I understand your negative to anything sounding as socialism, coming from the perfect example of a country that tried to implement it but utterly failed. However, many countries have different levels of state participation in the economy — and for many, it has worked great.
Even countries as mine, not faring by far as well as North European ones, have gained a lot from the socialist traits in our politico-economical history. I won't detail into the importance of the land communalization in Mexico between the late 1920s and 1990s, but it drastically helped level out wealth distribution. During the same period, the State owned all strategic industries (petroleum, electricity, water distribution, etc.) and, while Mexico faced and faces huge problems (corruption being among the most endemic), it was during that period that we had our most stable economy in history — Stable because for 40 years there was no big crisis (as we now face every 5-10 years), and growing at stable rates around 7% each year.
Finally, on the point of state employed people, specially public universities (as it directly implies me and the plan of life I have): This is –again– different in each place. In Mexico, the only entities I'd really call "universities" are the public ones. My university alone is responsible for over 50% of scientific research in the country, and #2 (Instituto Politécnico Nacional) is also public. Yes, we do have lots of private universities, but they are more what I'd call schools — they focus on capacitation, not in knowledge generation.
And yes, as an academic, quoting you, I don't actually produce any of the wealth that allowed the real taxes to be paid in the first place. However, we produce the knowledge that is needed for the country to function, to advance and to form an industry that actually produces that wealth.
I am with you on this. As long as it does not become money, stock options are just a strange form of paper — And you are in general not taxed on owning paper, unless it has some strange markings in it that make it money. Still, back to my post: I am paying more for my house not because the taxes increased, but because my house's value increased. And, as it increased, it crossed a threshold, placing me in a higher tax bracket. So, yes, I paid a lot more than a couple of years ago — Do I like it? No. Is it fair? Yes.
are now the primary suspect of breaking into Syria's government networks. You obviously have access to privileged information. Prepare to be arrested...
...On your next visit to Damascus, that is.
I'd love to be exempt from paying taxes...
on
The Zuckerberg Tax
·
· Score: 1
But even given the high evasion in my country, I'm sure I'd live far worse if we didn't pay taxes. My taxes run my country. They pay for the public security, for the basic infrastructure. Yes, they also pay the salaries of the people in government, and many people say those salaries are too high — But guess what? I work at a public university, so those taxes pay my salary as well! If you want to know how a country where no taxes are paid, take a look at life in Somalia, where there is no effective government. Or to any country poor enough to still have a barter-based economy, or with most families living off their own produce, effectively cut off the "evil" government control. Yes, not being an USA citizen makes me not have to blush when I proclaim I am a Socialist. I prefer paying more taxes, and the taxes being steeper as I earn more money. That's the only way to get a fairer society.
Don't you have real estate taxes in the USA?
on
The Zuckerberg Tax
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
My house has increased in value over the last 10 years. In Mexico, we pay taxes for all of our real estate - And the tax for my house increased quite a bit (way more than the percentage of appreciation - Yes, it has some brackets on which it jumps). Of course I didn't like it, but of course I believe it is fair.
Somebody in a third-world country. Seriously. I am an academician in UNAM (Mexico; largest Spanish-speaking university in the world). A beginning academician as myself earns about US$1500 a month, and the best payed academicians in UNAM will get... Up to 10 times as much. I published a book this year (granted, a book of research results on Free Software and similar communities, not a textbook), and it took me approx. ¼ of my time for 18 months. The university does not pay me royalties on sold copies (and that's part of the reason I negotiated for it to be a free CC-BY-SA book). If the prize is not too distant from a year worth of qualified job income... Hell, it's a very interesting job to take!
What were the four slogans of IngSoc? War is Peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is power. Democrats and Republicans are opposed to each other. My dear US-ians... You live under a single party system. Yes, a bit disguised as two parties, but so close to each other that they mean exactly the same in the end. And there are more parties, sure, but the system is crafted so that none of them will ever achieve anything. With a 48% vs. 47.5% (or whatever...) effective support, nothing will ever change, while it gives the illusion of balance and competition. Which is completely bogus. The USA is about as democratic as the countries whose political systems it has subverted over the past century.
I got my first job teaching computing in a high school, for the 15-18 year old groups. And yes, I probably got that job because the school's administration thought it was a dummy subject: I was 20 year old by then, and had absolutely no knowledge on how to stand in front of a group of 20 bored kids and keep their attention. That was, yes, the main reason that made me fail as a teacher.
However, there is another important reason: I was told to teach them Office software. The problem was, I was only mildly familiar with it. Yes, I had done some nice stuff with a word processor - but my Excel knowledge was very low. And it took me quite a bit to understand what was Powerpoint all about.
Yes, today we have loads of Office teachers. But they came from *somewhere*, didn't they? And if the curriculum changes, probably it will not be them who are best suited to teach - They might be better off as office assistants as a general case. There are people with qualifications needed to teach basic programming. Some of them might be frustrated current teachers trying to teach something more interesting than the way to color Excel cells.
An important part of school is exposing us to subjects we would not even consider otherwise, and give us the most basic concepts in them. As a programmer, of course, I thank for the 12 years worth of Mathematics I got, plus many concepts that were given to me in Physics, Chemistry... But I do not reject learning grammar, literature, history or biology. As many geeks (and unlike most of the rest) I hated physical education, but as an adult have to recognize its importance. We had several subjects, all of them mandatory, I would not properly know how to translate into English.
If you had the vocation to be a painter or a psychologist, would you sue the State for forcing you to spend 12 years of your life learning about an hour of every working day to mathematics? Do you think it's a waste to teach not only the numbers and basic arithmetic, but the basis of abstraction, probability, etc.? I know I could perfectly live without knowing the basics of Mexican history, but my understanding of the society that surrounds me would be much impaired.
Like mathematics, programming shows a different way of thinking, and is probably the most efficient way to get kids to understand some mental processes. I have long argued for the need of such a move, and hope many other countries follow the UK's lead. Come to think of it, were it not for learning Logo at school at age 10, I could have never discovered my vocation.
LaTeX is strongly geared towards producing printed documents. It has a very comprehensive (and beautiful!) amount tweaks, heuristics, and mostly everything is overridable. And while it can be used as the basis for non-printed outputs (i.e. latex2html makes nice structured, internally linked documents), it's not its main goal.
Reworking a LaTeX document to be used as the source for an epub (believe me, I have been looking at it from some different angles for a physical book we recently printed) is... Far from trivial.
I... Do think it has a point. No, I'm not that well versed in contemporary literature. But (being a native Spanish speaker), I have truly enjoyed, since my highschool years, reading Gabriel García Márquez and Mario Vargas Llosa (by then, not yet a Nobel winner, but he got awarded anyway years later).
I include José Saramago here, although he wrote in Portuguese, it's a close enough language to Spanish to suppose his style is clearly preserved. Saramago is among the hardest to read, as he completely twists grammar – Often, he clusters tens of sentences together, spanning several pages between periods, and –of course– almost never stopping for a paragraph break. However, his prose is amazingly easy and beautiful to read.
I read Tolkien a long time ago (The Hobbit when I was 15, the LoTR trilogy at 18 — I'm 35 now). I read them both in English, and I'm sure my English was by far not as fluent as today, but I remember truly enjoying his prose. Some other person said he takes too much time describing the places — That's one of the things I really *did* like. Grabbing, imagination-inducing – And showed me I have a much deeper English (at least, reading comprehension) than what I thought.
The Pirate Party's agenda is clear: Their main aim is to work against the IP nonsense. The name clearly says that's the main policy they are pushing to change. No, I would not say that just "taking interest" in other issues makes them crap and corrupt (as legislators, they'd have to take a stand on different issues and vote on all kinds of topics), but it would dillute their strong standing. I live in Mexico. Formally, there is a national Pirate Party organization - AFAICT, it's just a couple of enthusiasts, but they are not formally registered with the authorities or hold any political activities. I don't know how their campaign is carried out in European countries where they _do_ have representation, but I'd be very surprised if they had other points in their agenda. That means, "we will participate in the debates, and should hear and reflect our voters' opinions on other topics, but they are not central for us". I hope they keep it that way.
Most attacks come from trusted machines, either from people wanting to use their rightful access level to get more data than what they should (or modify data they should not be allowed to), or by bots crafted to infect internal users' workstations and rob their credentials. No, you shoul not trust them just because they are internal anymore than what you should trust me.
I don't do consulting anymore. When I did, many clients arrived to me as I was a well-known figure in my country's free software circle – Mostly as a speaker and as a security-conscious sysadmin, somewhat (although by far not so much) as a programmer. I was able to set the costs for my work because people arriving to me didn't just want a random firewall salesperson – They wanted me to set up their perimetral security.
Nowadays, I don't do consulting because I have a job at the university that allows me to be freer, schedule things my way, do what interests me. How did I get this job? Same thing: I showed I knew my lines way beyond what a resume can do it. I showed the projects I worked with.
Were it not for free software, I could not have had access to the tools I used and learnt with. And I could not contribute to projects. And I'd have a shittier job.
I had to get a retina scan and my 10 fingerprints taken to get a US visa. I am Mexican, and I understand those requirements are the same for all countries that don't enter the visa waiver program.
I consider my books basically sacred. I never underline or write on their borders, unlike many people.
I do a lot of note-taking with my (regular, 3G, keyboarded) Kindle. It has really changed my way to interact with a book - So much that it even prompted me to write a program (or do you prefer the Debian package?) to be able to more easily use my annotations from the computer.
Is there proof you did this earlier? Did you file a patent on your Infinite Monkey Generator? If so, you can sue his sorry ass goodbye and MAKE MONEY FAST!!!!1!11
What users expect from a device that looks and smells like a tablet is touch-screeny, with animations, with kewl effects, where you can rotate and the screen elegantly redraws itself. And, I'm sorry, you just will not see a fast e-ink screen. It's just a very different thing, with a very different purpose.
PDFs are printed page descriptions. An e-reader has very different constraints and logic. An ideal ebook is way closer to simplified HTML than to a PDF.
But still - Whatever you can get in HTML, it's almost trivial to convert to the venerable MOBI format. I have not needed to generate EPUB, although I understand it's a very similar process.
You have the military operating in your country, shooting at criminals. When you have the military operating inside your own country, there is NO rule of (civil) law, only martial law.
Wrong. There has been no declaration of martial law or of guarantees exception. The military are ilegally operating on the streets. And it is not something we just see and sigh - there are many initiatives pointing out this cannot happen in a country meant to be ruled by the law and not by the whim of the governing crew. Of course, if the president has the guts to call this a war, with all it entails, there will be a justification of having the military openly operating in the streets. But the president has reiterated we are not in a state of war.
Whether this is real or not... is a long subject. Of course I believe some areas of the country are in an open, hostile, multi-sided war. But the military has to follow a command - and that command has not yet been formally given.
As for the "decapitate the enemy" point... Both in your country (at least, in its wars) and in mine, it has been shown again and again that it does not work the way you describe. The only way to defuse a hostile force of would-be-civilians who enter a probably-deadly fight (be it for religion, for ideals, for money or for power) is to attack what leads to those armies' formation. Leaders are expendable. Yes, they are very important, and they are the masterminds of all attacks and all that... But you there's always a next leader for a formed group.
There are many points about your message that need correcting.
First, Mexico is not a poor country - It is a country full of social inequities. That might help you understand the problem a bit better. We have very wealthy people. The world's richest person, Carlos Slim (who made most of his fortune as the leading telecommunications provider in Latin America), is Mexican and has always lived here. I grew up among a very wealthy group, and I often felt I was quite poor - Yes, until I found out that even that way I (son of an University teacher and an artist) was still in the most fortunate economic group. In my office there are people who get 1/10th of my salary, and 10 times as much - And I work in the public sector (just imagine how deeper the differences might be in a private business).
Second, we cannot just go out and bomb a house because there's a druglord living there. That's clearly illegal. Yes, it might be what you expect in occupied countries, but that's completely unacceptable in a place where there is (or there is supposed to be) a law. Criminals must be aprehended, tried, and only after that, punished.
Third, and I think this is the main point: The problem is structural. The problem is not the five or six (or twenty or whatever) top people of the largest cartels. The thing is that, if the country does not give a viable way to survive with dignity to a large amount of its population... This will happen again and again. Kill a druglord, two will fight each other to death. With their armies, of course, and recruiting more people along the way. Yes, that's part of the (clearly failed) strategy of our (illegitimate!) president Calderón: Go fight them, go kill them. The results? In the previous presidency (2000-2006), we had around 2000 people dead because of drug-related violence. In the five years since then... 50,000. How long can they keep thinking it's the way out?
Gun posession is not a God-given right anywhere in the world. I am a Mexican, I don't have a gun, I don't have a gun license, nobody I know has one, and I'd never be interested in one.
And even if I got one, it would "only" be useful for smaller weapons, never for what I have seen in seemingly minor shops across the border.
Because nobody in my country would like to see US troops in. If you want something that unites drug cartels and government fighting for a common target, you have the answer there.
Want to stop this bloodshed in Mexico? Do something about drug rings in the US. Because here we have, yes, the chaos about territorial disputes, routes control... But it's all about getting the drugs to the other side. How come no note-worthy news ever reach us about the US capturing a drug lord in your country? Don't tell me it's because they don't exist.
Of course, we have the micro-scale drug dealers, and they are not Sisters of Mercy either. But our main problem is drug traffic, where the amounts are high. High enough to fund your own army.
Slashdot Mirror
I understand your negative to anything sounding as socialism, coming from the perfect example of a country that tried to implement it but utterly failed. However, many countries have different levels of state participation in the economy — and for many, it has worked great.
Even countries as mine, not faring by far as well as North European ones, have gained a lot from the socialist traits in our politico-economical history. I won't detail into the importance of the land communalization in Mexico between the late 1920s and 1990s, but it drastically helped level out wealth distribution. During the same period, the State owned all strategic industries (petroleum, electricity, water distribution, etc.) and, while Mexico faced and faces huge problems (corruption being among the most endemic), it was during that period that we had our most stable economy in history — Stable because for 40 years there was no big crisis (as we now face every 5-10 years), and growing at stable rates around 7% each year.
Finally, on the point of state employed people, specially public universities (as it directly implies me and the plan of life I have): This is –again– different in each place. In Mexico, the only entities I'd really call "universities" are the public ones. My university alone is responsible for over 50% of scientific research in the country, and #2 (Instituto Politécnico Nacional) is also public. Yes, we do have lots of private universities, but they are more what I'd call schools — they focus on capacitation, not in knowledge generation.
And yes, as an academic, quoting you, I don't actually produce any of the wealth that allowed the real taxes to be paid in the first place. However, we produce the knowledge that is needed for the country to function, to advance and to form an industry that actually produces that wealth.
I am with you on this. As long as it does not become money, stock options are just a strange form of paper — And you are in general not taxed on owning paper, unless it has some strange markings in it that make it money.
Still, back to my post: I am paying more for my house not because the taxes increased, but because my house's value increased. And, as it increased, it crossed a threshold, placing me in a higher tax bracket. So, yes, I paid a lot more than a couple of years ago — Do I like it? No. Is it fair? Yes.
are now the primary suspect of breaking into Syria's government networks. You obviously have access to privileged information. Prepare to be arrested...
But even given the high evasion in my country, I'm sure I'd live far worse if we didn't pay taxes.
My taxes run my country. They pay for the public security, for the basic infrastructure. Yes, they also pay the salaries of the people in government, and many people say those salaries are too high — But guess what? I work at a public university, so those taxes pay my salary as well!
If you want to know how a country where no taxes are paid, take a look at life in Somalia, where there is no effective government. Or to any country poor enough to still have a barter-based economy, or with most families living off their own produce, effectively cut off the "evil" government control.
Yes, not being an USA citizen makes me not have to blush when I proclaim I am a Socialist. I prefer paying more taxes, and the taxes being steeper as I earn more money. That's the only way to get a fairer society.
My house has increased in value over the last 10 years. In Mexico, we pay taxes for all of our real estate - And the tax for my house increased quite a bit (way more than the percentage of appreciation - Yes, it has some brackets on which it jumps). Of course I didn't like it, but of course I believe it is fair.
Somebody in a third-world country.
Seriously. I am an academician in UNAM (Mexico; largest Spanish-speaking university in the world). A beginning academician as myself earns about US$1500 a month, and the best payed academicians in UNAM will get... Up to 10 times as much. I published a book this year (granted, a book of research results on Free Software and similar communities, not a textbook), and it took me approx. ¼ of my time for 18 months. The university does not pay me royalties on sold copies (and that's part of the reason I negotiated for it to be a free CC-BY-SA book).
If the prize is not too distant from a year worth of qualified job income... Hell, it's a very interesting job to take!
What were the four slogans of IngSoc?
War is Peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is power. Democrats and Republicans are opposed to each other.
My dear US-ians... You live under a single party system. Yes, a bit disguised as two parties, but so close to each other that they mean exactly the same in the end. And there are more parties, sure, but the system is crafted so that none of them will ever achieve anything. With a 48% vs. 47.5% (or whatever...) effective support, nothing will ever change, while it gives the illusion of balance and competition. Which is completely bogus.
The USA is about as democratic as the countries whose political systems it has subverted over the past century.
I got my first job teaching computing in a high school, for the 15-18 year old groups. And yes, I probably got that job because the school's administration thought it was a dummy subject: I was 20 year old by then, and had absolutely no knowledge on how to stand in front of a group of 20 bored kids and keep their attention. That was, yes, the main reason that made me fail as a teacher.
However, there is another important reason: I was told to teach them Office software. The problem was, I was only mildly familiar with it. Yes, I had done some nice stuff with a word processor - but my Excel knowledge was very low. And it took me quite a bit to understand what was Powerpoint all about.
Yes, today we have loads of Office teachers. But they came from *somewhere*, didn't they? And if the curriculum changes, probably it will not be them who are best suited to teach - They might be better off as office assistants as a general case. There are people with qualifications needed to teach basic programming. Some of them might be frustrated current teachers trying to teach something more interesting than the way to color Excel cells.
An important part of school is exposing us to subjects we would not even consider otherwise, and give us the most basic concepts in them. As a programmer, of course, I thank for the 12 years worth of Mathematics I got, plus many concepts that were given to me in Physics, Chemistry... But I do not reject learning grammar, literature, history or biology. As many geeks (and unlike most of the rest) I hated physical education, but as an adult have to recognize its importance. We had several subjects, all of them mandatory, I would not properly know how to translate into English.
If you had the vocation to be a painter or a psychologist, would you sue the State for forcing you to spend 12 years of your life learning about an hour of every working day to mathematics? Do you think it's a waste to teach not only the numbers and basic arithmetic, but the basis of abstraction, probability, etc.? I know I could perfectly live without knowing the basics of Mexican history, but my understanding of the society that surrounds me would be much impaired.
Like mathematics, programming shows a different way of thinking, and is probably the most efficient way to get kids to understand some mental processes. I have long argued for the need of such a move, and hope many other countries follow the UK's lead. Come to think of it, were it not for learning Logo at school at age 10, I could have never discovered my vocation.
LaTeX is strongly geared towards producing printed documents. It has a very comprehensive (and beautiful!) amount tweaks, heuristics, and mostly everything is overridable. And while it can be used as the basis for non-printed outputs (i.e. latex2html makes nice structured, internally linked documents), it's not its main goal.
Reworking a LaTeX document to be used as the source for an epub (believe me, I have been looking at it from some different angles for a physical book we recently printed) is... Far from trivial.
I... Do think it has a point. No, I'm not that well versed in contemporary literature. But (being a native Spanish speaker), I have truly enjoyed, since my highschool years, reading Gabriel García Márquez and Mario Vargas Llosa (by then, not yet a Nobel winner, but he got awarded anyway years later).
I include José Saramago here, although he wrote in Portuguese, it's a close enough language to Spanish to suppose his style is clearly preserved. Saramago is among the hardest to read, as he completely twists grammar – Often, he clusters tens of sentences together, spanning several pages between periods, and –of course– almost never stopping for a paragraph break. However, his prose is amazingly easy and beautiful to read.
I read Tolkien a long time ago (The Hobbit when I was 15, the LoTR trilogy at 18 — I'm 35 now). I read them both in English, and I'm sure my English was by far not as fluent as today, but I remember truly enjoying his prose. Some other person said he takes too much time describing the places — That's one of the things I really *did* like. Grabbing, imagination-inducing – And showed me I have a much deeper English (at least, reading comprehension) than what I thought.
The Pirate Party's agenda is clear: Their main aim is to work against the IP nonsense. The name clearly says that's the main policy they are pushing to change. No, I would not say that just "taking interest" in other issues makes them crap and corrupt (as legislators, they'd have to take a stand on different issues and vote on all kinds of topics), but it would dillute their strong standing.
I live in Mexico. Formally, there is a national Pirate Party organization - AFAICT, it's just a couple of enthusiasts, but they are not formally registered with the authorities or hold any political activities. I don't know how their campaign is carried out in European countries where they _do_ have representation, but I'd be very surprised if they had other points in their agenda. That means, "we will participate in the debates, and should hear and reflect our voters' opinions on other topics, but they are not central for us".
I hope they keep it that way.
Most attacks come from trusted machines, either from people wanting to use their rightful access level to get more data than what they should (or modify data they should not be allowed to), or by bots crafted to infect internal users' workstations and rob their credentials. No, you shoul not trust them just because they are internal anymore than what you should trust me.
I have an incentive to free my code: Reputation.
I don't do consulting anymore. When I did, many clients arrived to me as I was a well-known figure in my country's free software circle – Mostly as a speaker and as a security-conscious sysadmin, somewhat (although by far not so much) as a programmer. I was able to set the costs for my work because people arriving to me didn't just want a random firewall salesperson – They wanted me to set up their perimetral security.
Nowadays, I don't do consulting because I have a job at the university that allows me to be freer, schedule things my way, do what interests me. How did I get this job? Same thing: I showed I knew my lines way beyond what a resume can do it. I showed the projects I worked with.
Were it not for free software, I could not have had access to the tools I used and learnt with. And I could not contribute to projects. And I'd have a shittier job.
I had to get a retina scan and my 10 fingerprints taken to get a US visa.
I am Mexican, and I understand those requirements are the same for all countries that don't enter the visa waiver program.
...And I love it.
I consider my books basically sacred. I never underline or write on their borders, unlike many people.
I do a lot of note-taking with my (regular, 3G, keyboarded) Kindle. It has really changed my way to interact with a book - So much that it even prompted me to write a program (or do you prefer the Debian package?) to be able to more easily use my annotations from the computer.
We would all surely hate to see coffee prices go up as it becomes the new super-biodiesel. Maybe we would have to fall back to drinking gasoline?
Is there proof you did this earlier? Did you file a patent on your Infinite Monkey Generator? If so, you can sue his sorry ass goodbye and MAKE MONEY FAST!!!!1!11
What users expect from a device that looks and smells like a tablet is touch-screeny, with animations, with kewl effects, where you can rotate and the screen elegantly redraws itself. And, I'm sorry, you just will not see a fast e-ink screen. It's just a very different thing, with a very different purpose.
No, what is difficult is to read the goddamn PDF.
PDFs are printed page descriptions. An e-reader has very different constraints and logic. An ideal ebook is way closer to simplified HTML than to a PDF.
But still - Whatever you can get in HTML, it's almost trivial to convert to the venerable MOBI format. I have not needed to generate EPUB, although I understand it's a very similar process.
Wrong. There has been no declaration of martial law or of guarantees exception. The military are ilegally operating on the streets. And it is not something we just see and sigh - there are many initiatives pointing out this cannot happen in a country meant to be ruled by the law and not by the whim of the governing crew. Of course, if the president has the guts to call this a war, with all it entails, there will be a justification of having the military openly operating in the streets. But the president has reiterated we are not in a state of war.
Whether this is real or not... is a long subject. Of course I believe some areas of the country are in an open, hostile, multi-sided war. But the military has to follow a command - and that command has not yet been formally given.
As for the "decapitate the enemy" point... Both in your country (at least, in its wars) and in mine, it has been shown again and again that it does not work the way you describe. The only way to defuse a hostile force of would-be-civilians who enter a probably-deadly fight (be it for religion, for ideals, for money or for power) is to attack what leads to those armies' formation. Leaders are expendable. Yes, they are very important, and they are the masterminds of all attacks and all that... But you there's always a next leader for a formed group.
There are many points about your message that need correcting.
First, Mexico is not a poor country - It is a country full of social inequities. That might help you understand the problem a bit better. We have very wealthy people. The world's richest person, Carlos Slim (who made most of his fortune as the leading telecommunications provider in Latin America), is Mexican and has always lived here. I grew up among a very wealthy group, and I often felt I was quite poor - Yes, until I found out that even that way I (son of an University teacher and an artist) was still in the most fortunate economic group. In my office there are people who get 1/10th of my salary, and 10 times as much - And I work in the public sector (just imagine how deeper the differences might be in a private business).
Second, we cannot just go out and bomb a house because there's a druglord living there. That's clearly illegal. Yes, it might be what you expect in occupied countries, but that's completely unacceptable in a place where there is (or there is supposed to be) a law. Criminals must be aprehended, tried, and only after that, punished.
Third, and I think this is the main point: The problem is structural. The problem is not the five or six (or twenty or whatever) top people of the largest cartels. The thing is that, if the country does not give a viable way to survive with dignity to a large amount of its population... This will happen again and again. Kill a druglord, two will fight each other to death. With their armies, of course, and recruiting more people along the way. Yes, that's part of the (clearly failed) strategy of our (illegitimate!) president Calderón: Go fight them, go kill them. The results? In the previous presidency (2000-2006), we had around 2000 people dead because of drug-related violence. In the five years since then... 50,000. How long can they keep thinking it's the way out?
Gun posession is not a God-given right anywhere in the world. I am a Mexican, I don't have a gun, I don't have a gun license, nobody I know has one, and I'd never be interested in one.
And even if I got one, it would "only" be useful for smaller weapons, never for what I have seen in seemingly minor shops across the border.
Because nobody in my country would like to see US troops in. If you want something that unites drug cartels and government fighting for a common target, you have the answer there.
Want to stop this bloodshed in Mexico? Do something about drug rings in the US. Because here we have, yes, the chaos about territorial disputes, routes control... But it's all about getting the drugs to the other side. How come no note-worthy news ever reach us about the US capturing a drug lord in your country? Don't tell me it's because they don't exist.
Of course, we have the micro-scale drug dealers, and they are not Sisters of Mercy either. But our main problem is drug traffic, where the amounts are high. High enough to fund your own army.