Haha, yes, I've seen the videos. "Watch me buy gas with bitcoins!" *transfers bitcoins to friend, waits 20 minutes, friend buys gas with USD*
Haha, yes. Not watch me buy gold with BTC. *Loads one of a dozen sites selling metals for BTC, waits three days for a package, and flips it for cash the same day (or more sanely, keeps the metal for when Uncle Sam takes a cue from the UCB and comes for our savings accounts to pay off their useless debt).
No matter what you're paid with, you still need to pay the taxes to the IRS if you are a US citizen, and in almost all cases they must be converted to USD.
Clearly every light bulb does not need to be on the internet, at least at present
You've overlooked the real driver for these.
Consider: Utilities around the world have made a massive push for "smart" meters, despite massive customer resistance. They can spend billions deploying these easily hackable pieces of crap, yet can't upgrade their infrastructure to properly handle truly distributed generation. Now that you have a smartmeter, they offer discounts if you install major appliances the meter can communicate with - So when it hits 110F, the utility can shut off your AC and refrigerator and send that electricity to cubicle farms that really need it to power floor after floor of garish fluorescent lights.
This takes the logical next step - Until now, the utilities had no convenient way to tell you how much of that electricity you pay for can go toward your lighting - Did you know some people still insist on using halogen lights??? But with this, the power company can just keep dialing the brightness down as needed, you damned flat-rate residential parasites!;)
Nah, just the stock Slashdot "we hate energy efficiency" rant applied to the next generation of products.
CFLs? Every Slashdotter needs to walk into a room and instantly have 6500K light or people... will... die!
Solar panels? Take more energy to make than they'll ever produce, and it lowers property values to have free electricity.
IGPs? Sure, I only play cheesy online Flash solitaire, but I NEED A quad 7990 and an external 3KW PSU just to feed it.
Electric cars? They "had to" push it home on that show with the car guys. And Elon Musk eats Christian babies.
And LED bulbs? Still new enough that you have the uninformed Luddites bitching that they cost $60 each, despite the fact that you can now buy them for under $20 regularly and around $10 on sale - Still pretty damned expensive, but in the "worth it" range for the handful of lights you use the most.
Google, an advertising/marketing company, puts out an OS for phones and tablets and gives it away for free and then allows users access to a repository system where free apps and games are often supplied... for free.
You've missed one important part of that equation...
Yes, Google gives all that stuff away in the hopes of making money on advertising revenue. But advertising to people who really don't want it (to the point they would actively block it) costs money.
The evil marketing firms of the world can still survive in a world with AdBlock et al... They just need to cast a more narrow net - Target those who, for whatever reason (old? stupid? Researchers studying the behavior of bottom-feeders in a shrinking ecosystem?) don't block ads - And leave the rest of us the hell alone.
The real problem with "micro"-transactions comes from every goddamned site that tries them, doing their best to aggregate them back into macro (or at least normal) transactions.
From site-specific microcurrencies - usually one dime or penny per unit - That you can only spend in multiples of 50 (aka "$5.00") or 500 (aka "$5.00") respectively, to tip jars that refuse to process under a buck or five, just about every site out there that takes "micro" payments refuses to actually take micro payments. And they lose money as a result.
Yes, guys, I would send you a few cents - maybe up to a buck if I really, really like what you do - To view your content, if I like it and can do so anonymously and friction-free. I won't, however, send you a Lincoln to read about your recent experience with an obnoxious Wallyworld cashier, no matter how funny you consider yourself.
Offhand, I would guess mostly adult professionals completely sick of having our sleep cycle disrupted "for the chiiiiiildren" so the helicopters can feel better about dropping their snowflakes off at a busy intersection to wait half an hour for the arrival of a specifically road-rage-inducing yellow transport.
The fact is that road accidents, particularly to pedestrians, are less likely in daylight than in darkness.
Better solution - The school day only lasts six hours; children (especially adolescents) tend to have a sleep cycle lagged by 2-3 hours vs the adult population; So... Start school later, don't fuck with the clocks themselves.
Children walk to school early in the morning. The brighter outside it is, the better parents feel
Fuck how parents feel. The kids don't really care.
And I don't give a damn about the candy industry or the amount of light on Halloween, either. We, as a society, need to move beyond pandering to the whims of these "helicopter" parents turning their "precious and unique snowflakes" into a generation of helpless losers unable to grasp the idea of "don't stand in the road" and "don't get into the van" and "don't believe Mr. Timmons when he says he has a roll of dimes in his pocket for you".
And if you take this as humor, I feel sorry for you, you've already gone too far over to "their" side.
And what about those of us who enjoy the evening? Who enjoy sunsets and dusk, and would like some time afterwards? There are those who have decent access to more (semi-)rural areas as well, who would like to enjoy the stars without it getting too late.
As a night-owl, I would honestly prefer the sun rise at 6am every day, and damn the rest of the milestones (noon/dusk/mid-night).
I do my best work in the evening, I always have to fight myself to go to bed, I hate waking up, etc. But I find it much easier get my sleepy ass out of bed after the sun has come up than before - To the point that for my alarm clock (at least in the winter), I actually use a "dawn simulator", which means a really bright lamp that turns on over the course of half an hour. A lot of people with SAD use those and claims it helps; I don't actually get SAD, I just find it massively easier to wake up after sunrise, simple as that.
So... Keep enjoying the evening - I do too! But we can enjoy it in the dark just as well.:)
First of all, the USPS delivered 160 billion total items last year. It would seem your 203B comes from 2008 (page 5), so I'll use that year's data for the rest of this response. Of that 202.7 billion, it breaks down as:
17.5% (35.4B) "real" first-class items (stamp-bearing single item)
1.6% (3.3B) packages
27.8% (56.3B) spam (first-class presorted, 91.7B total first class minus 35.4B single-item gives 56.3B ) 48.9% (99.1B) outright crap (3rd class advertising)
4.2% (8.6B) other - periodicals? (they don't break this out here but do elsewhere)
Now for fun, let's compare that to how they describe their revenue (page 4), shall we? (For 2012 instead of 2008, but we can likely assume the overall ratios tend to hold steady over time):
44.5% ($28.9B) first class mail (including presorted which actually costs less than "real" first class, but they don't separate that out for revenue)
25.2% ($16.4B) advertising mail
17.8% ($11.6B) shipping
2.6% ($1.7B) periodicals
See a trend there? Almost a perfectly inverse relationship between "I want it" and "how much the post office charges to send it". And you wonder why I won't cry to see them cease to exist?
You DO know you can opt out of junk mail right?
You DO know you can't opt out of mail from companies with whom you have an "existing business relationship", right? So that order you placed with LL Bean 15 years ago makes you their bitch forever. And, the DMA "opt out" doesn't actually work like the telemarketer opt-out list - It has essentially no teeth. Want proof? Send in a new opt-out request (even while having one already in effect) - You'll get a huge batch of crap from "member" companies taking advantage of a verified-good address in the "60-90 days" it "may" take before your request goes into effect. And I say that from personal experience.
or did you just complain about something you actual know nothing about so you can be a whiny bitch?
You mean, kinda like responding to Slashdot posts just to sound clever while spouting factually incorrect nonsense? So, do you work for the APWU, or just belong to it as a member?
The post office can be completely self-sustaining. The problem is that the idiots in congress are forcing it to pre-fund pensions for the next 75 years.
An unfunded pension liability merely externalizes the risk of default - Company goes under, bam, you have tens of thousands of retirees and near-retirees on welfare until the mercy of death gives them back the dignity they worked fair 'n square for. Forcing a company (including the post office) to fully fund their pension system does not count as frivolous political posturing, but sound and necessary fiscal policy.
That said, we can certainly agree that congress deserves its share of the blame, for example by not allowing the USPS to raise rates, close offices, and shorten their hours as needed. Though even then, as I said, the USPS brings me nothing but crap; I would honestly prefer it go under even without any financial savings.
Why exactly do we want to find yet another way to siphon money from the public to maintain an obsolete business model that, as far as I can tell, exists solely to deliver snail-spam to my door?
I have no objection to paying $4.99 to FedEx for the once or twice each year I actually send something in a #10 envelope... As long as it means the literally hundreds useless catalogs (plus credit card and life insurance offers, plus political fliers in even-numbered years) I get per year need to do the same - By which I mean, hopefully that would effectively end unsolicited commercial/charitable/political mail.
Trash.. I think the courts can probably figure out a distinction between waste and actual speech.
Clearly, they cannot - Because phone books do not count as fucking speech.
Sick of this "corporate speech" BS. We can't have campaign finance reform because CORPORATE SPEECH. Now we can't opt out of phonebooks because CORPORATE SPEECH. But try to protest at the G8 summit, and you'll get to see just how much HUMAN speech matters anymore.
We need to end the rights of incorporation now. We can come up with a short list of powers granted to companies to facilitate doing business, but when real live natural born humans take a back seat to fictional entities, time to change the laws before things start burning.
Not all people are alike, no matter how much specialists struggle to classify them and put them in little boxes.
The fact that your bad posture hasn't hurt you - yet - Doesn't mean the same basic laws of physics don't apply to you as apply to the rest of us.:)
Your skull should normally "balance" atop your spine. Any deviation from that requires the active use of muscles to offset the imbalance; and if you maintain such a position for long periods of time, eventually those muscles get tired. At that point, you start risking damage as secondary muscles try to do the same job much less efficiently.
Perhaps you have exceptionally strong/enduring neck muscles. Perhaps you've just gotten lucky so far. Perhaps you just haven't hit 30 yet and still consider your body indestructible. Doesn't matter - It doesn't hurt you to have an ergonomically-friendly work area, so why the hell would you deliberately make it otherwise?
Please Please Please don't have a commercial spaceflight disaster this soon. I want to GTFO(ff) of this planet before I die. That sure as hell won't happen as long as we have nothing but NASA crippled by the same useless monkeys in charge who can't even balance the budget.
Shit, even bugs can balance a budget (ie, ants storing food for the winter). Our leaders can't pull off a feat mere bugs can do.
And those troubling effects persisted long after I took the gear off. That’s because my brain had adjusted to an unnatural view, so it took a while to readjust to normal vision.
Hey, I'd rather have the direct neural link too. But seriously? Whoever manages to come up with a truly viable wearable "augmented reality" system wins. Why the hell would I want to take it off?
Let my brain adjust to having my left higher and further to the left! If I really need to react on a moment's notice to a loss of the HUD image - I'll close one eye.
Pssst - I'm white.
And regardless of the "real" boogieman, we didn't directly blow Russians up, nor they, us - Instead,we took turns blowing up various pawns in Southeast Asia (not really known for its caucasian population).
Well, if you end social security, you'd better redirect a substantial part of those funds to police forces and a lot of additional jails, because criminal activity related to poverty and despair will then skyrocket.
LOL... You just made me picture an army of grannies on a looting spree.:)
Radically cutting spending everywhere is a good idea in theory, but in practice, I'm afraid it won't work so smoothly.
Agreed - And I understand that we'd realistically need to phase out something as onerous as SS over the next 50 years or so. But the sooner we start, the better; and beginning the phase-out while it still has a book surplus (I say "book" because virtually the entirety of OASI - All 2.6 trillion dollars, currently sits in US treasuries - aka a loan from our government to itself that helps hide yet one more part of the "real" deficit) will hurt less than starting once it "officially" runs out of money.
Hell, the government could even pull off a bit of "free" money from that deal - Allow people to opt out entirely, at the expense of losing your existing contributions. Anyone under 35 would take that in a heartbeat, since they don't ever expect to collect a dime anyway once the Boomers finish draining the pot.
Hate to say it, but the House Republicans take the majority of the blame for this one.
Wait - So the whitehouse bluffed and the Republicans called them on it, and you blame the Republicans?
IANAR, but just no. Both sides may take the blame for failing to come up with real cuts, but the full burden of responsibility for the sequester rests solidly on Barry's broad shoulders.
Cut it all - Starting with congresscritter pensions and benefits (don't get distracted by their salaries, just a drop in the bucket compared to their real cost).
The problem with this whole sequester (aside from not going nearly far enough) comes from the whitehouse thinking themselves clever for having made an uncallable bluff - From assuming that the Republicans would never let the military suffer any real cuts. Well, whaddya know, in a surprising show of sanity, the larger principle of getting government spending under control trumped even their favorite special interest.
Yeah, we (by which I mean fiscal conservatives, not to imply I would ever voluntarily associate myself with the GOP) would all rather see the real problems addressed - End social security, end security theater, and cut HHS and the DOD in half (at least). But this current farce? Hey, better than nothing, but at least it counts as a start.
Slashdot Mirror
Haha, yes, I've seen the videos. "Watch me buy gas with bitcoins!" *transfers bitcoins to friend, waits 20 minutes, friend buys gas with USD*
Haha, yes. Not watch me buy gold with BTC. *Loads one of a dozen sites selling metals for BTC, waits three days for a package, and flips it for cash the same day (or more sanely, keeps the metal for when Uncle Sam takes a cue from the UCB and comes for our savings accounts to pay off their useless debt).
No matter what you're paid with, you still need to pay the taxes to the IRS if you are a US citizen, and in almost all cases they must be converted to USD.
Lol... Mod parent +5 funny!
Clearly every light bulb does not need to be on the internet, at least at present
;)
You've overlooked the real driver for these.
Consider: Utilities around the world have made a massive push for "smart" meters, despite massive customer resistance. They can spend billions deploying these easily hackable pieces of crap, yet can't upgrade their infrastructure to properly handle truly distributed generation. Now that you have a smartmeter, they offer discounts if you install major appliances the meter can communicate with - So when it hits 110F, the utility can shut off your AC and refrigerator and send that electricity to cubicle farms that really need it to power floor after floor of garish fluorescent lights.
This takes the logical next step - Until now, the utilities had no convenient way to tell you how much of that electricity you pay for can go toward your lighting - Did you know some people still insist on using halogen lights??? But with this, the power company can just keep dialing the brightness down as needed, you damned flat-rate residential parasites!
Seems somebody is craving attention at any cost.
Nah, just the stock Slashdot "we hate energy efficiency" rant applied to the next generation of products.
CFLs? Every Slashdotter needs to walk into a room and instantly have 6500K light or people... will... die !
Solar panels? Take more energy to make than they'll ever produce, and it lowers property values to have free electricity.
IGPs? Sure, I only play cheesy online Flash solitaire, but I NEED A quad 7990 and an external 3KW PSU just to feed it.
Electric cars? They "had to" push it home on that show with the car guys. And Elon Musk eats Christian babies.
And LED bulbs? Still new enough that you have the uninformed Luddites bitching that they cost $60 each, despite the fact that you can now buy them for under $20 regularly and around $10 on sale - Still pretty damned expensive, but in the "worth it" range for the handful of lights you use the most.
Google, an advertising/marketing company, puts out an OS for phones and tablets and gives it away for free and then allows users access to a repository system where free apps and games are often supplied... for free.
You've missed one important part of that equation...
Yes, Google gives all that stuff away in the hopes of making money on advertising revenue. But advertising to people who really don't want it (to the point they would actively block it) costs money.
The evil marketing firms of the world can still survive in a world with AdBlock et al... They just need to cast a more narrow net - Target those who, for whatever reason (old? stupid? Researchers studying the behavior of bottom-feeders in a shrinking ecosystem?) don't block ads - And leave the rest of us the hell alone.
The real problem with "micro"-transactions comes from every goddamned site that tries them, doing their best to aggregate them back into macro (or at least normal) transactions.
From site-specific microcurrencies - usually one dime or penny per unit - That you can only spend in multiples of 50 (aka "$5.00") or 500 (aka "$5.00") respectively, to tip jars that refuse to process under a buck or five, just about every site out there that takes "micro" payments refuses to actually take micro payments. And they lose money as a result.
Yes, guys, I would send you a few cents - maybe up to a buck if I really, really like what you do - To view your content, if I like it and can do so anonymously and friction-free. I won't, however, send you a Lincoln to read about your recent experience with an obnoxious Wallyworld cashier, no matter how funny you consider yourself.
Who the hell modded this rant as insightful?
Offhand, I would guess mostly adult professionals completely sick of having our sleep cycle disrupted "for the chiiiiiildren" so the helicopters can feel better about dropping their snowflakes off at a busy intersection to wait half an hour for the arrival of a specifically road-rage-inducing yellow transport.
The fact is that road accidents, particularly to pedestrians, are less likely in daylight than in darkness.
Better solution - The school day only lasts six hours; children (especially adolescents) tend to have a sleep cycle lagged by 2-3 hours vs the adult population; So... Start school later, don't fuck with the clocks themselves.
Children walk to school early in the morning. The brighter outside it is, the better parents feel
Fuck how parents feel. The kids don't really care.
And I don't give a damn about the candy industry or the amount of light on Halloween, either. We, as a society, need to move beyond pandering to the whims of these "helicopter" parents turning their "precious and unique snowflakes" into a generation of helpless losers unable to grasp the idea of "don't stand in the road" and "don't get into the van" and "don't believe Mr. Timmons when he says he has a roll of dimes in his pocket for you".
And if you take this as humor, I feel sorry for you, you've already gone too far over to "their" side.
And what about those of us who enjoy the evening? Who enjoy sunsets and dusk, and would like some time afterwards? There are those who have decent access to more (semi-)rural areas as well, who would like to enjoy the stars without it getting too late.
:)
As a night-owl, I would honestly prefer the sun rise at 6am every day, and damn the rest of the milestones (noon/dusk/mid-night).
I do my best work in the evening, I always have to fight myself to go to bed, I hate waking up, etc. But I find it much easier get my sleepy ass out of bed after the sun has come up than before - To the point that for my alarm clock (at least in the winter), I actually use a "dawn simulator", which means a really bright lamp that turns on over the course of half an hour. A lot of people with SAD use those and claims it helps; I don't actually get SAD, I just find it massively easier to wake up after sunrise, simple as that.
So... Keep enjoying the evening - I do too! But we can enjoy it in the dark just as well.
Does that include the IP addresses of the 20 million visitors they will get over the next 48 hours for appearing on the Slashdot FP?
203 billion pieces of mail, the vast majority of which is 1oz envelopes.
Bzzzt..
First of all, the USPS delivered 160 billion total items last year. It would seem your 203B comes from 2008 (page 5), so I'll use that year's data for the rest of this response. Of that 202.7 billion, it breaks down as:
17.5% (35.4B) "real" first-class items (stamp-bearing single item)
1.6% (3.3B) packages
27.8% (56.3B) spam (first-class presorted, 91.7B total first class minus 35.4B single-item gives 56.3B )
48.9% (99.1B) outright crap (3rd class advertising)
4.2% (8.6B) other - periodicals? (they don't break this out here but do elsewhere)
Now for fun, let's compare that to how they describe their revenue (page 4), shall we? (For 2012 instead of 2008, but we can likely assume the overall ratios tend to hold steady over time):
44.5% ($28.9B) first class mail (including presorted which actually costs less than "real" first class, but they don't separate that out for revenue)
25.2% ($16.4B) advertising mail
17.8% ($11.6B) shipping
2.6% ($1.7B) periodicals
See a trend there? Almost a perfectly inverse relationship between "I want it" and "how much the post office charges to send it". And you wonder why I won't cry to see them cease to exist?
You DO know you can opt out of junk mail right?
You DO know you can't opt out of mail from companies with whom you have an "existing business relationship", right? So that order you placed with LL Bean 15 years ago makes you their bitch forever. And, the DMA "opt out" doesn't actually work like the telemarketer opt-out list - It has essentially no teeth. Want proof? Send in a new opt-out request (even while having one already in effect) - You'll get a huge batch of crap from "member" companies taking advantage of a verified-good address in the "60-90 days" it "may" take before your request goes into effect. And I say that from personal experience.
or did you just complain about something you actual know nothing about so you can be a whiny bitch?
You mean, kinda like responding to Slashdot posts just to sound clever while spouting factually incorrect nonsense? So, do you work for the APWU, or just belong to it as a member?
The post office can be completely self-sustaining. The problem is that the idiots in congress are forcing it to pre-fund pensions for the next 75 years.
An unfunded pension liability merely externalizes the risk of default - Company goes under, bam, you have tens of thousands of retirees and near-retirees on welfare until the mercy of death gives them back the dignity they worked fair 'n square for. Forcing a company (including the post office) to fully fund their pension system does not count as frivolous political posturing, but sound and necessary fiscal policy.
That said, we can certainly agree that congress deserves its share of the blame, for example by not allowing the USPS to raise rates, close offices, and shorten their hours as needed. Though even then, as I said, the USPS brings me nothing but crap; I would honestly prefer it go under even without any financial savings.
Why exactly do we want to find yet another way to siphon money from the public to maintain an obsolete business model that, as far as I can tell, exists solely to deliver snail-spam to my door?
I have no objection to paying $4.99 to FedEx for the once or twice each year I actually send something in a #10 envelope... As long as it means the literally hundreds useless catalogs (plus credit card and life insurance offers, plus political fliers in even-numbered years) I get per year need to do the same - By which I mean, hopefully that would effectively end unsolicited commercial/charitable/political mail.
How about dropping digital cable entirely and just ripping from analog channels?
It worked for TiVi et al for a decade before digital cable became common.
Trash.. I think the courts can probably figure out a distinction between waste and actual speech.
Clearly, they cannot - Because phone books do not count as fucking speech.
Sick of this "corporate speech" BS. We can't have campaign finance reform because CORPORATE SPEECH. Now we can't opt out of phonebooks because CORPORATE SPEECH. But try to protest at the G8 summit, and you'll get to see just how much HUMAN speech matters anymore.
We need to end the rights of incorporation now. We can come up with a short list of powers granted to companies to facilitate doing business, but when real live natural born humans take a back seat to fictional entities, time to change the laws before things start burning.
Not all people are alike, no matter how much specialists struggle to classify them and put them in little boxes.
:)
The fact that your bad posture hasn't hurt you - yet - Doesn't mean the same basic laws of physics don't apply to you as apply to the rest of us.
Your skull should normally "balance" atop your spine. Any deviation from that requires the active use of muscles to offset the imbalance; and if you maintain such a position for long periods of time, eventually those muscles get tired. At that point, you start risking damage as secondary muscles try to do the same job much less efficiently.
Perhaps you have exceptionally strong/enduring neck muscles. Perhaps you've just gotten lucky so far. Perhaps you just haven't hit 30 yet and still consider your body indestructible. Doesn't matter - It doesn't hurt you to have an ergonomically-friendly work area, so why the hell would you deliberately make it otherwise?
Amazing fact: Elon is not the only person involved in SpaceX.
Go Clyde Johnson, Junior AP Entry Clerk! Make those valves your bitch, dude!
Please Please Please don't have a commercial spaceflight disaster this soon. I want to GTFO(ff) of this planet before I die. That sure as hell won't happen as long as we have nothing but NASA crippled by the same useless monkeys in charge who can't even balance the budget.
Shit, even bugs can balance a budget (ie, ants storing food for the winter). Our leaders can't pull off a feat mere bugs can do.
Go Elon! Make those valves your bitch, dude!
I offer evil ass Slashdot trolls $10,000.00 to disprove MyCleanPC Creation Principle
Okay...
UnMyCleanPc.
Ha! Pay up, bitch! Don't make me send Frost Pister after your ass, sucka!
And those troubling effects persisted long after I took the gear off. That’s because my brain had adjusted to an unnatural view, so it took a while to readjust to normal vision.
Hey, I'd rather have the direct neural link too. But seriously? Whoever manages to come up with a truly viable wearable "augmented reality" system wins. Why the hell would I want to take it off?
Let my brain adjust to having my left higher and further to the left! If I really need to react on a moment's notice to a loss of the HUD image - I'll close one eye.
Pssst - I'm white. And regardless of the "real" boogieman, we didn't directly blow Russians up, nor they, us - Instead,we took turns blowing up various pawns in Southeast Asia (not really known for its caucasian population).
Well, if you end social security, you'd better redirect a substantial part of those funds to police forces and a lot of additional jails, because criminal activity related to poverty and despair will then skyrocket.
:)
LOL... You just made me picture an army of grannies on a looting spree.
Radically cutting spending everywhere is a good idea in theory, but in practice, I'm afraid it won't work so smoothly.
Agreed - And I understand that we'd realistically need to phase out something as onerous as SS over the next 50 years or so. But the sooner we start, the better; and beginning the phase-out while it still has a book surplus (I say "book" because virtually the entirety of OASI - All 2.6 trillion dollars, currently sits in US treasuries - aka a loan from our government to itself that helps hide yet one more part of the "real" deficit) will hurt less than starting once it "officially" runs out of money.
Hell, the government could even pull off a bit of "free" money from that deal - Allow people to opt out entirely, at the expense of losing your existing contributions. Anyone under 35 would take that in a heartbeat, since they don't ever expect to collect a dime anyway once the Boomers finish draining the pot.
Your payroll tax increased 2% on Jan 1, if you work.
Key point there, if you work. Guess how those mysteriously unaffected by the payroll tax increase tend to vote?
Follow the money.
/ Not a Republican.
Hate to say it, but the House Republicans take the majority of the blame for this one.
Wait - So the whitehouse bluffed and the Republicans called them on it, and you blame the Republicans?
IANAR, but just no. Both sides may take the blame for failing to come up with real cuts, but the full burden of responsibility for the sequester rests solidly on Barry's broad shoulders.
Cut it all - Starting with congresscritter pensions and benefits (don't get distracted by their salaries, just a drop in the bucket compared to their real cost).
The problem with this whole sequester (aside from not going nearly far enough) comes from the whitehouse thinking themselves clever for having made an uncallable bluff - From assuming that the Republicans would never let the military suffer any real cuts. Well, whaddya know, in a surprising show of sanity, the larger principle of getting government spending under control trumped even their favorite special interest.
Yeah, we (by which I mean fiscal conservatives, not to imply I would ever voluntarily associate myself with the GOP) would all rather see the real problems addressed - End social security, end security theater, and cut HHS and the DOD in half (at least). But this current farce? Hey, better than nothing, but at least it counts as a start.
Cut. It. All!