Massachusetts has shown how to do it. Now all it takes is realization of what can be done and applying it elsewhere.
That's no mystery: just attract a highly educated workforce, and education, health, income, life expectancy, etc. will all follow. Unfortunately, getting the top 5% of the population to move to your state is not something every state can do.
Obviously the U.S. misses a strategy to bring enough education to rural areas and less wealthy people.
You got the causation backwards. It's not that Singapore causes its families to become educated, it's that families that value education and are looking for a place to succeed move to those places. And if you look at those nations, they actually spend far less per pupil than the US. They also have greater economic freedoms, less regulation, and far lower taxes than the US. Top income tax rates in Singapore and Hong Kong are 20% and 15% respectively, vs 55% in the US.
So, you're right, there are lessons we can learn from these studies, just not the lessons you seem to be implying.
As you can see, about 60% is Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, unemployment/welfare, and interest. That leaves 40% for everything else. There is no way social programs are smaller than corporate subsidies.
Re farm subs - the original stuff worked, to an extent, and the incentives weren't bad.
Such government programs tend to work in the short term; but they fail in the long term as people learn how to game the system.
_Some_ are healthier, wealthier, and better educated
You're trying to spin this as if some ended up better off at the expense of others and that's wrong. A lot of people are better off, and some just stayed where they were. The net result is more inequality. That inequality reflects a larger inequality among the value of different workers and professions to the economy.
Aaargh. If you look at income distribution alone, the fact of the shrinking middle class ought to be a sufficient sign.
Yeah, a significant part of the middle class (the green peak) disappeared; it became wealthy (in part just because of demographics), but even the low end of the income distribution shifted upwards slightly. So the US as a whole is better off than it used to be and no income group profited at the expense of other groups.
I don't mean to show a false sense of impending disaster. We're living inside one already, there's no impending, unless you wish to count all the jobs that will be lost due automation alone in the next thirty years. What will we do with all the jobless?
Oh my god, not that tired old Luddite argument. Automation doesn't produce joblessness; it never has and it never will. What will happen? They'll get cleaner, better jobs than they had before, either making more of the stuff they were making before, or making stuff nobody had time to make before. Automation makes us all better off.
I dunno, man; I think it'd be good to sit around a table and follow the numbers - where does money come from and where does it go, and what is it doing for whom as it flows. This is really what Congress is supposed to be doing. Of late in particular they're not doing so well at it.
No, it is not the job of Congress to direct money around the economy or make sure everybody gets a share; we don't have central planning in the US.
Ah, crap, I'm not good at this, I can but try, even so poorly. The numbers are there. YMMV.
The numbers are clear, and they don't support your views.
But you seem to be arguing what you're uncomfortable with, rather than the argument at hand.
You haven't made an "argument". You claimed that the Declaration of Independence showed that religion is the basis of US law. But the Declaration of Independence has no legal power, it wasn't intended by its authors as the basis of US law, religion cannot be used as the basis of court decisions in the US, and it is not used to justify the rights in the US Constitution. There are many legal systems in the world that are rooted in religion, and they differ in many of these points from ours. Hence your proposition that "religion forms the basis of US laws" is wrong.
Why would a utilitarian answer, even potentially, be the objectively valid one?
There are two kinds of ethics: descriptive and normative. The utilitarian answer is descriptively true since it coincides with what we know from evolutionary biology about why people are the way they are. So in that sense, it is "objectively valid" and it is also relevant to the discussion. Normatively, there are many possible ethical systems. But whatever system you choose, the burden is on you to explain what its relationship to objective reality is and why many real people choose to behave differently from your system. (Personally, I'm not a strict utilitarian, I simply explained to you why the species concept is relevant.)
I can [argue] instead that
Well, then do. So far, you haven't argued for something, you have merely repeatedly stated that you don't like other people's assumptions or basis of reasoning. You're not going to change anybody's mind without actually starting to make an argument for a position.
"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights..."
That's the Declaration of Independence, a declaration to a Christian nation and potentate. Using a generic term like "creator" seems a reasonable compromise to convey the idea. The argument isn't rooted in Christian theology at all, it is self-evident, and the "creator" might just refer to deism, not Christianity.
How is that... remotely relevant?
Because evolution happens at the level of species, and a priori, chimps are a species that we are in competition with (of course, they lost long ago). Human social structures, empathy, justice, and morality in human relationships are built into all of us through evolution (our "creator") because they are useful. So, if you want to extend notions of human justice and morality to other species, you need to make a utilitarian argument for that. People have done that, and it roughly ends up where we are today: we outlaw animal cruelty (because of the bad effect it has on people), but we don't outlaw the killing or use of animals for scientific purposes, labor, or food. I don't see any reason to revisit that.
I'm sure they also didn't recognize blacks as being equal to whites
Yes, and science disproved racism convincingly: human "race" is not a biologically meaningful concept. In contrast, the differences between chimps and humans are biologically real and significant.
Times change, so does thinking on what's right and wrong.
Feel free to argue that it is wrong to treat chimps in certain ways (I certainly would). But that argument has to start with the biological fact that chimps are a different species from humans. And you have to recognize that if you make that argument for hominid animals, why you wouldn't also make it for non-hominid animals, like food animals.
If a corporation can be a person, why can't a chimp?
Corporate personhood derives from the personhood of the people who constitute the corporation. Corporations have free speech rights because their share holders have, and the share holders (by virtue of buying shares in the corporation) have chosen the corporation to speak for them. When they want the corporation to stop speaking for them, they sell their shares.
Why shouldn't groups of people be able to get together and voice their political opinions in the form of a corporation?
There is no justification for a separate status for one type of hominid over another within the context of Naturalism.
That's wrong. Chimps, for example, are a different species; chimps and humans can't have offspring. Their brains are obviously quite different. They are also vicious and aggressive animals.
It will be interesting to see how the courts address this from a secular standpoint, since the rationale for "rights" is grounded in a wholly theistic construct, at least in the U.S.
US laws are based on Enlightenment philosophy, not religion. As such, they are a mix of social contract, classical liberalism, and human rights. Enlightenment philosophers generally recognized that animals could suffer and that humans had some moral responsibility towards them, but did not generally recognize them as persons.
Second, I'm not talking about entitlements, but direct subsidies. But even when entitlements are included (unlike many, I distinctly exclude Social Security - OASDI - because they're insurance policy payouts), direct corporate payments exceed the rest.
Whether you think you're entitled to Social Security as an "insurance policy payout" is fiscally irrelevant; insurance companies are supposed to have reserves for their payouts, the federal government for practical purposes does not. Social security is mandatory government spending, with the same effect as all the others.
Looking at the budget, I find your statement preposterous. Care to put some specific numbers on it? How much money does the federal government subsidize corporations by according to you? How big is the rest of the budget according to you?
Direct payments to individual subsistence farmers locked into a particular cash crop - often tobacco - in an effort to help them move to rotation, intercropping, and moving to other cash crops - were extended to corporate farming, where a corporate owner could retire on payments to not grow something.
But that's exactly the problem with most of these supposed social and welfare programs for individuals: they rarely work as intended, because they create the wrong incentives. Farm subsidies contributed to the destruction of small farms, just like rent control contributes to the destruction of the rental market, etc.
The universal desire of parents for their children to have at least the practical opportunity to have a better life was last realized for the post-war generation - that's a measure of how low we've sunk, by allowing a situation where the profits of productivity can be siphoned off by the few and not re-invested in the common enterprise.
That's not true either. Despite all the bad government policies, we're healthier, wealthier, and better educated than we have ever been before. And we're economically and socially still far better off than almost any other nation on earth.
The irony about arguments like your is that you sort of start off right, but then you put up a false picture of impending disaster and use that to justify the policies that make our lives worse in the first place, while not proposing to do anything about the corporate welfare and subsidies.
Besides how many civil liberties violations have been caught on discrete "life recorders" versus perfectly normal phones?
You argue that Google Glass is bad because private individuals shouldn't be allowed to record others surreptitiously and without their consent. If that's the principle you want to establish, then there won't be any surreptitious recording, with any device. Legally, there won't be any distinction between a phone strapped to your head (Google Glass), one strapped to your wrist, or one in your pocket.
Mass surveillance is not a good thing. Just because security cameras exist all over the place, that doesn't make google glass somehow OK. And the lack of support for google glass doesn't make all those security cameras OK either.
The security cameras aren't going away, ever: governments and corporations will keep them, they have the power to. Furthermore, they want to control who and what gets recorded, so they want to strip private individuals of their ability to record, keeping that power to themselves. And you are helping them with their agenda.
Establishing a social norm in which every private individual goes around with a camera strapped to their face that they can enable and disable whenever they like is a good thing, because it provides a necessary counterbalance to a corporate and governmental surveillance society that is invariably coming anyway.
Most surveillece camera footage donesn't leave the shop.
Surveillance is frequently outsourced, analyzed, and recorded off site these days.
It's also obvious when someone is using a cellphone camera, compact or DSLR.
It may be obvious when you do it, but taking photos without drawing attention is one of the primary skills of good photographers. Furthermore, even if you notice, there is nothing you can do about it anyway.
That changes if people are uploading video to the internet 24/7 (something which glass doesn't do yet).
Google Glass doesn't do it because that's not its purpose; it's a digital assistant that happens to have a camera and is deliberately recognizable. It makes a lousy life recorder, although it is reasonably good as a POV snapshot camera, a useful tool in its own right. Many people are using life recorders already, and you don't even notice them because, unlike Google Glass, they are designed for that purpose, have a long battery life, and are invisible.
Both Google Glass and life recorders are important tools for safeguarding our civil liberties against corporate and governmental abuses, because for the first time, widespread multi-POV documentation is possible, and even unskilled photographers have the tools to take pictures of police or criminals without having to face getting beat up for it. But instead of welcoming that, you want to destroy it.
Or, the person does realise and is focussing first on the worst offender.
Both the restaurant owner and you don't understand the technology and are being manipulated. Your fixation and hatred of Google Glass threatens an important tool for individuals to protect their liberties and rights while at the same promoting the agenda of the people wanting to establish a corporate and governmental surveillance society and monopoly. You're on the side of the bad guys.
Even on private property? If you're a provate property owner you have the right to eject someone for photographing if you wish.
The restaurant patrons aren't the property owners, so they have no special rights. And property owners do not have a right not to be photographed, all they can do is tell people to leave. Not the same thing.
ImOuttaHere incorrectly blamed Reagan for de-funding scientific research and I gave data showing that he is wrong. I also pointed out that it is mandatory spending and entitlement programs that are squeezing out scientific research and other discretionary spending, a simple budgetary fact.
Last I looked, direct subsidies to corporations exceeded those to individuals by almost a factor of two.
Nearly half of our federal budget are Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid. Other welfare programs and direct payments to individuals bring that up to far above 50% And those programs are growing and squeezing out discretionary spending, including scientific research. Those are the facts. Sorry if you don't like them.
Nevertheless, governmental subsidies to corporations are economically very harmful and should be stopped. They traditionally occur in the form of agricultural subsidies, oil subsidies, bailouts, and simple pork spending. It is an outrage that instead of stopping this corporate cronyism, as he promised, Obama added even more to it: more bailouts, stimulus spending, alternative energy subsidies, and transportation subsidies. The irony is that Democrats often dress up their corporate subsidies as "social spending", like they did with health care reform, and people like you believe that b.s.
All corporate subsidies should be eliminated. After that, we need to find a sustainable way of financing a basic safety net for all Americans. Unfortunately, Democrats have turned out to be just as unwilling to do that as Republicans. Until there is a fundamental change in one party or the other and people like you get over their blind partisanship, we continue to head for fiscal and economic disaster.
... so how do your comments square with the following?
I objected to your claim that the "US de-funded scientific research, because Ronald Raygun privatized many government functions." In fact, the US did not de-fund scientific research under Reagan, as the AAAS data shows, so you are wrong. Feel free to dislike Reagan for other reasons (personally, I think he was an idiot), but blaming him for things he didn't do is not helpful because then you miss the real culprits.
The real threat to US scientific dominance comes from entitlement programs, mandatory spending, and interest on the federal debt, because those are squeezing out discretionary spending.
(The Chemical Engineering News article names some departments that were cut, but that's not inconsistent with the AAAS data. The Chemical Engineering statement is either sloppy or deliberately misleading.)
The US has been *reducing* the amount spent on "trying to fix social problems" (or anything that primarily benefits everyday citizens, for that matter) for at least 3 decades now, not increasing it!
That's completely wrong. In fact, we are spending a larger and larger portion of our budget on social programs:
During Reagan and Bush, science funding increased while during Clinton and Obama it decreased. The decrease in the Obama years has been particularly sharp, mostly because Obama wasted so much money on politically popular social programs and bailouts. It's the welfare state that's killing public funding for science, not privatization.
No, still absurd, stupid, and self-centered if they ask you to remove anything reasonable
That's the problem: it is not reasonable to ask me to remove a useful digital device that's may be an integral part of my day-to-day life just because you have an irrational fear that I might be using it for clandestinely recording you. The fear is irrational because if I actually wanted to record you clandestinely, there would be much better and cheaper ways to do it than sticking a big Android device on my face.
(I'm actually not a Google Glass user myself, but even my phone can take pictures of you without you noticing.)
But Glass is just too much a wild factor in that you can't tell if it's recording or not, so you basically have to assume it it
The guy taking a picture from halfway across the room with his DSLR will capture you in exquisit detail. Someone with a pen camera in his jacket or a life recording camera around their neck will. Anyone with one of dozens of phone and camera models with a 90 deg angle between lens and screen will give you no hint they are taking a picture, as will people using any of the dozens of WiFi controllable cameras. All of that will end up in the cloud sooner or later.
And even if you can tell that I'm taking a picture of you, what were you planning on doing about it?
Just wait. Right now, there are battery life and bandwidth limitations to 24/7 surveillance.
Google Glass is primarly for information display and interaction, with the option of intentional photography and video. For constant recording, people use life recording devices. They have no display, are completely invisible, and already have a battery life that lasts an entire day. You're barking up the wrong tree.
and time for the public to adjust to submitting to the next level of all-pervasive corporate control.
Corporations, police, and other people who tend to infringe on your rights would like nothing more than to be able to ban personal recording devices, because it prevents people from documenting their abuses, while they themselves can record and conduct surveillance as much as they want and use it against you.
What you are actually doing is supporting "all-pervasive corporate control".
But now Google gets views of me, from a dozen angles, to process through their face recognition algorithms and record into the giant tracking DB in the Cloud.
So do Apple, Microsoft, Flickr, and Facebook, the NSA, D-Link, and lots of other companies and organizations. They get it from public and private surveillance cameras, phone cameras, digital cameras, and many other sources.
Anybody who takes an "intentional" picture with a modern D-SLR in that restaurant (and the owner allows that) will end up with a much better unintentional snapshot of you in the background than Google Glass can ever produce. And they will likely upload it to Google, Apple, Microsoft, Flickr, and/or Facebook, and any of those companies run face recognition and keep track of it in their giant tracking DBs in the Cloud. Yes, Apple, your favorite computer company, does the same thing with your pictures.
You are so fixated on your irrational hatred of Google that you don't realize what's actually going on around you.
It would be trivial to extend such laws to the case of being filmed without consent as well. All we need is the will to do it, ie elect politicians with a spine, or at least a fear for their own privacy.
Yes, it would be trivial. And what would the result be? When politicians, government officials, police, private security guards, business owners, and others violate your rights, you can't document it.
Politicians don't need "a spine" to make private photography illegal, they are already itching to do it, and people like you are furthering their effort to create a government surveillance state by wanting to give the state a surveillance monopoly.
You do have rights over commercial use of photographs of you, and there are some restrictions on publishing, but that's all. You can fantasize all you want, but you do not have a right not to be photographed, period.
It's not about whether the restaurant owner can exclude people wearing Google Glass; of course he has that right because they are not a protected class.
But patrons of the restaurant still don't have an expectation of privacy; it is legal for other patrons to photograph them for as long as they are on premises, just as it is legal for the restaurant owner to film them clandestinely on his surveillance cameras (which he probably does).
And if people use a wearable camera and the restaurant owner doesn't notice and doesn't exclude them, there are no further consequences for anybody.
Slashdot Mirror
That's no mystery: just attract a highly educated workforce, and education, health, income, life expectancy, etc. will all follow. Unfortunately, getting the top 5% of the population to move to your state is not something every state can do.
You got the causation backwards. It's not that Singapore causes its families to become educated, it's that families that value education and are looking for a place to succeed move to those places. And if you look at those nations, they actually spend far less per pupil than the US. They also have greater economic freedoms, less regulation, and far lower taxes than the US. Top income tax rates in Singapore and Hong Kong are 20% and 15% respectively, vs 55% in the US.
So, you're right, there are lessons we can learn from these studies, just not the lessons you seem to be implying.
http://www.heritage.org/index/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_tax_rates
Yes, they can do that, thanks to government-created monopolies.
Yes, if we turn into Sweden, Singapore, or the UK, we can make single payer work as well as they do. The price is far too high.
The budget is here:
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/b/bc/Fy2007spendingbycategory.png/800px-Fy2007spendingbycategory.png
As you can see, about 60% is Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, unemployment/welfare, and interest. That leaves 40% for everything else. There is no way social programs are smaller than corporate subsidies.
Such government programs tend to work in the short term; but they fail in the long term as people learn how to game the system.
You're trying to spin this as if some ended up better off at the expense of others and that's wrong. A lot of people are better off, and some just stayed where they were. The net result is more inequality. That inequality reflects a larger inequality among the value of different workers and professions to the economy.
Here is a comparison of income distributions:
http://www.cato-unbound.org/sites/cato-unbound.org/files/old/images/burkfig2.jpg
Yeah, a significant part of the middle class (the green peak) disappeared; it became wealthy (in part just because of demographics), but even the low end of the income distribution shifted upwards slightly. So the US as a whole is better off than it used to be and no income group profited at the expense of other groups.
Oh my god, not that tired old Luddite argument. Automation doesn't produce joblessness; it never has and it never will. What will happen? They'll get cleaner, better jobs than they had before, either making more of the stuff they were making before, or making stuff nobody had time to make before. Automation makes us all better off.
No, it is not the job of Congress to direct money around the economy or make sure everybody gets a share; we don't have central planning in the US.
The numbers are clear, and they don't support your views.
You haven't made an "argument". You claimed that the Declaration of Independence showed that religion is the basis of US law. But the Declaration of Independence has no legal power, it wasn't intended by its authors as the basis of US law, religion cannot be used as the basis of court decisions in the US, and it is not used to justify the rights in the US Constitution. There are many legal systems in the world that are rooted in religion, and they differ in many of these points from ours. Hence your proposition that "religion forms the basis of US laws" is wrong.
There are two kinds of ethics: descriptive and normative. The utilitarian answer is descriptively true since it coincides with what we know from evolutionary biology about why people are the way they are. So in that sense, it is "objectively valid" and it is also relevant to the discussion. Normatively, there are many possible ethical systems. But whatever system you choose, the burden is on you to explain what its relationship to objective reality is and why many real people choose to behave differently from your system. (Personally, I'm not a strict utilitarian, I simply explained to you why the species concept is relevant.)
Well, then do. So far, you haven't argued for something, you have merely repeatedly stated that you don't like other people's assumptions or basis of reasoning. You're not going to change anybody's mind without actually starting to make an argument for a position.
That's the Declaration of Independence, a declaration to a Christian nation and potentate. Using a generic term like "creator" seems a reasonable compromise to convey the idea. The argument isn't rooted in Christian theology at all, it is self-evident, and the "creator" might just refer to deism, not Christianity.
Because evolution happens at the level of species, and a priori, chimps are a species that we are in competition with (of course, they lost long ago). Human social structures, empathy, justice, and morality in human relationships are built into all of us through evolution (our "creator") because they are useful. So, if you want to extend notions of human justice and morality to other species, you need to make a utilitarian argument for that. People have done that, and it roughly ends up where we are today: we outlaw animal cruelty (because of the bad effect it has on people), but we don't outlaw the killing or use of animals for scientific purposes, labor, or food. I don't see any reason to revisit that.
Yes, and science disproved racism convincingly: human "race" is not a biologically meaningful concept. In contrast, the differences between chimps and humans are biologically real and significant.
Feel free to argue that it is wrong to treat chimps in certain ways (I certainly would). But that argument has to start with the biological fact that chimps are a different species from humans. And you have to recognize that if you make that argument for hominid animals, why you wouldn't also make it for non-hominid animals, like food animals.
Corporate personhood derives from the personhood of the people who constitute the corporation. Corporations have free speech rights because their share holders have, and the share holders (by virtue of buying shares in the corporation) have chosen the corporation to speak for them. When they want the corporation to stop speaking for them, they sell their shares.
Why shouldn't groups of people be able to get together and voice their political opinions in the form of a corporation?
That's wrong. Chimps, for example, are a different species; chimps and humans can't have offspring. Their brains are obviously quite different. They are also vicious and aggressive animals.
US laws are based on Enlightenment philosophy, not religion. As such, they are a mix of social contract, classical liberalism, and human rights. Enlightenment philosophers generally recognized that animals could suffer and that humans had some moral responsibility towards them, but did not generally recognize them as persons.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Animal_rights#John_Locke.2C_Immanuel_Kant
Whether you think you're entitled to Social Security as an "insurance policy payout" is fiscally irrelevant; insurance companies are supposed to have reserves for their payouts, the federal government for practical purposes does not. Social security is mandatory government spending, with the same effect as all the others.
Looking at the budget, I find your statement preposterous. Care to put some specific numbers on it? How much money does the federal government subsidize corporations by according to you? How big is the rest of the budget according to you?
But that's exactly the problem with most of these supposed social and welfare programs for individuals: they rarely work as intended, because they create the wrong incentives. Farm subsidies contributed to the destruction of small farms, just like rent control contributes to the destruction of the rental market, etc.
That's not true either. Despite all the bad government policies, we're healthier, wealthier, and better educated than we have ever been before. And we're economically and socially still far better off than almost any other nation on earth.
The irony about arguments like your is that you sort of start off right, but then you put up a false picture of impending disaster and use that to justify the policies that make our lives worse in the first place, while not proposing to do anything about the corporate welfare and subsidies.
You argue that Google Glass is bad because private individuals shouldn't be allowed to record others surreptitiously and without their consent. If that's the principle you want to establish, then there won't be any surreptitious recording, with any device. Legally, there won't be any distinction between a phone strapped to your head (Google Glass), one strapped to your wrist, or one in your pocket.
The security cameras aren't going away, ever: governments and corporations will keep them, they have the power to. Furthermore, they want to control who and what gets recorded, so they want to strip private individuals of their ability to record, keeping that power to themselves. And you are helping them with their agenda.
Establishing a social norm in which every private individual goes around with a camera strapped to their face that they can enable and disable whenever they like is a good thing, because it provides a necessary counterbalance to a corporate and governmental surveillance society that is invariably coming anyway.
Surveillance is frequently outsourced, analyzed, and recorded off site these days.
It may be obvious when you do it, but taking photos without drawing attention is one of the primary skills of good photographers. Furthermore, even if you notice, there is nothing you can do about it anyway.
Google Glass doesn't do it because that's not its purpose; it's a digital assistant that happens to have a camera and is deliberately recognizable. It makes a lousy life recorder, although it is reasonably good as a POV snapshot camera, a useful tool in its own right. Many people are using life recorders already, and you don't even notice them because, unlike Google Glass, they are designed for that purpose, have a long battery life, and are invisible.
Both Google Glass and life recorders are important tools for safeguarding our civil liberties against corporate and governmental abuses, because for the first time, widespread multi-POV documentation is possible, and even unskilled photographers have the tools to take pictures of police or criminals without having to face getting beat up for it. But instead of welcoming that, you want to destroy it.
Both the restaurant owner and you don't understand the technology and are being manipulated. Your fixation and hatred of Google Glass threatens an important tool for individuals to protect their liberties and rights while at the same promoting the agenda of the people wanting to establish a corporate and governmental surveillance society and monopoly. You're on the side of the bad guys.
The restaurant patrons aren't the property owners, so they have no special rights. And property owners do not have a right not to be photographed, all they can do is tell people to leave. Not the same thing.
ImOuttaHere incorrectly blamed Reagan for de-funding scientific research and I gave data showing that he is wrong. I also pointed out that it is mandatory spending and entitlement programs that are squeezing out scientific research and other discretionary spending, a simple budgetary fact.
Nearly half of our federal budget are Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid. Other welfare programs and direct payments to individuals bring that up to far above 50% And those programs are growing and squeezing out discretionary spending, including scientific research. Those are the facts. Sorry if you don't like them.
Nevertheless, governmental subsidies to corporations are economically very harmful and should be stopped. They traditionally occur in the form of agricultural subsidies, oil subsidies, bailouts, and simple pork spending. It is an outrage that instead of stopping this corporate cronyism, as he promised, Obama added even more to it: more bailouts, stimulus spending, alternative energy subsidies, and transportation subsidies. The irony is that Democrats often dress up their corporate subsidies as "social spending", like they did with health care reform, and people like you believe that b.s.
All corporate subsidies should be eliminated. After that, we need to find a sustainable way of financing a basic safety net for all Americans. Unfortunately, Democrats have turned out to be just as unwilling to do that as Republicans. Until there is a fundamental change in one party or the other and people like you get over their blind partisanship, we continue to head for fiscal and economic disaster.
I objected to your claim that the "US de-funded scientific research, because Ronald Raygun privatized many government functions." In fact, the US did not de-fund scientific research under Reagan, as the AAAS data shows, so you are wrong. Feel free to dislike Reagan for other reasons (personally, I think he was an idiot), but blaming him for things he didn't do is not helpful because then you miss the real culprits.
The real threat to US scientific dominance comes from entitlement programs, mandatory spending, and interest on the federal debt, because those are squeezing out discretionary spending.
(The Chemical Engineering News article names some departments that were cut, but that's not inconsistent with the AAAS data. The Chemical Engineering statement is either sloppy or deliberately misleading.)
That's completely wrong. In fact, we are spending a larger and larger portion of our budget on social programs:
http://www.aaas.org/spp/rd/Hist/BudGDP.jpg
http://thf_media.s3.amazonaws.com/infographics/2012/10/SR-fed-spending-numbers-2012-p2-2-chart-3_HIGHRES.jpg
Science, infrastructure, and other spending that benefits everyday citizens is being squeezed out by ineffective welfare programs.
Nice theory, but doesn't agree with reality.
http://www.aaas.org/spp/rd/fy2013/hist13pAgy.png
During Reagan and Bush, science funding increased while during Clinton and Obama it decreased. The decrease in the Obama years has been particularly sharp, mostly because Obama wasted so much money on politically popular social programs and bailouts. It's the welfare state that's killing public funding for science, not privatization.
That's the problem: it is not reasonable to ask me to remove a useful digital device that's may be an integral part of my day-to-day life just because you have an irrational fear that I might be using it for clandestinely recording you. The fear is irrational because if I actually wanted to record you clandestinely, there would be much better and cheaper ways to do it than sticking a big Android device on my face.
(I'm actually not a Google Glass user myself, but even my phone can take pictures of you without you noticing.)
The guy taking a picture from halfway across the room with his DSLR will capture you in exquisit detail. Someone with a pen camera in his jacket or a life recording camera around their neck will. Anyone with one of dozens of phone and camera models with a 90 deg angle between lens and screen will give you no hint they are taking a picture, as will people using any of the dozens of WiFi controllable cameras. All of that will end up in the cloud sooner or later.
And even if you can tell that I'm taking a picture of you, what were you planning on doing about it?
Google Glass is primarly for information display and interaction, with the option of intentional photography and video. For constant recording, people use life recording devices. They have no display, are completely invisible, and already have a battery life that lasts an entire day. You're barking up the wrong tree.
Corporations, police, and other people who tend to infringe on your rights would like nothing more than to be able to ban personal recording devices, because it prevents people from documenting their abuses, while they themselves can record and conduct surveillance as much as they want and use it against you.
What you are actually doing is supporting "all-pervasive corporate control".
So do Apple, Microsoft, Flickr, and Facebook, the NSA, D-Link, and lots of other companies and organizations. They get it from public and private surveillance cameras, phone cameras, digital cameras, and many other sources.
Anybody who takes an "intentional" picture with a modern D-SLR in that restaurant (and the owner allows that) will end up with a much better unintentional snapshot of you in the background than Google Glass can ever produce. And they will likely upload it to Google, Apple, Microsoft, Flickr, and/or Facebook, and any of those companies run face recognition and keep track of it in their giant tracking DBs in the Cloud. Yes, Apple, your favorite computer company, does the same thing with your pictures.
You are so fixated on your irrational hatred of Google that you don't realize what's actually going on around you.
Yes, it would be trivial. And what would the result be? When politicians, government officials, police, private security guards, business owners, and others violate your rights, you can't document it.
Politicians don't need "a spine" to make private photography illegal, they are already itching to do it, and people like you are furthering their effort to create a government surveillance state by wanting to give the state a surveillance monopoly.
You do have rights over commercial use of photographs of you, and there are some restrictions on publishing, but that's all. You can fantasize all you want, but you do not have a right not to be photographed, period.
Those are a waste of money.
Did I say anywhere that people have a right to publish those photos? No.
People can take photos anywhere in public spaces and you have no right to interfere. But there are reasonable limitations on publishing.
It's not about whether the restaurant owner can exclude people wearing Google Glass; of course he has that right because they are not a protected class.
But patrons of the restaurant still don't have an expectation of privacy; it is legal for other patrons to photograph them for as long as they are on premises, just as it is legal for the restaurant owner to film them clandestinely on his surveillance cameras (which he probably does).
And if people use a wearable camera and the restaurant owner doesn't notice and doesn't exclude them, there are no further consequences for anybody.