The reason you don't see kids playing in the street is that, while the world is no more dangerous, in the present if you are a parent and let your kid play outside unsupervised, and something happens to them you will be held up on coast to coast 24/7 new as a bad parent and you will be doomed.
So in self preservation no parent will allow their child out of their sight less social stigma destroy them. This what happens in the world of the 24/7 internet enabled new cycle.
Of course there real problem isn't that they can't be retrained, it's that they don't want to put in the cycles necessary to be retrained.
These are often the same folks who wasted their time during that lengthy period of free education they were afforded early in life.
Because Uncle Joe was in the union they managed to get a cushy job in some establishment that afforded them money for doing some brainless job that did not require them to learn anything. Now that job has been automated and they are completely unwilling to learn anything new. They be all to ready to throw some wooden shoes into the mechanism though.
The employment is not meaningful if it is not necessary. If it can be automated than it is not meaningful to do it the hard way.
Life is an always changing backdrop to our activities. Originally everyone had to hunt for their own food, make their own fire, and find their own cave. Culture, which itself is always evolving, along with civilization has made it easier for people by allow us to specialize. But as Heinlein said people are generalists. Specialization is for insects. We should always be ready for the next evolution. The next change.
If we teach our children that they can stop learning when they graduate and that they should expect to get a job an keep it for the rest of their life, we are doing them no favors.
You talk as if the "U.S. public" is a thing. The reality is that just because something is good for you does not mean it is good for me. Ever decision, private, public, political, cultural, creates winners and losers. Sometimes individuals are neither because the decision doesn't effect them at all. Other times the losers deserve to lose. My self interest is not necessarily the same as yours, and conversely your self-interest may go against mine.
Individualism in the U.S. is important, but collectivism is also important, but traditionally that collectivism was expressed through private collectives, not political parties. So people express their collectivism through their religion, clubs, and other organizations.
No one demonizes social structures. Many people simply feel that government bureaucracy is not always the best method to solve all problems.
Argentina had an aircraft carrier. It spent the war in port because they were afraid British submarines would sink it.
Aircraft carriers are not really platforms meant for normal intensity warfare between equals. During heavily asymmetrical warfare they're great because they can sit way off shore beyond the defending country's ability to strike and send wave after wave of aircraft against them for days, weeks, months. In really high intensity warfare, like a civilization ending world war a carrier's job is to get all planes off the deck. What happens to the ship (and it's crew) after that is tactically immaterial. But in a war between two more of less equal combatants a carrier is a terrible weapon. Its hugely expensive. The only way to protect it is to have an entire fleet of ships which create a 200 mile exclusion zone around it where any non-friendly ship is diverted or sunk. And the enemy can't have any submarines.
In the real world only the first situation has obtained since the end of WWII. In WWII dozens of carriers on both sides were sunk, usually in battles where fleets were hundreds of miles from each other.
Let me repeat myself. Such barriers to information have only existed for a few hundred years at most. Before that most people lived in the same place and everyone new everything about everyone. True, it was possible to move to try to get away from that knowledge, but in most cases knowing who you could trust and who you couldn't was and is a valuable thing.
Further, in most cases when someone needed to deal with someone they didn't know, they required a letter of introduction, references, which could be checked, and other records.
This is the natural order of things, not the "privacy by obscurity" that the last few centuries allowed to happen.
My right to know who I am dealing with, whether I can trust them, if they are safe to be around trumps their right to obscurity.
Privacy is a very modern concept. When most people lived in small towns privacy was non-existent. This was one reason people could do business based on a person's word. If someone gave their word then reneged you knew they were not trustworthy. That was shared far and wide and no one would do business with them.
It wasn't until more modern times that you needed an iron clad contract to make someone keep their word under governmental force. This became necessary because some amount of "privacy by obscurity" came into existence due to increase mobility and population. Make no mistake though. Most people still never traveled more than a few miles from where they were born and there everyone knew who was "the good guys and who was the bad guys" as a cop friend of my father use to say about people around the old neighborhood.
So now technology has merely caught up with the way it's been for most of human history and those who have taken advantage of "privacy by obscurity" for the last couple of generations want to continue to be able to do that, to the detriment of those who this information would protect.
The EU has the right to pass any kind of law their sovereign citizens will put up with. They have no right to try to extend those laws beyond their own borders. If they don't want their citizens to have access to information people in the rest of the world have let then put up a firewall to prevent their citizens from accessing the information. It's worked so well for China.
No one has the right to rewrite history. You are responsible for your actions. We all make mistakes. Own them, don't try to hide them.
I have a right to information that protects me, my family, my business, my country. You do not have a right to keep that information from me so that you can continue to act badly.
People deserve a second chance. But contingent on the second chance is that other people realize that it's a second chance. A second chance is a product of mercy, not ignorance.
Will it result in a larger number of defendants being held in pre-trial detention or will it result in an explosion of defendants just not showing up to court? Or both?
It's an interesting experiment and a great reason for why the U.S. needs to stay a collection of sovereign states that can do things their own way.
I personally think it will be a disaster. Particularly for poor and minority defendants. I hope I'm wrong.
So we're suppose to get bent out of shape because bounty hunters are using people's location data to catch people who have jumped bail? Do you even know what bounty hunters do? They go after people who have borrowed money to post bail and then don't show up for their court date.
Typically this results in the bail bondsman losing the money they put up. But don't be fooled, no bail bondsman loans money without collateral. Usually this is the accused house, or their parent's house. Or the business of the friend they fooled into taking a chance on them. So this means the bondsman puts a lien against the house or the business or whatever and if they don't get their money the poor dupe who trusted the bail jumper loses their house or business or whatever.
Tell me again how these wanted fugitives, who are wanted by the police, the court system, and often not just the victims of their crimes but the 'friends' and family who have helped them out, have a right to privacy.
The real problem you guys are having is that where it mattered he told the truth.
Make NATO countries pay more of the cost of defense and pay the amount they promised.
Rebuild Navy to 350 ships
Role back Obama's executive orders on Cuba, DACA, etc
Renegotiate NAFTA
Take no salary
Address Veteran's problems
Slash federal regulations
Lifetime bans on ex-white house officials becoming foreign lobbyists (sorry Bill).
Nominate pro-life and pro-natural law juristys to the supreme court.
Pull out of the Paris Accords.
Cancel the Iran deal
Move the U.S. Embassy to Jerusalem
Stop TPP
Raise tariffs on countries that manipulate their currency to get an unfair advantage (China)
Basically he's keeping his campaign promised. That's what has you so nervous. He's a politician who actually tries to do what he said he'd do. Since he's doing the opposite of what Clinton would have done that makes him the opposite of the least evil candidate and more like the best candidate. In may ways better than any of the other Republicans who would have promised the same stuff, but done none of it.
Loss of public trust for Washington or politicians in general is a boat that sailed a long time ago. It is ridiculous to say Trump is destroying public trust in our political institutions. It is particularly absurd to make that statement and invoke the name of Hillary Clinton, who was so dishonest she rigged her own nomination to the detriment of Sanders, and then got caught at it because her party wasn't competent enough to secure their own mail servers.
No one cares about Trump's tax returns. If people really cared about tax returns the Clintons would be in jail. Their money laundering foundation would certainly be under scrutiny.
Legislation isn't being passed because Trump is weak. It's not being passed because, unlike the Democrats the Republican leadership doesn't blackmail and threaten their members. In the Republican party people like Cruz, Romney, and a lot of the others go their own way and the party doesn't punish them for voting their conscious or for their constituencies.
Does anyone really believe that Nancy Pelosi is speaker again for any other than she has the goods on so many people that they're afraid to vote against her? She certainly hasn't done any good for the country.
Would that be the U.S. which has the lowest rate of unemployment in their African American, Hispanic and just about everyone else since we started keeping records? Or perhaps the high stock market rate? The new businesses started?
The government was shut down because Democrats, who promised they would vote for border security 40 years ago when Reagan granted amnesty to illegals reneged on their promise and Trump's base is tired of it.
The wall is shorthand. As an object it needs to be built. As a symbol it is shorthand for the people in this country who want to address the immigration crisis rather than simply ignoring immigration laws we don't like.
The Democrats don't care about whether a wall is built or not. They just don't want to give Trump a win. As a party they are perfectly willing to allow illegal criminals to murder police officers (One of the most recent who was a legal immigrant). They are willing to allow any number of poor foreigners to die in Mexico and South America in an attempt to get to the U.S. boarder, where they are likely to be turned away, or will be exploited by criminals who will sneak them in and then further exploit them in situations which often are no more than human trafficking.
The worst thing for Democrats would be for the border to be secured and for immigration laws to be fixed. Most of the present immigration laws with stupid quotas and restrictions on people by country (read that as race/culture) were passed by Progressive Democrats in an effort to prevent Eastern Europeans, Jews and other non-WASPs from enter the U.S. in the run up to WWII. They wanted to ensure those "undesirables" didn't get into the country. The Democrats caused this problem. Like many other things they've done since the 1860's they hope people will forget what the Democrat party actually had stood for for a long time.
If Mueller had anything he would have released it before the last election. He's got nadda. He keeps going after the little fish, offering immunity or plea deals, and once he gives them finding out there's nothing the little fish have that will get him an crime under which he can indite.
Expect a report to be released in the next couple of months which shows that Trump did business with people in Russian who, low and behold did business with the Russian government. He probably did business with people who did business with the British government too, and with the U.S. government. Because when you own international businesses that's what happens. You do business with your own government, foreign governments, and people who do business with your own governments and foreign governments.
That's what happens when your run a business instead holding down a place in academia or a low level government job.
I'm absolutely sure there is stuff that the government funds that I agree with which is beyond their constitutional duty.
As an adult I accept that those areas will have to find other revenue streams should by some miracle the United States ever actually start following the constitution. And like a reasonable adult person I'm prepared to work to see that happens. The answer might be to amend the constitution to bring that activity under the responsibility of the U.S. government. Surely if it is a truly necessary and valuable contribution to the national good it should be possible to convince two-thirds of the Congress and three fourths of the states that such a thing needs to be done.
A large part of the border already has a wall, and its very effective when combined with manpower and technology. So effective that up until recently a majority of the illegal aliens entering the country did it by avoiding the wall.
The border patrol wants a wall along the rest of the border to make their job easier. No let me restate that. The border patrol wants a wall along the rest of the border to make their job possible.
Walls work, but they only work if they are manned and have technological support.
of course building a wall is only the start. We need to fix our immigration laws. I'm actually a free immigration supporter. One reason we have so many people sneaking over the border is because we make it impossible for them to come in legally. Now a small percentage of those people are people we should want to keep out. They do damage to the nation far beyond their small number, just as a single bad person can disrupt a meeting with a hundred people in it. A single bad immigrant can do a lot of damage. So we must first secure our border. Then we need to have a serious conversation about why a country built by immigrants should try to keep out all of the good hardworking people who want to come here.
Except its not one person one vote at any level of the federal government. Note that Congress also does not operate on the one person one vote premise either. In neither the House nor the senate are does every person in the U.S. get the same representation. Instead the value of their vote is entirely dependent on where they live.
Since as a U.S. citizen you are a citizen of your state first this is entirely appropriate. The U.S. is not a collection of counties, provinces or districts. It is a collection of sovereign states. That's the way the government was formed under the constitution and that is they it is administered.
The Electoral College was instituted to do exactly what it did last election. Prevent a a few high population states from dominating the national policy of the majority of other states in the federal association of sovereign states whihc is the United States.
New York and California can pass what ever loonie tune local policies they want. They must at all cost be prevented from imposing those policies on the rest of us.
The best policy the U.S. could follow is overturning the seventeenth and enforce the tenth amendment. As long as the fifteenth amendment is equally voraciously defended the overall result would be to the benefit of most.
I'd throw in abolishing the sixteenth amendment, but that would take a constitutional amendment, because congress would never vote to cut their own purse strings.
By the way the sixteenth and the seventeenth are the legacy of the last time Progressives got control of things. They the same party that segregated the Army, which had been desegregated since the end of the Civil War. You can thank Wilson for all that mess.
Debt exploded after 1980, went down slightly under Clinton (and a Republican Congress). It went back up under Bush, and then again under Obama (who controlled both houses during his first term and the senate during his second term.)
Lets just look at congress, In period since 1980 the democrat have controlled the house for 20 years. The Republicans cave controlled the house for 18 years. In the same period the Democrats have controlled the senate for 18 Years and the 22 years. It looks to me as though they are both equally culpable.
Every company that has pension liability should be paying into its employee pension funds in a manner that will not cause them to default. Congress has a particular interest in entities like the USPS because in the case of default it is reasonable to suppose they will be pressured to use taxpayer money to make up for that pension money the USPS didn't properly put aside.
This is the reason private companies have dumped pension plans for matching contributions to employee funded pensions. Since the USPS is prevented from doing that by law and union contracts it is only reasonable that they be forced to meet their pension liabilities by contributing to the pension plan of their employees.
The fact that other entities are badly managed is not a reason that USPS should be allowed to offload that liability on the taxpayers.
The big streaming companies are Disney. As soon as they launch their own streaming channel we're into what people have been saying they've wanted all along, a la carte service. To see it all you'll have to pay Disney, which will have Disney channel stuff, Star Wars, Marvel, Fox, and ABC. To get Star Trek you'll have to get CBS streaming (Yeah, I know they're dead), to get Netflix your go there, Amazon Prime you go there, NBC and Disney stuff that's R rated you go to HULU. I don't know if BBC America has a streaming service that's available for cord cutters.
So basically It'll probably cost you $159 a month to stream it all. Plus whatever your paying fro your internet connection. It will be so much better than cable.
The claim that mental hospitals were shutdown as part of the Reagan government austerity program is one of the big lies of the left.
Its true that Reagan signed the OBRA, which repealed an act passed under Carter, but Carter was the president directly before Reagan, so we're to believe that in a mere decade the mental health system became so dependent on the federal teat that it could not exist without it.
The fact is that mental hospitals existed before Carter. While I'm sure they benefited from lots of free money the expulsion of patients and the closing down of facilities has more to do with the abysmal conditions which were extant in most facilities and the public's backlash against those conditions when they became aware of them, than anything.
The failure of states and charitable institutions to address the problem also didn't help. Solutions are always best when applied locally. Putting the federal government in charge of anything that can best be handled at a local level seldom results in anything but extending the problem.
The Smithsonian was founded as a bequest to the United States by James Smithson a private British citizen. The United States government then promptly took that bequest (equivalent to $11 million dollars) and p*ssed it away.
Luckily ex-President John Quincy Adams persuaded Congress to restore the money.
So what have we learned here? The Smithsonian was never suppose to be a thing paid for by the U.S. government. In the past, as now, the best way to screw something up is to give money to the federal government so that they can do the job.
Had a competent private company had control of Smithson's bequest all of the Smithsonian's funds would be coming from private sources and their funding would never have been in jeopardy.
In some ways the Smithsonian is a the poster boy for why the federal government shouldn't be doing things.
As for the National Parks they should be self-funded by a private chartered organization. Let the people and companies that use them pay for their upkeep and maintenance. Things like ski lodges on public land, which since they are run by private companies I can guarantee they are not shut down.This would also make them shutdown proof.
Slashdot Mirror
The reason you don't see kids playing in the street is that, while the world is no more dangerous, in the present if you are a parent and let your kid play outside unsupervised, and something happens to them you will be held up on coast to coast 24/7 new as a bad parent and you will be doomed.
So in self preservation no parent will allow their child out of their sight less social stigma destroy them. This what happens in the world of the 24/7 internet enabled new cycle.
Of course there real problem isn't that they can't be retrained, it's that they don't want to put in the cycles necessary to be retrained.
These are often the same folks who wasted their time during that lengthy period of free education they were afforded early in life.
Because Uncle Joe was in the union they managed to get a cushy job in some establishment that afforded them money for doing some brainless job that did not require them to learn anything. Now that job has been automated and they are completely unwilling to learn anything new. They be all to ready to throw some wooden shoes into the mechanism though.
The employment is not meaningful if it is not necessary. If it can be automated than it is not meaningful to do it the hard way.
Life is an always changing backdrop to our activities. Originally everyone had to hunt for their own food, make their own fire, and find their own cave. Culture, which itself is always evolving, along with civilization has made it easier for people by allow us to specialize. But as Heinlein said people are generalists. Specialization is for insects. We should always be ready for the next evolution. The next change.
If we teach our children that they can stop learning when they graduate and that they should expect to get a job an keep it for the rest of their life, we are doing them no favors.
You talk as if the "U.S. public" is a thing. The reality is that just because something is good for you does not mean it is good for me. Ever decision, private, public, political, cultural, creates winners and losers. Sometimes individuals are neither because the decision doesn't effect them at all. Other times the losers deserve to lose. My self interest is not necessarily the same as yours, and conversely your self-interest may go against mine.
Individualism in the U.S. is important, but collectivism is also important, but traditionally that collectivism was expressed through private collectives, not political parties. So people express their collectivism through their religion, clubs, and other organizations.
No one demonizes social structures. Many people simply feel that government bureaucracy is not always the best method to solve all problems.
Argentina had an aircraft carrier. It spent the war in port because they were afraid British submarines would sink it.
Aircraft carriers are not really platforms meant for normal intensity warfare between equals. During heavily asymmetrical warfare they're great because they can sit way off shore beyond the defending country's ability to strike and send wave after wave of aircraft against them for days, weeks, months. In really high intensity warfare, like a civilization ending world war a carrier's job is to get all planes off the deck. What happens to the ship (and it's crew) after that is tactically immaterial. But in a war between two more of less equal combatants a carrier is a terrible weapon. Its hugely expensive. The only way to protect it is to have an entire fleet of ships which create a 200 mile exclusion zone around it where any non-friendly ship is diverted or sunk. And the enemy can't have any submarines.
In the real world only the first situation has obtained since the end of WWII. In WWII dozens of carriers on both sides were sunk, usually in battles where fleets were hundreds of miles from each other.
Let me repeat myself. Such barriers to information have only existed for a few hundred years at most. Before that most people lived in the same place and everyone new everything about everyone. True, it was possible to move to try to get away from that knowledge, but in most cases knowing who you could trust and who you couldn't was and is a valuable thing.
Further, in most cases when someone needed to deal with someone they didn't know, they required a letter of introduction, references, which could be checked, and other records.
This is the natural order of things, not the "privacy by obscurity" that the last few centuries allowed to happen.
My right to know who I am dealing with, whether I can trust them, if they are safe to be around trumps their right to obscurity.
Privacy is a very modern concept. When most people lived in small towns privacy was non-existent. This was one reason people could do business based on a person's word. If someone gave their word then reneged you knew they were not trustworthy. That was shared far and wide and no one would do business with them.
It wasn't until more modern times that you needed an iron clad contract to make someone keep their word under governmental force. This became necessary because some amount of "privacy by obscurity" came into existence due to increase mobility and population. Make no mistake though. Most people still never traveled more than a few miles from where they were born and there everyone knew who was "the good guys and who was the bad guys" as a cop friend of my father use to say about people around the old neighborhood.
So now technology has merely caught up with the way it's been for most of human history and those who have taken advantage of "privacy by obscurity" for the last couple of generations want to continue to be able to do that, to the detriment of those who this information would protect.
The EU has the right to pass any kind of law their sovereign citizens will put up with. They have no right to try to extend those laws beyond their own borders. If they don't want their citizens to have access to information people in the rest of the world have let then put up a firewall to prevent their citizens from accessing the information. It's worked so well for China.
No one has the right to rewrite history. You are responsible for your actions. We all make mistakes. Own them, don't try to hide them.
I have a right to information that protects me, my family, my business, my country. You do not have a right to keep that information from me so that you can continue to act badly.
People deserve a second chance. But contingent on the second chance is that other people realize that it's a second chance. A second chance is a product of mercy, not ignorance.
Yeah, I'm interested to see how that works.
Will it result in a larger number of defendants being held in pre-trial detention or will it result in an explosion of defendants just not showing up to court? Or both?
It's an interesting experiment and a great reason for why the U.S. needs to stay a collection of sovereign states that can do things their own way.
I personally think it will be a disaster. Particularly for poor and minority defendants. I hope I'm wrong.
We'll see though.
So we're suppose to get bent out of shape because bounty hunters are using people's location data to catch people who have jumped bail? Do you even know what bounty hunters do? They go after people who have borrowed money to post bail and then don't show up for their court date.
Typically this results in the bail bondsman losing the money they put up. But don't be fooled, no bail bondsman loans money without collateral. Usually this is the accused house, or their parent's house. Or the business of the friend they fooled into taking a chance on them. So this means the bondsman puts a lien against the house or the business or whatever and if they don't get their money the poor dupe who trusted the bail jumper loses their house or business or whatever.
Tell me again how these wanted fugitives, who are wanted by the police, the court system, and often not just the victims of their crimes but the 'friends' and family who have helped them out, have a right to privacy.
So you're alright with violent murders crossing the border as long as they don't perpetrate their violence for political reasons?
The real problem you guys are having is that where it mattered he told the truth.
Make NATO countries pay more of the cost of defense and pay the amount they promised.
Rebuild Navy to 350 ships
Role back Obama's executive orders on Cuba, DACA, etc
Renegotiate NAFTA
Take no salary
Address Veteran's problems
Slash federal regulations
Lifetime bans on ex-white house officials becoming foreign lobbyists (sorry Bill).
Nominate pro-life and pro-natural law juristys to the supreme court.
Pull out of the Paris Accords.
Cancel the Iran deal
Move the U.S. Embassy to Jerusalem
Stop TPP
Raise tariffs on countries that manipulate their currency to get an unfair advantage (China)
Basically he's keeping his campaign promised. That's what has you so nervous. He's a politician who actually tries to do what he said he'd do. Since he's doing the opposite of what Clinton would have done that makes him the opposite of the least evil candidate and more like the best candidate. In may ways better than any of the other Republicans who would have promised the same stuff, but done none of it.
Loss of public trust for Washington or politicians in general is a boat that sailed a long time ago. It is ridiculous to say Trump is destroying public trust in our political institutions. It is particularly absurd to make that statement and invoke the name of Hillary Clinton, who was so dishonest she rigged her own nomination to the detriment of Sanders, and then got caught at it because her party wasn't competent enough to secure their own mail servers.
No one cares about Trump's tax returns. If people really cared about tax returns the Clintons would be in jail. Their money laundering foundation would certainly be under scrutiny.
Legislation isn't being passed because Trump is weak. It's not being passed because, unlike the Democrats the Republican leadership doesn't blackmail and threaten their members. In the Republican party people like Cruz, Romney, and a lot of the others go their own way and the party doesn't punish them for voting their conscious or for their constituencies.
Does anyone really believe that Nancy Pelosi is speaker again for any other than she has the goods on so many people that they're afraid to vote against her? She certainly hasn't done any good for the country.
Would that be the U.S. which has the lowest rate of unemployment in their African American, Hispanic and just about everyone else since we started keeping records? Or perhaps the high stock market rate? The new businesses started?
The government was shut down because Democrats, who promised they would vote for border security 40 years ago when Reagan granted amnesty to illegals reneged on their promise and Trump's base is tired of it.
The wall is shorthand. As an object it needs to be built. As a symbol it is shorthand for the people in this country who want to address the immigration crisis rather than simply ignoring immigration laws we don't like.
The Democrats don't care about whether a wall is built or not. They just don't want to give Trump a win. As a party they are perfectly willing to allow illegal criminals to murder police officers (One of the most recent who was a legal immigrant). They are willing to allow any number of poor foreigners to die in Mexico and South America in an attempt to get to the U.S. boarder, where they are likely to be turned away, or will be exploited by criminals who will sneak them in and then further exploit them in situations which often are no more than human trafficking.
The worst thing for Democrats would be for the border to be secured and for immigration laws to be fixed. Most of the present immigration laws with stupid quotas and restrictions on people by country (read that as race/culture) were passed by Progressive Democrats in an effort to prevent Eastern Europeans, Jews and other non-WASPs from enter the U.S. in the run up to WWII. They wanted to ensure those "undesirables" didn't get into the country. The Democrats caused this problem. Like many other things they've done since the 1860's they hope people will forget what the Democrat party actually had stood for for a long time.
If Mueller had anything he would have released it before the last election. He's got nadda. He keeps going after the little fish, offering immunity or plea deals, and once he gives them finding out there's nothing the little fish have that will get him an crime under which he can indite.
Expect a report to be released in the next couple of months which shows that Trump did business with people in Russian who, low and behold did business with the Russian government. He probably did business with people who did business with the British government too, and with the U.S. government. Because when you own international businesses that's what happens. You do business with your own government, foreign governments, and people who do business with your own governments and foreign governments.
That's what happens when your run a business instead holding down a place in academia or a low level government job.
I'm absolutely sure there is stuff that the government funds that I agree with which is beyond their constitutional duty.
As an adult I accept that those areas will have to find other revenue streams should by some miracle the United States ever actually start following the constitution. And like a reasonable adult person I'm prepared to work to see that happens. The answer might be to amend the constitution to bring that activity under the responsibility of the U.S. government. Surely if it is a truly necessary and valuable contribution to the national good it should be possible to convince two-thirds of the Congress and three fourths of the states that such a thing needs to be done.
A large part of the border already has a wall, and its very effective when combined with manpower and technology. So effective that up until recently a majority of the illegal aliens entering the country did it by avoiding the wall.
The border patrol wants a wall along the rest of the border to make their job easier. No let me restate that. The border patrol wants a wall along the rest of the border to make their job possible.
Walls work, but they only work if they are manned and have technological support.
of course building a wall is only the start. We need to fix our immigration laws. I'm actually a free immigration supporter. One reason we have so many people sneaking over the border is because we make it impossible for them to come in legally. Now a small percentage of those people are people we should want to keep out. They do damage to the nation far beyond their small number, just as a single bad person can disrupt a meeting with a hundred people in it. A single bad immigrant can do a lot of damage. So we must first secure our border. Then we need to have a serious conversation about why a country built by immigrants should try to keep out all of the good hardworking people who want to come here.
Except its not one person one vote at any level of the federal government. Note that Congress also does not operate on the one person one vote premise either. In neither the House nor the senate are does every person in the U.S. get the same representation. Instead the value of their vote is entirely dependent on where they live.
Since as a U.S. citizen you are a citizen of your state first this is entirely appropriate. The U.S. is not a collection of counties, provinces or districts. It is a collection of sovereign states. That's the way the government was formed under the constitution and that is they it is administered.
Keep on spouting the Progressive line.
The Electoral College was instituted to do exactly what it did last election. Prevent a a few high population states from dominating the national policy of the majority of other states in the federal association of sovereign states whihc is the United States.
New York and California can pass what ever loonie tune local policies they want. They must at all cost be prevented from imposing those policies on the rest of us.
The best policy the U.S. could follow is overturning the seventeenth and enforce the tenth amendment. As long as the fifteenth amendment is equally voraciously defended the overall result would be to the benefit of most.
I'd throw in abolishing the sixteenth amendment, but that would take a constitutional amendment, because congress would never vote to cut their own purse strings.
By the way the sixteenth and the seventeenth are the legacy of the last time Progressives got control of things. They the same party that segregated the Army, which had been desegregated since the end of the Civil War. You can thank Wilson for all that mess.
So what do the number say?
Debt exploded after 1980, went down slightly under Clinton (and a Republican Congress). It went back up under Bush, and then again under Obama (who controlled both houses during his first term and the senate during his second term.)
Lets just look at congress, In period since 1980 the democrat have controlled the house for 20 years. The Republicans cave controlled the house for 18 years. In the same period the Democrats have controlled the senate for 18 Years and the 22 years. It looks to me as though they are both equally culpable.
Every company that has pension liability should be paying into its employee pension funds in a manner that will not cause them to default. Congress has a particular interest in entities like the USPS because in the case of default it is reasonable to suppose they will be pressured to use taxpayer money to make up for that pension money the USPS didn't properly put aside.
This is the reason private companies have dumped pension plans for matching contributions to employee funded pensions. Since the USPS is prevented from doing that by law and union contracts it is only reasonable that they be forced to meet their pension liabilities by contributing to the pension plan of their employees.
The fact that other entities are badly managed is not a reason that USPS should be allowed to offload that liability on the taxpayers.
Most sports leagues have a streaming package. You pony up some money and you can stream sports.
The big streaming companies are Disney. As soon as they launch their own streaming channel we're into what people have been saying they've wanted all along, a la carte service. To see it all you'll have to pay Disney, which will have Disney channel stuff, Star Wars, Marvel, Fox, and ABC. To get Star Trek you'll have to get CBS streaming (Yeah, I know they're dead), to get Netflix your go there, Amazon Prime you go there, NBC and Disney stuff that's R rated you go to HULU. I don't know if BBC America has a streaming service that's available for cord cutters.
So basically It'll probably cost you $159 a month to stream it all. Plus whatever your paying fro your internet connection. It will be so much better than cable.
It ain't science if it's not falsifiable. It also ain't science if its not reproducible.
Most studies in these fields are neither. So they are not real science.
Of course attempts to prove this result in the breaking of many people's rice bowls so anyone trying must be reeducated or destroyed.
The claim that mental hospitals were shutdown as part of the Reagan government austerity program is one of the big lies of the left.
Its true that Reagan signed the OBRA, which repealed an act passed under Carter, but Carter was the president directly before Reagan, so we're to believe that in a mere decade the mental health system became so dependent on the federal teat that it could not exist without it.
The fact is that mental hospitals existed before Carter. While I'm sure they benefited from lots of free money the expulsion of patients and the closing down of facilities has more to do with the abysmal conditions which were extant in most facilities and the public's backlash against those conditions when they became aware of them, than anything.
The failure of states and charitable institutions to address the problem also didn't help. Solutions are always best when applied locally. Putting the federal government in charge of anything that can best be handled at a local level seldom results in anything but extending the problem.
The Smithsonian was founded as a bequest to the United States by James Smithson a private British citizen. The United States government then promptly took that bequest (equivalent to $11 million dollars) and p*ssed it away.
Luckily ex-President John Quincy Adams persuaded Congress to restore the money.
So what have we learned here? The Smithsonian was never suppose to be a thing paid for by the U.S. government. In the past, as now, the best way to screw something up is to give money to the federal government so that they can do the job.
Had a competent private company had control of Smithson's bequest all of the Smithsonian's funds would be coming from private sources and their funding would never have been in jeopardy.
In some ways the Smithsonian is a the poster boy for why the federal government shouldn't be doing things.
As for the National Parks they should be self-funded by a private chartered organization. Let the people and companies that use them pay for their upkeep and maintenance. Things like ski lodges on public land, which since they are run by private companies I can guarantee they are not shut down.This would also make them shutdown proof.