stop reading whatever is filling your head with nonsense. If you find yourself avoiding WikiPedia and every news source except for Drudge and Fox, you have only yourself to blame for constructing a fantasy world that never punishes you for being ignorant of the facts.
Gay rights don't matter? Reproductive rights don't matter? Ending wars doesn't matter? Reforming health care doesn't matter?
The fashionable political ignorance fad has really run its course. Learn something or find something less important to ruin with your branded apathy.
I read all sorts of sources including AJ. I just don't take it as gospel. My point stands.
No, it doesn't. Your assertion was that the United States did not invade Iraq for oil, but every single internal document is either aimed at excusing the invasion or at overturning the Iraqi constitution in order to open up their oil market. You are fucking wrong, and you're still wrong, despite your feigned ignorance aimed at winning this argument.
Even if that law was passed, it would have given "Western" nations no more of an advantage than the Chinese, Russians, and others who ended up getting the contracts. People like you love to go on about "conspriacies" without ever creating a concrete narrative as to how actions actually benefit the supposed conspirator. The net result of the Iraq was has been absolutely horriffic for the US. Our reputation as a nation is smashed to bits. The region has been destabilized. Iraq is soon to become yet another proxy state of Iran. Nobody will every believe us again about WMDs which gives every dictator with the will carte blanche to say "the US is lying again" while rushing unabated to the nuclear finish line. And on top of all of that we didn't even get any of the oil we supposedly did it all for. Jesus. If the conspirators are that incompetent, you really think it's out of the realm of possibility they were actually stupid enough to believe Saddam, suspicious as he was acting, didn't actually have WMDs.
Just because the conspiracy failed doesn't mean there wasn't a conspiracy. It would be like claiming that Moscow never had any intention of running things in Czechoslovakia if they were kicked out, or failed it any part of their plans. It's a childish way to escape the truth.
It's not like the CIA has a fantastic track record historically on predicting these sorts of things. We've missed the mark on every single nuclear advance of every single enemy without exception.
Holy fuck, are you actually that misinformed?
Your really think it's just not possible Iraq is a result of stupidity and not malice? You have a lot more faith in our leadership than I do.
It's a combination of hubris, malice, and stupidity. You seem to live in a fantasy world of false dichotomies.
Perhaps you can explain then, if it was such a conspiracy, how the US managed to orchestrate the invasion
What kind of thinking person asks how the world's largest military power "managed" to "orchestrate" the invasion? It's what we do. We spend more than the rest of the world combined every single year on our military. So why are you asking how we managed to militarily overpower a nation with 30 million people that has been subject to sanctions and bombings from 1991 until our invasion in 2003?
and create a government without managing to get a simple law passed
A law that basically states that Iraq's resources are owned by foreign powers isn't a simple law. It's a declaration of ownership. Unsurprisingly, there was huge opposition to the law, and since the opposition was from real Iraqis and not puppets like Chalabi, the idea that Iraqis own Iraqi oil prevailed. Do not give credit to the United States government for their idiocy. Give credit to the Iraqis who had the fortitude to say no to an occupying power.
Perhaps you can explain how this law would have helped give "Western" nations an advantage over other countries.
It's still about oil in Iraq
In essence, the Bush Administration invaded to overturn the Iraqi Constitution, which states that Iraqis own Iraqi oil. They failed at the second part of their plan.
On a larger note, if you want to understand geopolitics, you're going to have to read and think with some regularity in order to understand what's going on in the world. Reading US centric newspapers to understand our role in the world is like reading Pravda in order to understand Russia's role in the world. It's a helpful input, but often has nothing to do with reality.
Dude, it's not my fault you can't read. From the article you linked:
Rather than giving foreign oil companies control over Iraqi reserves, as the U.S. had hoped to do with the Oil Law it failed to get the Iraqi parliament to pass, the oil companies were awarded service contracts lasting 20 years for seven of the 10 oil fields on offer -- the oil will remain the property of the Iraqi state, and the foreign companies will pump it for a fixed price per barrel.
You don't remember Rumsfeld saying that the war would last no longer than five weeks and cost no more than 50 billion? The Iraq War was the result of the dumbest executive branch in world history attempting to continue the policy of occupation in the Middle East. They failed miserably on every goal, and one of those goals was to gain control of oil fields for Western companies.
Their failure to achieve that goal does not mask the goal, or erase it from history. It simply exposes that the plan was doomed from the start, as it always has been. You cannot occupy another nation and take their resources without wiping them out, or eventually being thrown out. That's why we need to invest trillions of dollars on new energy research instead of occupation and nation building.
Who is talking about Israel? They're a military outpost. They do what we tell them.
Western oil firms remain as US exits Iraq
But don't let reality change your worldview. See if there's any more western friendly propaganda in the rabbit hole you live in.
If you define 1953 as not so long ago you must be in it for the long run. Waiting for the return of Zoroaster?
In 1953 we overthrew their democratic government, and then for 26 years we sponsored a puppet government that tortured and killed dissidents. A direct result of that radicalization and suppression is the Islamic Revolution of 1979. Our further interference by arranging loans for Saddam Hussein to punish them with a war cost the lives of one million people, including those who died in the gas attacks at Halabja, in the Iran-Iraq War. That ended in 1988.
This is the problem with stupid, simplistic understandings of history. It has been a policy of the United States for over a century to control and occupy the Middle East with extreme forms of violence that have killed millions, and sanctions that have killed hundreds of thousands more. There is no difference between us and the methods of other colonial powers, except that instead of pretending that natives are savages that are not worthy of consideration, we are pretending that Arabs and Iranians are savages that are not worthy of consideration. We kill them, take control of their oil, and they should just learn to accept that their natural resources may be under their feet, but God has intended them to belong to us as veto power against our enemies, or just so we can burn through it ourselves.
The historical evidence for those facts is overwhelming, and if you think you disagree with the hypothesis of American colonialism, you are either innocently or willfully ignorant.
As proof of this truism, without looking it up, name one nation that does not have a United States military presence inside of their national border, or inside of a neighboring nation. The same cannot be said for any other nation because the fact is and remains that we are a colonial power. That doesn't make us evil because we are America, but it does make us evil because we are an empire. Telling people how to live without giving them the opportunity to decide for themselves is simple tyranny, and it's wrong. It always has been, and it always will be, and there is never a legitimate principled foundation for taking away someone's right to choose their own path, especially when we take that right away from entire nations.
The one thing missing in the market is a waterproof or water resistant rugged touch phone. Offer it with and without cameras for corporate clients. Make it open, semi-upgradeable, and relatively inexpensive. Work with someone like arduino to develop an ecosystem of input devices that allow experimentation which simply isn't allowed on closed platforms like iOS. Offer a dock that has USB and HDMI outputs to turn it into a mini computer or just share media on a larger display.
Make it compatible with worldwide cell services, make it easy to swap SIM cards out, and easy to expand with SD cards or some other type of storage.
It could be done. But not with that schmuck running the place.
Since the rights of non-Muslims and women are far worse in Saudi Arabia, and they don't even pretend to have a democracy, why aren't we punishing them?
Remember, the American word for "democracy" really means "does as we tell them." There is no exception to that rule.
First, you're using hypothetical anecdotes instead of referring to highway safety data. Mortality for auto accidents has dropped precipitously since the government stepped in and enforced safety regulations, including things like seat belts and air bags that were maligned by fundamentalist libertarians when they were introduced. I'm sorry that you don't want to grow up and share that public space, but the rest of the country is full of adults who accept that compromise.
If you're going to try and malign public education, be prepared to lose that debate by a mile. The quality of education is the highest in nations that provide publicly funded education by law, like Finland, Germany, Denmark, Norway, etc. American schools are failing because of many reasons, but it can't be because they are run by a government.
You have confused freedom for convenience. No one is stopping you from giving yourself diabetes -- they're just saying you can't order enormous diabetes buckets at restaurants in New York City, in the same way it's illegal to over-serve alcohol. Society is recognizing that over-consumption of processed food is leading to many undesirable and enormously expensive health problems across the country, and our government is taking steps to reduce that problem because we can't afford to have a country that's too fat and too unhealthy to work or fight.
Unless you are against all forms of consumption taxes to regulate unhealthy behavior, I'm going to have to call bullshit on your entire argument. Regulation of excess soda sales in restaurants in New York City has zero effect on your freedom, but you think otherwise because you've been told to for partisan political purposes.
I don't know why you are making this special exception for sodas and light bulbs. Government regulates how fast you go on the highway because otherwise more people would become injured and die, which increases health care costs and reduces production. They regulate how other products, such as cigarettes, are marketed so children aren't hooked to a habit that literally does nothing but kill people and suck money out of their pocket. It's no different from consumption taxes -- you increase the costs and the hassle for behaviors that are harmful to society in order to make society more healthy, more productive, and better for everyone except the producers who are looking to destroy lives in order to stick money in their pocket.
Sugary sodas offer zero nutritional or cultural value. It's a cocktail of glucose and caffeine designed to addict, and what's worse, billions of dollars are spent marketing that product which does have an effect. Corn subsidies have driven the cost of sodas so far down that it's often cheaper than water, and that leads to things like Dew Mouth in Appalachia, which is a serious health concern that carries heavy long term costs that will be paid for by someone -- probably you or your children, unless you're the sort of libertarian that wants people with diabetes to die in hospital parking lots, hoping they get lucky with some charitable care.
Do you want government to try and meaningfully reduce harmful habits in favor of investing that money in education or infrastructure, or do you want to watch your country eat and drink so much garbage pushed by corporations who make a living by exploiting addictive behaviors that it may literally bankrupt our healthcare system? There is a choice. Pretending that curbing unhealthy behavior crosses the line in the same city where Stop and Frisk illegally detains hundreds of thousands of citizens every year is a pretty pathetic one.
And how do you plan to get a more transparent and consumer-caring corporation? By saying pretty please with sugar on top? You can't threaten a monopoly with a boycott or a vote, unless you want to give up the product or service they are offering, which tends to be a problem when it's food, water, shelter, healthcare, transportation, etc. So for the things that actually matter, there's very little reason to entrust them to a private tyranny that does not even have to pretend to give a damn about you or your family.
My solution to a corrupt and tyrannical government is a more transparent and democratic government. According to your logic, you'd recommend that someone stop using condoms altogether if one of them broke.
You are falling perfectly into the propaganda trap. I just told you the government took away your right to have a trial and your right to be free of being frisked every time you step out on a public street, and yet you're still talking about how convenient your soda consumption needs to be in order for you to be '"free" from the "oppression" of regulating the size of soda.
Do you really not understand the difference? I'm not asking in a rhetorical way... I believe if you think about it for a minute you'll reach the same conclusion.
I agree that regulating the size of soda is a bit ridiculous. But compared to the fact that we have lost half the bill of rights in the past 10 years, and millionaires and multinationals are paying 10% or less of their income in tax, and the destruction of our environment continues to cycle out of control so they can pocket more money, you should wonder why the corporate shills who deliver your news are more concerned about the size of soda in New York City than about anything that is actually important.
Or maybe it's us. Maybe they're just responding to our laziness. Maybe they are perfectly fulfilling their function to market the product that we want: soda size regulation is tyranny, because doing something about actual tyrannies might involve work or risk.
Guess who wins in either case.
If there's public support for a law, it's not tyranny. It's a law in a democracy.
I find it strange that there's so much coverage of a simple law designed to reduce consumption of what amounts to a cup of poison that is enormously expensive for our society in the long run. If you really want to fill your body with empty calories and caffeine, you are free to do so. It's just slightly less convenient.
And now I get it. You can take away an American's right to due process. You can take away their right to be free of unreasonable searches and seizures. But don't make the ultimate mistake and deny their right to idiotic convenience.
If you're voting in a non-contested state, then I fully agree with voting for a third party candidate. If you are voting in a tossup state, you should take a moment to consider the very real possibility that the rights you enjoy won by earlier progressive movements could continue to be eradicated at a greater pace should you fail to pick the least evil of the two options we have in this election.
By which party?
Romney's support among African Americans is statistically zero. His Latino support is better, but not by much. Are you trying to tell me that those two groups know less about their own situation than you do?
If there's no difference, why not vote for the party with a track record of at least pretending like they give a damn?
He is proposing a 5 trillion dollar tax cut. He's claiming that he will close the gap in revenues by closing loopholes, but won't reference any specifics. Even if he eliminated all loopholes for the very wealthy, there would still be a shortfall that would have to be taxed on the rest of the population, and that's if the economy grows as he claims it will. Did the Bush Tax Cuts, military spending increases, and deregulation help the economy and the deficit from 2001 to 2009? Please provide references if you say that they did.
Additionally, you should have read more than the summary cherry picked for your political purposes.
Over ten years that amounts to close to one trillion dollars, if and only if his prophesy about raising revenues comes true. And according to that same study:
Everything you just said is true unless you don't care about gay rights, immigrant rights, reproductive rights, civil rights, publicly funded social programs, a modicum of union rights...
Even if you're a conservative, Romney can't be a good choice. He is promising a 5 trillion dollar tax cut as well as deep cuts to fundamental social programs that will not solve any problems, but kick the can down the road. And he's promising to increase "defense" spending. The last conservative President to attempt to balance the budget with a combination of social spending cuts, military cuts, and a reasonable top tax rate was Bill Clinton, who followed Bush Sr, who also raised taxes an attempt to pay down the doubling of the federal deficit brought about by Reaganite policies of the 80s -- tax cuts for the rich, huge defense spending, empire building, deregulation (remember the S&L crisis?), which also resulted in larger deficits.
When Bush Jr was in office, his Administration launched two wars, continued deregulation of Wall Street, and cut taxes to largely benefit the wealthy. Once again, the deficit soared, and the economy was wrecked by over-leveraged bets covered by the middle class. Romney is literally promising more of the same. So if you are going to vote, pay careful attention to the differences. Sometimes they are small, but of the five elections I have seen, the difference between Obama and Romney could not be more obvious.
I tried to get some account history for an old handle of mine, but they said they had no way of producing a single dump of comments for one individual.
It was a little distressing, but then I was comforted to realize that while we may have more information about the past, the past still finds a way to disappear.
This is why humanity is doomed. The stresses introduced by shrinking resources, exploding populations, the competition to control fossil fuel reserves, and increasingly unpredictable weather patterns are major causes of war, hunger, and economic distress, but we continue to address the symptoms rather than the disease causing them.
Bill Hicks said it best: "We are a virus with shoes." And it looks like we're in danger of killing our host.
My guess is that you just don't remember life before the TSA.
When I was a kid, my whole family could meet me at the gate where I arrived. Now, you're not allowed unless you have special permission. Before the TSA, you were allowed to keep your shoes on. You didn't have to disassemble your luggage on the conveyor belt. Security check lines were short. You didn't have to worry about spending hours in detention if they mistakenly had you on the no fly list, or if someone thought you looked suspicious, or if you had dark skin. Eighty and ninety year old individuals and children were never strip searched, and nor was anyone unless there was some serious suspicions about that person. Now we are all terrorists until proven innocent, which we can only do by giving up our Constitutional rights.
So, the reason there was no security theater outrage is because we didn't have to watch a TSA agent pat down a infant, or read about them requiring a 95 year old cancer patient to remove her adult diapers. Entire city blocks weren't shut down over suspicious packages, and we weren't spending billions of dollars on processes with dubious security value.
One reason the TSA is receiving funding instead of technologies to scan containers is because actually inspecting our imports would slow business down, and while giving up large parts of the Bill of Rights is just fine, the people who own our government through lobbyists would never allow a fraction of their profits to get eaten up by providing actual security measures. The other reason is because it subjects more people to the idea that terrorism is our greatest threat, and establishes the normalization of constant search, seizure, and fear whenever the government cares to abuse citizens. No Administration is going to give up that power without a fight.
The TSA has nothing to do with terrorism. It has to do with ratcheting up fear so the military industry can continue to suck half of our discretionary budget. It's a drop-in replacement for the cold war. We spend 4 times more than the entirety of the EU combined, or roughly 40-45% of the entire world budget.
The numbers are probably higher, but I can't find any statistics right now that include interest on past wars, paying for veterans benefits, and the various weapons research projects that are buried in other departments like the DoE.