From China's perspective, they have so many channels to inject things into the supply chains through component vendors no one has even heard of, and under less scrutiny than Huawei
And American manufacturers take samples of finished product and tear them down to ensure they actually have what is in the spec.
That doesn't mean it's impossible to slip something through, but it can't be a routine "always include the chip with the malware instead of what we told Apple"......at least not without significantly more effort to disguise it.
If I decided to peruse the code looking for backdoors, how hard would it be?
Almost impossible.
First, you don't actually have the code. You have, at best, a binary created from the code. That could be run through a disassembler and you could spend many, many hours combing through the output looking for something interesting.....but we're talking about something on the scale of reading a large portion of books in a small library looking for one particular sentence....and that sentence can be phrased many different ways.
But it's not necessarily in the code on the phone's filesystem and probably isn't. It's far more reliable for the Bad Guys to put their malware into the chips that make up the phone. You're really not going to find something that's embedded in, say, the chip that runs one of the phone's radios. First, you don't have a way to address it from the software running in the main CPU - you only get to communicate over what the phone maker put in, and that is not going to be complete access to the chip. Second, it's not just a binary sitting on a filesystem, it's a binary embedded in the chip. And your only way to access it is to ask the chip nicely. It doesn't have to let you see the binary, and even if it does show you something, you have no way of knowing if that binary is actually what is running in the chip.
And that's assuming it's still in the firmware and not something baked into the silicon, though that is unlikely. It's hard to do and firmware is plenty good enough.
The bias wasn't that they didn't look at left-wing groups, it was that a typical left-wing process might take a couple of months at worst while when looking at a tea party group, it would take years.
Actually, it took years for both. Again, the left-wing groups didn't whine about it, so they did not sue. Which means they did not get a settlement and an apology.
A settlement is not a complete story. It is about the groups involved in the litigation. So it is not actually evidence that only Tea Party groups had trouble.
I've already taken the option of reducing my salary paid to me to $35k while increasing the dividend payout.
So you've decided to tie your retirement to the fortunes of a single company that happens to be your employer.
How'd that work out for Enron employees? It's quite clever to follow in their footsteps.
A circle jerk is still a circle jerk. When the money for the government stops, the checks stop going out. IE the money doesn't exist and seniors go hungry.
When the sun sets, obviously the sun is gone. You can't access it so it no longer exists.
Or perhaps it still exists and you can't access it.....almost like the money existing in the Trust Fund, but no checks being sent out....
Again, you know almost nothing on this subject, and charlatans who want to steal from you have told you a story. You believe the story, making their theft so much easier.
What about when the Obama administration use the NEA to advocate for Obama care???
The NEA is not part of the government, and the Hatch act does not apply.
What about sending the IRS after the tea party?
When it was actually investigated, it turned out the IRS was actually more lenient to tea party groups than left-wing groups....the left wing groups just didn't whine about it.
What about how the DoJ employees use 90% of their personal earnings to donate to democrats they are investigating?
[citation required] Btw, DOJ employees aren't paid that well and still must consume food.
What about Joe Biden telling everyone to vote against Robert Bork -a judicial nominee- because Bork wasn't a democrat?
The horror of the Senate doing it's job of "advise and consent".
Bork had many bad rulings during his judicial career. And that's not a partisan statement - he was overruled many, many times. What Bork did is applied his political beliefs to the cases before him instead of applying the law. That's not what a judge is supposed to do.
Far more skilled judges, like Scalia and Thomas, cloak their political beliefs in the law. Such that they are technically applying the law while serving their political ends.
What about the state department under Obama trading favors with foreign interests for domestic privileges and campaign donations?
Wait....the State Department negotiated with foreign interests?!?!?!?!! How shocking!!!1!!eleven!! Next you'll tell me the Defense Department has a few weapons.
As for campaign donations, [citation required]. Keep in mind the scummy Clinton Foundation donations are not actually a campaign donation.
This guy tells people he wants Trump re-elected and that is politicizing the federal government ??? What ??
He promoted Trump while acting as an FCC commissioner. That's a violation of the Hatch act. Invite him to speak but leave off his title, and it's not a violation.
Federal law says incumbents are allowed to campaign on military bases. That's because it was expected when the laws were written that people are going to have political views and they are going to fundraise and they are going to run for office !
And this is relevant because......? And when supplying your justification, keep in mind the President and VP are exempt from the Hatch act.
That is clearly not the case here from a plain reading of the Act. O'Rielley is a Presidential appointee, and appointees are explicitly excluded from the Act.
No, they are excluded from part of the act. You're only looking at the exclusions from one section of the act.
Everyone who is not the President or VP is covered by the rest of the act, where they can not use their official position to influence an election. He did that, and isn't the President or VP.
I love that you give Obama credit for "cutting the budget" while simultaneously blaming the Republicans for refusing to pass a budget without those massive cuts
I love how you read what you wanted to read instead of what was actually written.
Over the last 38 years, the budget deficit has gone down when Democrats are "in power". The deficit has gone up when Republicans are "in power". "In power" meaning they are the party who is considered in-charge for an extended period of time (since the trend is far more important than an individual budget for measuring this).
So no, the parties are not equal on this. Republicans understand that no one really gives a shit about the deficit. Democrats are stupid enough to believe the Very Serious People who say it's a major problem, and hamstring their policy because of it.
You've also got the 'Obamacare' background wrong. A single writer in a conservative think-tank proposed a mandatory system like Obamacare adopted
Are you under the illusion that the Heritage Foundation started working on this for fun? And that fun just happened to coincide with the same time the Clintons were working on a reform plan? And forgetting the minor detail that it was handed over to Dole as an alternative system, and only spiked when Gingrich came to power and torpedoed the whole reform effort?
Also, Romney tried to veto most of Massachusetts plan - the Democrat legislature overrode his veto to implement it.
Hey look! A lie! On April 12, 2006, Governor Romney signed the health legislation. Now, Romney did try to line-item-veto some sections of the bill, and those were overridden. But he signed the overall bill. Which makes sense because Romney proposed the bill to begin with. He didn't like some of the changes the legislature made, and tried to veto those.
But hey, Republicans are all pure and would never ever ever do something like write or pass an "Obamacare" style plan.:eyeroll:
To top it off, Obama didn't propose the Obamacare plan. Pelosi and the Congressional Democrats did it entirely without White House input, mostly by just assembling a wishlist of Health Insurance industry lobbyist proposals
So....do you actually believe people's memories are this short, or do I need to provide you all the pictures and at-the-time articles about meetings at the White House?
Obama made a proposal. Congress started running with it and Pelosi got it through the House quickly. The Senate was dragging its feet. Kennedy died, and Congress was about to abandon the effort. The Obama White House then became heavily involved in not dropping the proposal and getting Harry Reid to do his fucking job and pass the bills.
How did you manage to write such a large post, and not get anything correct?
Largely by not quoting the propaganda you've internalized. I realize this is a shock, but it turns out there's lots of people who are not accurately describing what is going on. Instead, they have a narrative they want to sell you.
If you seriously think the government hasn't long been double dipping into social security to fund general liabilities, then you are quite frankly an idiot.
The Social Security trust fund buys US Government bonds. As an investment. That's why it's a "trust fund". The proceeds of the sale of those bonds go into the general fund. But the bonds still exist. And are paid out when they mature. They are not all suddenly due at a future date. A small part of them are getting paid every single month....and the proceeds are used to buy more bonds.
Your claim is that the money is just "gone". It isn't. It's invested. Can the government default on those bonds? Only if they want to annihilate the US Government's creditworthiness. There's no way that the market would believe "just these bonds and nothing else." So default would be a massive economic disaster that even a nacho cheese Dorito with bad hair can see coming.
As for your Forbes article, the thing you didn't quite understand is the people cutting the Social Security checks, the power to run their computers and printers, the the postage to mail them and many other things are paid out of the discretionary budget. They are not funded out of the Social Security fund. So when the article talks about "running out of money", they're talking about the debt limit for the discretionary budget. Social Security still had it's funding and a few trillion in the bank....well, in the bond portfolio, mostly. If the money was as fungible as you claim, then that giant pile of cash would be rather useful in avoiding a debt limit, no?
Again, you do not understand the subject at all, which makes you a fantastic target for propaganda. Which you've absorbed and now believe to be the truth.
First: Their big unions are so powerful that they are some of the biggest campaign contributors in many states
You mistakenly believe this because "rich people" are not lumped together as a single contributor. They vastly overwhelm spending by all unions combined.
which results in the people the union bosses want running the state education bureaucracies
Um....no. The unions are not interested in "school choice reformers" running the state education bureaucracy, since the for-profit schools they set up siphon even more money out of the system. Yet such people are put in charge in many states, and have been for a long time.
Second: In places like California, the teachers support all the other state workers (who respond by supporting the teachers) and ALL these state workers collectively use their political might to get incredibly generous pensions
That's because they collectively decided to forego more salary in favor of pensions. If you want to get rid of the pension, you're going to have to pay more salary.
Teachers love to complin about paltry pay, but they also love to have the public not notice that the pay is for only about 9 months per year of work
So you apparently don't know any teachers.
and does not include pension and heath benefits that dwarf the retirement benefits of most of the parents of the kids in the schools.
Wait....you mean unions work? They negotiate much better benefits than we can negotiate as individuals? Perhaps those parents should stop shitting on unions and join one.
Lots of state workers in California retire and collect as much (or more) per year in retirement than while they worked
Please define and provide a citation for "Lots". Also, please refer the "or more" people to the attorney general's office so they can be prosecuted.
The primary reasons so many states are failing to pay for the necessary basic school supplies is that they are instead funding state worker pensions as demanded by the unions
Uh...pensions have been cut over the last 40 years. They have not been increasing. If a state suddenly can't pay, it's not because the pensions went up. Might wanna look at all those tax cuts that got passed in those 40 years.
they are obeying the courts in funding all the multilingual stuff required by all the immigrant kids they themselves (via their union bosses and the DNC) imported into the country.
So the DNC is going to other countries and shipping people to the United States? Got a citation for that which does not include an Alex Jones wanna-be?
There are more immigrant kids in the United States today than ever before in American history
The population of the United States today is larger than ever before in American history.
In other words, to make your claim about immigrants relevant, you'd have to compare it to the overall population of the United States.....but doing so would destroy your talking point.
America today is spending more money per pupil on education than it ever has in American history. The results do not justify the costs.
First, correct for inflation.
Second, take a look at where the money's being spent. The biggest increases in spending are capital costs (ie. building new buildings), administrative costs (the district office is WAAAAY fuller than it was 50 years ago), and sports (gotta have that big Friday Night Lights stadium, with very expensive coaching staff).
Teachers aren't the big problem. But there's a lot of money to be made convincing you they are.
The two main things that throw off your 20% calculation is the ridiculously high 'employee benefit' spending
"Employee benefits" is far more than teacher salary. For example, it's the salaries of every administrator, as well as the health insurance and pension benefits of everyone.
One of the main ways spending has gone up is there are a lot more "administrators" per teacher than there used to be.
Yep, only the Republicans were responsible for all that debt. I'll give you a clue - both parties are bad.
Bill Clinton left office with a budget surplus. The last W budget was more than $1T in the red. The last Obama budget was $600M in the red, when $200M of tax cuts were added in an attempt to appease Republicans. The one before that was $400M in the red. Meanwhile, the Trump tax cuts are ballooning the deficit nicely.
Tell me again how both parties are equally bad when it comes to budget deficits.
Illinois is run lock stock and barrel by Democrats
You better tell current Illinois governor Bruce Rauner that he's a Democrat. He'll be rather surprised, since he's a Republican.
Also, the Illinois legislature has 67 D seats and 51 R seats. While that gives Democrats control of the legislature, it's pretty far from "lock stock and barrel". That would be more like California, with 53 D seats and 25 R seats and the governor.
Obamacare was a disaster
To call something a 'disaster', you've got to indicate the criteria you are measuring with.
There's a lot more people with health insurance that they can afford. There's also things like the elimination of lifetime limits and minimum required coverage that isn't shit if you happen to have ovaries. Those are rather positive if you are measuring by "less people dying because their checking account doesn't have 7 figures in it".
It wasn't cheap, but it wasn't supposed to be - the theory is free market competition would drive down prices over time and "over time" takes a while. After all, "Obamacare" was the plan designed for Bob Dole (R) to give in response to Bill Clinton's health care reform efforts, so it hews very close to "free markets" and other Republican shibboleths. That's why Republican Mitt Romney passed it in Massachusetts.
Obama mistakenly thought that if he proposed a Republican reform plan with a couple tweaks (such as where subsidies faded out), then some Republicans would support the plan. And you can see how that worked out.
Btw, "Obamacare", like most Republican social spending plans, is not a good plan. It assumes health care is an efficient market, and that's just not possible. But the assumption that all markets are efficient is core to modern Republicanism, so it had to be in the plan.
Goldman Sachs bought both parties years ago
Well, whatever you do, continue to pretend that all politicians are equally awful. That way there's no reward for bucking Goldman Sachs and thus getting the changes you want.
IE public system pensions, social security, and welfare.
*sings* One of these things is not like the others......
You should probably look up the difference between mandatory and discretionary spending when it comes to the federal budget, and their funding mechanisms. It's an extremely important subject, and your lack of understanding is why you mistakenly believe cutting Social Security or pensions will do anything to the discretionary budget.
And your robot is going to come in and asses the best way to lay out the pipes in the ground based on conditions? Nope.
Every single one of your examples is not a difficult algorithm to develop. The only thing holding back automation is sufficiently advanced robotics to actually do the work. But that's just a matter of time.
And your brick layer there, its one thing to put bricks dry stacked on one another with no rebar. It is a whole other matter to mortar the joins, set the blocks perfect and straight and control the slump and settle of them
Guess what the robot already handles? Everything you just cited. Yes, it's not in their CGI'ed promotional materials, but that success is why Caterpillar just put a few million into an Australian company.
The net result is the bricklaying robot was about 80% the speed of a master bricklayer during an 8-hour shift....but the robot can work 24 hours/day.
Also, when your fancy machine breaks down you will spend more than you save getting a guy on site to trouble shoot the system and repair it.
Having dealt with a mason who fell off some scaffolding, I'm pretty sure the troubleshooting and repairs of a robot are significantly easier and faster than a human. For example, humans get a little upity when you drain all their fluids to fix a leak.
Imagine how much easier it would be to pull the wire if you actually were the fish tape. Well, advanced enough robotics and AI and you get something that can pull wire better, faster and cheaper than you.
There were lots of masons also saying "Love to see it happen". Then this thing got invented.
Nope. That is NOT different. During every other wave of automation, there were people like you who firmly believed there would be no new jobs to for the displaced.
It's probably pretty easy to automate someone who only reads one sentence before smashing the keyboard.
When manufacturing jobs were disappearing, NOBODY could foresee that the new jobs would be for pizza deliverers, graphic artists, app developers, and Starbucks baristas.
Uh...you're kidding, right? Pizza delivery (and food delivery in general) is not new. Try 1800s. Nor are artists. Nor are the wait/kitchen staff that you now call baristas. And "app developers" started being a thing in the 1950s, when manufacturing jobs were massively growing. Changing the name of a job is not inventing a new job.
Ten minutes later a robotic vehicle picks it up and delivers it to a repair shop. An hour later it brings the fixed toaster back to your house
Why is the repair shop staffed by humans?
See, it's the nexus of AI and robotics that's different this time. The previous times the advances in robotics/machinery could replicate some relatively simple tasks, but left work for the humans because those advances could not handle anything outside their narrow scope. Good enough AI can fix anything that went wrong with your toaster without human intervention. Especially one designed with automated repair in mind. And that AI does not need to be anywhere near pseudo-human to fix any problem that comes up with a toaster.
And that's assuming you're dumb enough to pay 3x the cost of a new toaster to get the old one repaired. It's not like autonomous vehicle service is going to be free, nor are the parts and the repairs.
It's the shitty quality of replies like yours that make this a worthless subject to discuss. You're unwilling to see the train roaring down the tracks because you personally were not run over in the last 10 minutes.
The difference is there was some other job the workers could move to.
The trick with this round of automation is if we develop advanced enough AI to do the automation, there isn't going to be something else. Because that new job would also be automated away.
What we're bickering about is when it's going to happen, and what is "advanced enough AI". But it's going to happen. We might want to plan for it instead of hoping that the 1890s repeat themselves.
Yes, damn me for giving Blue Cross my children's Social Security numbers and a host of other information, as they demanded in order to insure us. Totally my fault they turned out to have shitty security.:eyeroll:
Slashdot Mirror
At a minimum, the Chinese can't arrest you, or extradite you to China if you go on vacation.
Why not?
They have the capability to abduct/arrest/assassinate someone anywhere in the world. Just like every other major nation.
They aren't bragging about using that capability. At this time.
At least I can probably trust the NSA doesn't have its greasy mitts inside one of those
The problem with backdoors is you don't know if the original controller is still in control of it.
It is quite possible for one group to take over a backdoor installed by another group.
From China's perspective, they have so many channels to inject things into the supply chains through component vendors no one has even heard of, and under less scrutiny than Huawei
And American manufacturers take samples of finished product and tear them down to ensure they actually have what is in the spec.
That doesn't mean it's impossible to slip something through, but it can't be a routine "always include the chip with the malware instead of what we told Apple"......at least not without significantly more effort to disguise it.
If I decided to peruse the code looking for backdoors, how hard would it be?
Almost impossible.
First, you don't actually have the code. You have, at best, a binary created from the code. That could be run through a disassembler and you could spend many, many hours combing through the output looking for something interesting.....but we're talking about something on the scale of reading a large portion of books in a small library looking for one particular sentence....and that sentence can be phrased many different ways.
But it's not necessarily in the code on the phone's filesystem and probably isn't. It's far more reliable for the Bad Guys to put their malware into the chips that make up the phone. You're really not going to find something that's embedded in, say, the chip that runs one of the phone's radios. First, you don't have a way to address it from the software running in the main CPU - you only get to communicate over what the phone maker put in, and that is not going to be complete access to the chip. Second, it's not just a binary sitting on a filesystem, it's a binary embedded in the chip. And your only way to access it is to ask the chip nicely. It doesn't have to let you see the binary, and even if it does show you something, you have no way of knowing if that binary is actually what is running in the chip.
And that's assuming it's still in the firmware and not something baked into the silicon, though that is unlikely. It's hard to do and firmware is plenty good enough.
The bias wasn't that they didn't look at left-wing groups, it was that a typical left-wing process might take a couple of months at worst while when looking at a tea party group, it would take years.
Actually, it took years for both. Again, the left-wing groups didn't whine about it, so they did not sue. Which means they did not get a settlement and an apology.
Inspector's General report:
https://www.washingtonpost.com...
Overall story:
http://nymag.com/daily/intelli...
A settlement is not a complete story. It is about the groups involved in the litigation. So it is not actually evidence that only Tea Party groups had trouble.
I've already taken the option of reducing my salary paid to me to $35k while increasing the dividend payout.
So you've decided to tie your retirement to the fortunes of a single company that happens to be your employer.
How'd that work out for Enron employees? It's quite clever to follow in their footsteps.
A circle jerk is still a circle jerk. When the money for the government stops, the checks stop going out. IE the money doesn't exist and seniors go hungry.
When the sun sets, obviously the sun is gone. You can't access it so it no longer exists.
Or perhaps it still exists and you can't access it.....almost like the money existing in the Trust Fund, but no checks being sent out....
Again, you know almost nothing on this subject, and charlatans who want to steal from you have told you a story. You believe the story, making their theft so much easier.
What about when the Obama administration use the NEA to advocate for Obama care???
The NEA is not part of the government, and the Hatch act does not apply.
What about sending the IRS after the tea party?
When it was actually investigated, it turned out the IRS was actually more lenient to tea party groups than left-wing groups....the left wing groups just didn't whine about it.
https://www.politico.com/story...
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/1...
What about using the "Fairness Doctrine" to shut down Rush Limbaugh?
The Fairness Doctrine ended in the 1987.
What about how the DoJ employees use 90% of their personal earnings to donate to democrats they are investigating?
[citation required]
Btw, DOJ employees aren't paid that well and still must consume food.
What about Joe Biden telling everyone to vote against Robert Bork -a judicial nominee- because Bork wasn't a democrat?
The horror of the Senate doing it's job of "advise and consent".
Bork had many bad rulings during his judicial career. And that's not a partisan statement - he was overruled many, many times. What Bork did is applied his political beliefs to the cases before him instead of applying the law. That's not what a judge is supposed to do.
Far more skilled judges, like Scalia and Thomas, cloak their political beliefs in the law. Such that they are technically applying the law while serving their political ends.
What about the state department under Obama trading favors with foreign interests for domestic privileges and campaign donations?
Wait....the State Department negotiated with foreign interests?!?!?!?!! How shocking!!!1!!eleven!! Next you'll tell me the Defense Department has a few weapons.
As for campaign donations, [citation required]. Keep in mind the scummy Clinton Foundation donations are not actually a campaign donation.
This guy tells people he wants Trump re-elected and that is politicizing the federal government ??? What ??
He promoted Trump while acting as an FCC commissioner. That's a violation of the Hatch act. Invite him to speak but leave off his title, and it's not a violation.
Federal law says incumbents are allowed to campaign on military bases. That's because it was expected when the laws were written that people are going to have political views and they are going to fundraise and they are going to run for office !
And this is relevant because......? And when supplying your justification, keep in mind the President and VP are exempt from the Hatch act.
That is clearly not the case here from a plain reading of the Act. O'Rielley is a Presidential appointee, and appointees are explicitly excluded from the Act.
No, they are excluded from part of the act. You're only looking at the exclusions from one section of the act.
Everyone who is not the President or VP is covered by the rest of the act, where they can not use their official position to influence an election. He did that, and isn't the President or VP.
Is that your definition or theirs?
Because a salary is a benefit. And often salaries and other benefits are lumped into one line item in the budget.
I love that you give Obama credit for "cutting the budget" while simultaneously blaming the Republicans for refusing to pass a budget without those massive cuts
I love how you read what you wanted to read instead of what was actually written.
Over the last 38 years, the budget deficit has gone down when Democrats are "in power". The deficit has gone up when Republicans are "in power". "In power" meaning they are the party who is considered in-charge for an extended period of time (since the trend is far more important than an individual budget for measuring this).
So no, the parties are not equal on this. Republicans understand that no one really gives a shit about the deficit. Democrats are stupid enough to believe the Very Serious People who say it's a major problem, and hamstring their policy because of it.
You've also got the 'Obamacare' background wrong. A single writer in a conservative think-tank proposed a mandatory system like Obamacare adopted
Are you under the illusion that the Heritage Foundation started working on this for fun? And that fun just happened to coincide with the same time the Clintons were working on a reform plan? And forgetting the minor detail that it was handed over to Dole as an alternative system, and only spiked when Gingrich came to power and torpedoed the whole reform effort?
Also, Romney tried to veto most of Massachusetts plan - the Democrat legislature overrode his veto to implement it.
Hey look! A lie!
On April 12, 2006, Governor Romney signed the health legislation.
Now, Romney did try to line-item-veto some sections of the bill, and those were overridden. But he signed the overall bill. Which makes sense because Romney proposed the bill to begin with. He didn't like some of the changes the legislature made, and tried to veto those.
But hey, Republicans are all pure and would never ever ever do something like write or pass an "Obamacare" style plan. :eyeroll:
To top it off, Obama didn't propose the Obamacare plan. Pelosi and the Congressional Democrats did it entirely without White House input, mostly by just assembling a wishlist of Health Insurance industry lobbyist proposals
So....do you actually believe people's memories are this short, or do I need to provide you all the pictures and at-the-time articles about meetings at the White House?
Obama made a proposal. Congress started running with it and Pelosi got it through the House quickly. The Senate was dragging its feet. Kennedy died, and Congress was about to abandon the effort. The Obama White House then became heavily involved in not dropping the proposal and getting Harry Reid to do his fucking job and pass the bills.
How did you manage to write such a large post, and not get anything correct?
Largely by not quoting the propaganda you've internalized. I realize this is a shock, but it turns out there's lots of people who are not accurately describing what is going on. Instead, they have a narrative they want to sell you.
If you seriously think the government hasn't long been double dipping into social security to fund general liabilities, then you are quite frankly an idiot.
The Social Security trust fund buys US Government bonds. As an investment. That's why it's a "trust fund". The proceeds of the sale of those bonds go into the general fund. But the bonds still exist. And are paid out when they mature. They are not all suddenly due at a future date. A small part of them are getting paid every single month....and the proceeds are used to buy more bonds.
Your claim is that the money is just "gone". It isn't. It's invested. Can the government default on those bonds? Only if they want to annihilate the US Government's creditworthiness. There's no way that the market would believe "just these bonds and nothing else." So default would be a massive economic disaster that even a nacho cheese Dorito with bad hair can see coming.
As for your Forbes article, the thing you didn't quite understand is the people cutting the Social Security checks, the power to run their computers and printers, the the postage to mail them and many other things are paid out of the discretionary budget. They are not funded out of the Social Security fund. So when the article talks about "running out of money", they're talking about the debt limit for the discretionary budget. Social Security still had it's funding and a few trillion in the bank....well, in the bond portfolio, mostly. If the money was as fungible as you claim, then that giant pile of cash would be rather useful in avoiding a debt limit, no?
Again, you do not understand the subject at all, which makes you a fantastic target for propaganda. Which you've absorbed and now believe to be the truth.
First: Their big unions are so powerful that they are some of the biggest campaign contributors in many states
You mistakenly believe this because "rich people" are not lumped together as a single contributor. They vastly overwhelm spending by all unions combined.
which results in the people the union bosses want running the state education bureaucracies
Um....no. The unions are not interested in "school choice reformers" running the state education bureaucracy, since the for-profit schools they set up siphon even more money out of the system. Yet such people are put in charge in many states, and have been for a long time.
Second: In places like California, the teachers support all the other state workers (who respond by supporting the teachers) and ALL these state workers collectively use their political might to get incredibly generous pensions
That's because they collectively decided to forego more salary in favor of pensions. If you want to get rid of the pension, you're going to have to pay more salary.
Teachers love to complin about paltry pay, but they also love to have the public not notice that the pay is for only about 9 months per year of work
So you apparently don't know any teachers.
and does not include pension and heath benefits that dwarf the retirement benefits of most of the parents of the kids in the schools.
Wait....you mean unions work? They negotiate much better benefits than we can negotiate as individuals? Perhaps those parents should stop shitting on unions and join one.
Lots of state workers in California retire and collect as much (or more) per year in retirement than while they worked
Please define and provide a citation for "Lots". Also, please refer the "or more" people to the attorney general's office so they can be prosecuted.
The primary reasons so many states are failing to pay for the necessary basic school supplies is that they are instead funding state worker pensions as demanded by the unions
Uh...pensions have been cut over the last 40 years. They have not been increasing. If a state suddenly can't pay, it's not because the pensions went up. Might wanna look at all those tax cuts that got passed in those 40 years.
they are obeying the courts in funding all the multilingual stuff required by all the immigrant kids they themselves (via their union bosses and the DNC) imported into the country.
So the DNC is going to other countries and shipping people to the United States? Got a citation for that which does not include an Alex Jones wanna-be?
There are more immigrant kids in the United States today than ever before in American history
The population of the United States today is larger than ever before in American history.
In other words, to make your claim about immigrants relevant, you'd have to compare it to the overall population of the United States.....but doing so would destroy your talking point.
America today is spending more money per pupil on education than it ever has in American history. The results do not justify the costs.
First, correct for inflation.
Second, take a look at where the money's being spent. The biggest increases in spending are capital costs (ie. building new buildings), administrative costs (the district office is WAAAAY fuller than it was 50 years ago), and sports (gotta have that big Friday Night Lights stadium, with very expensive coaching staff).
Teachers aren't the big problem. But there's a lot of money to be made convincing you they are.
Aside from a nurse, janitors, principal, career counselor, and social worker, how many other administrators do you need?
Woah there! How do you expect to run a school without 12 vice assistant principals?
The two main things that throw off your 20% calculation is the ridiculously high 'employee benefit' spending
"Employee benefits" is far more than teacher salary. For example, it's the salaries of every administrator, as well as the health insurance and pension benefits of everyone.
One of the main ways spending has gone up is there are a lot more "administrators" per teacher than there used to be.
And most of the other 49 states are worse.
Yep, only the Republicans were responsible for all that debt. I'll give you a clue - both parties are bad.
Bill Clinton left office with a budget surplus. The last W budget was more than $1T in the red. The last Obama budget was $600M in the red, when $200M of tax cuts were added in an attempt to appease Republicans. The one before that was $400M in the red. Meanwhile, the Trump tax cuts are ballooning the deficit nicely.
Tell me again how both parties are equally bad when it comes to budget deficits.
Illinois is run lock stock and barrel by Democrats
You better tell current Illinois governor Bruce Rauner that he's a Democrat. He'll be rather surprised, since he's a Republican.
Also, the Illinois legislature has 67 D seats and 51 R seats. While that gives Democrats control of the legislature, it's pretty far from "lock stock and barrel". That would be more like California, with 53 D seats and 25 R seats and the governor.
Obamacare was a disaster
To call something a 'disaster', you've got to indicate the criteria you are measuring with.
There's a lot more people with health insurance that they can afford. There's also things like the elimination of lifetime limits and minimum required coverage that isn't shit if you happen to have ovaries. Those are rather positive if you are measuring by "less people dying because their checking account doesn't have 7 figures in it".
It wasn't cheap, but it wasn't supposed to be - the theory is free market competition would drive down prices over time and "over time" takes a while. After all, "Obamacare" was the plan designed for Bob Dole (R) to give in response to Bill Clinton's health care reform efforts, so it hews very close to "free markets" and other Republican shibboleths. That's why Republican Mitt Romney passed it in Massachusetts.
Obama mistakenly thought that if he proposed a Republican reform plan with a couple tweaks (such as where subsidies faded out), then some Republicans would support the plan. And you can see how that worked out.
Btw, "Obamacare", like most Republican social spending plans, is not a good plan. It assumes health care is an efficient market, and that's just not possible. But the assumption that all markets are efficient is core to modern Republicanism, so it had to be in the plan.
Goldman Sachs bought both parties years ago
Well, whatever you do, continue to pretend that all politicians are equally awful. That way there's no reward for bucking Goldman Sachs and thus getting the changes you want.
IE public system pensions, social security, and welfare.
*sings* One of these things is not like the others......
You should probably look up the difference between mandatory and discretionary spending when it comes to the federal budget, and their funding mechanisms. It's an extremely important subject, and your lack of understanding is why you mistakenly believe cutting Social Security or pensions will do anything to the discretionary budget.
Take a moment to think about this.
What is required to apply for an SSN? What information was stolen from Blue Cross?
Golly, they stole the information needed to apply for an SSN. So not having an SSN does not help.
And your robot is going to come in and asses the best way to lay out the pipes in the ground based on conditions? Nope.
Every single one of your examples is not a difficult algorithm to develop. The only thing holding back automation is sufficiently advanced robotics to actually do the work. But that's just a matter of time.
And your brick layer there, its one thing to put bricks dry stacked on one another with no rebar. It is a whole other matter to mortar the joins, set the blocks perfect and straight and control the slump and settle of them
Guess what the robot already handles? Everything you just cited. Yes, it's not in their CGI'ed promotional materials, but that success is why Caterpillar just put a few million into an Australian company.
The net result is the bricklaying robot was about 80% the speed of a master bricklayer during an 8-hour shift....but the robot can work 24 hours/day.
Also, when your fancy machine breaks down you will spend more than you save getting a guy on site to trouble shoot the system and repair it.
Having dealt with a mason who fell off some scaffolding, I'm pretty sure the troubleshooting and repairs of a robot are significantly easier and faster than a human. For example, humans get a little upity when you drain all their fluids to fix a leak.
Imagine how much easier it would be to pull the wire if you actually were the fish tape. Well, advanced enough robotics and AI and you get something that can pull wire better, faster and cheaper than you.
There were lots of masons also saying "Love to see it happen". Then this thing got invented.
Nope. That is NOT different. During every other wave of automation, there were people like you who firmly believed there would be no new jobs to for the displaced.
It's probably pretty easy to automate someone who only reads one sentence before smashing the keyboard.
When manufacturing jobs were disappearing, NOBODY could foresee that the new jobs would be for pizza deliverers, graphic artists, app developers, and Starbucks baristas.
Uh...you're kidding, right? Pizza delivery (and food delivery in general) is not new. Try 1800s. Nor are artists. Nor are the wait/kitchen staff that you now call baristas. And "app developers" started being a thing in the 1950s, when manufacturing jobs were massively growing. Changing the name of a job is not inventing a new job.
Ten minutes later a robotic vehicle picks it up and delivers it to a repair shop. An hour later it brings the fixed toaster back to your house
Why is the repair shop staffed by humans?
See, it's the nexus of AI and robotics that's different this time. The previous times the advances in robotics/machinery could replicate some relatively simple tasks, but left work for the humans because those advances could not handle anything outside their narrow scope. Good enough AI can fix anything that went wrong with your toaster without human intervention. Especially one designed with automated repair in mind. And that AI does not need to be anywhere near pseudo-human to fix any problem that comes up with a toaster.
And that's assuming you're dumb enough to pay 3x the cost of a new toaster to get the old one repaired. It's not like autonomous vehicle service is going to be free, nor are the parts and the repairs.
It's the shitty quality of replies like yours that make this a worthless subject to discuss. You're unwilling to see the train roaring down the tracks because you personally were not run over in the last 10 minutes.
The difference is there was some other job the workers could move to.
The trick with this round of automation is if we develop advanced enough AI to do the automation, there isn't going to be something else. Because that new job would also be automated away.
What we're bickering about is when it's going to happen, and what is "advanced enough AI". But it's going to happen. We might want to plan for it instead of hoping that the 1890s repeat themselves.
How can a bank tell the difference between a kid opening a credit card at his parent's urging so he can build up a credit history
By noticing the kid is less than 18 years old.
Banks should not be attempting to sign contracts with minors.
Yes, damn me for giving Blue Cross my children's Social Security numbers and a host of other information, as they demanded in order to insure us. Totally my fault they turned out to have shitty security. :eyeroll:
Not all lenders have strict standards.
For example, most "finance your new car here!" dealers will accept anyone with a pulse, and about half of the people without one.