The difference is that following this ruling the Chinese government can directly spend money to support or oppose candidates. If you thought "The Manchurian Candidate" was a scary thought, wait until we have a real candidate supported by China's dollar surplus.
Kennedy... said, "No sufficient government interest justifies limits on the political speech of nonprofit or for-profit corporations."
It this or an equivalent is in the decision it also opens the door for churches to donate and support candidates from the pulpit with no recourse from the IRS. And the Catholic Church (or any other foreign government for that matter) is now entitled to spend unlimited money to influence elections.
Gotta love those "conservatives" on the court. They don't care who's in charge, as long as there's plenty of money involved.
Yes, but individuals are taxed based upon their income rather than their profits after expenses. So individuals pay much much much much higher taxes than corporations.
But I'm all for getting rid of income taxes entirely. The only proper basis for taxes is wealth. Taxes should be a fixed percentage of personal wealth (i.e. assets-liabilities), with no sheltered assets and business ownership taxed based upon the higher of market or book value. You could get rid of corporate taxes entirely, since the taxes would be paid by the owners of the corporation.
Exactly. You take the "money" out of electing politicians, you restrict donations, etc, then the media gets the run the show even more than they do now because they get to decide what to report and what not to report.
Exactly. It was so unfair in the past. Now what the media reports will be based upon which corporation pays them the most money to lie on behalf of their candidate.
A foreign corporation will no longer need to donate to a PAC in order to make political contributions. Following this ruling it can buy advertising directly.
Therefore the rules applying to contributions to a PAC don't apply to the discussion at hand.
IBM does not yet appoint the president, Microsoft does not have a veto on laws.
And you said he sounded silly. Individual corporations typically don't have the power to veto legislation, but industry groups (formed colluding corporations) do. Rather than veto laws, the industry groups typically write the laws and get Congress to ratify them.
Given that companies don't have to disclose contributions in advance (or at all in the case of buying advertising for a candidate) or get majority shareholder approval in advance of contributing, it is impossible to prevent your assets from used for political purposes. Selling your shares after the fact doesn't help, especially when most corporations do not disclose their lobbying activities to their shareholders.
Ah. And your rights to donate campaign money (which is, to the penny, open to all public scrutiny and reporting), or the ability of you and your business partner to do the same - you think that's "corporatism?"
But that's not really what it's about. It's about corporations that you own stock in having the unlimited ability to donate your money achieve political goals you disagree with.
How does free (non-libelous, non-fraudulant) speech threaten democracy?
You didn't apparently see the hour long "documentary" that was the subject of this case. It was both libelous and fraudulent.
Unfortunately the courts have decided that speech for political purposes can be both libelous and fraudulent without limit or recourse.
If that weren't the case, wouldn't people claiming Obama falsified his birth certificate (definitely libelous and fraudulent) be held responsible for their lies? Wouldn't people that claimed Hillary Clinton either had Vince Foster killed, or pulled the trigger herself be in hot water. Wouldn't Rush Limbaugh be in trouble for claiming that Obama was siphoning off Haiti donations into his campaign funds? No, in this country you can lie about anything as long as it's political.
I don't think, at that time, there had ever been a company powerful enough to fully control a government. I also don't think that the founding fathers considered money to be synonymous with free speech. I don't think any of them would have considered guaranteeing free speech as an equivalent to guaranteeing the right to bribery.
You may not have noticed, but the Republican and Democratic (not Democrat, ya asswipe) parties are owned by corporations. Should any party rise to replace one of them, it would quickly be purchased.
The Constitution was designed, in part, to protect the people from the government. The founding fathers, remembering the East India Company, among others, were quite aware of the dangers of companies controlled by the government. I don't think they were fully aware of the dangers of a government controlled by companies.
Actually, it was the Supreme Court that decided that corporations are persons. (In truth a clerk inserted a statement to that effect into a Supreme Court decision without the Court deciding that.) But it's precedent now, and with the Roberts court precedent means everything, unless a majority of the court decides to discard 200 years of precedent, as it did in this case.
If the U.S. Constitution ensures the free speech rights of corporations, as the SCOTUS has judged, then clearly the Constitution is defective.
No, the SCOTUS is defective. Talk about legislating from the bench... Talk about deciding issues that weren't before the court...
If you'll remember the court decided to take this case even though it hadn't been appealed to the Supreme Court, and even though the Court wasn't in session at the time. The question before the court was "Do the makers of an hour long politically motivated attack ad need to disclose who funded of the ad as is required by law?" The court's answer to that question was "congress cannot limit the ability of the people who run corporations to spend assets they don't own on political campaigns." In other words, campaign financing restrictions only apply to individuals.
It's pretty apparent now that Roberts and Alito committed perjury during their confirmation hearings. Somehow, I doubt that they will be impeached.
Of course, this is the court that decided that a television news organization was just exercising free speech when it decided to air a falsified story in order to benefit a sponsor. This just extends that decision so that now it's legal for a sponsor to directly pay for a falsified news story attacking a political opponent.
Democracy wasn't working out here anyway. How much worse can this make it?
A 'birther' wants to know that no one who lacks the qualifications for office may be elected yet will disregard any evidence presented as to the qualifications of a candidate they oppose. There's nothing catastrophic in this.
A 'tea-bagger' wants no taxation without representation yet all of them are currently represented by two senators and a congressman, apart from the tiny minority that choose to live in the District of Columbia (are there any?). Still they complain about taxation without representation. Again, I fail to see the 'danger' of this idea.
I doubt he has $290,000 per per person in medical coverage on his motorcycle insurance. Nor would most states require medical liability in that amount. California's requirements are: $15,000 for injury/death to one person, $30,000 for injury/death to more than one person, $5,000 for damage to property (known as 15/30/5 for short) Or in lieu of insurance you can post a $35,000 bond. In either case, I spent one night in the hospital following an emergency room visit and was billed $26,000. (Fortunately I am insured) If you're counting on that $15,000 to cover your medical costs in an accident you'd better hope nobody gets admitted to the hospital.
Of course anyone with significant assets should have 500/1000/500 in auto insurance and a couple million extra in blanket liability coverage. It seems the average cover of insured drivers in CA is about 25/50/25. I know quite a few people with significant assets that stick to the minimum, though.
But with everyone covered and everyone in the risk pool, everyone's costs go down.
No, my costs go up because I'm forced to either buy insurance (which I don't need) or pay a penalty (for not buying insurance).
No, because what you are doing by not buying health insurance is relying on the rest of us and our bankruptcy laws to bail you out if it turns out that you do need health coverage. If you show up at the emergency room in process of having an unexpected hemorrhagic stroke, you are going to get emergency care, an MRI, several days in the hospital, probably a rehab stay, and, most likely state disability and/or SSI if you are too disabled to work. And you will get these things without having to show an insurance card or a statement listing all of your assets. And when the bills show up, you'll hide as much of your assets as you can, then file for bankruptcy. At which point the hospital gets jack shit and makes up for the loss by charging the rest of us more.
And you'll do this because, as a selfish bastard, you are more than happy to live in a society that guarantees your access to healthcare without forcing you to pay for it.
What if I don't want to be part of the risk pool? What if I'd rather have the money my employer is going to spend on health insurance in my paycheck instead? The mandate is unpopular specifically because it takes away our freedom of choice.
That would be fine, if you could be also put outside of the benefit pool. But when you show up at the emergency room uninsured, the hospital is no longer allowed to dump you in the alley where you can die without inconveniencing the rest of us. You don't have a choice because the rest of us have to pay your bills if you are uninsured. So tough. If you want freedom to be uninsured, find a country where hospitals have the freedom not to serve you.
Uhm, thats funny, it would seem that every person on the planet with a basic understanding of electricity is wrong then.
Yes, because like most complicated parts of physics, a basic understand is an overly simplified view of what is going on. A current is more like the charge weighted mean of the velocity distribution of charged particles rather than something related to the velocity of individual charged particles. Apparently they've found a way for the charge weighted mean of the velocity distribution to propagate faster than light while the charges themselves remain subluminal. I would guess it's related to a radial projection effect.
I suppose I should RTF-papers to find out for sure.
And in case it wasn't apparent, a programmer writes multiple transpose functions both in C and assembly (for SIMD instructions) and determines at run time which version works best on the processor at hand. If the compiler wants to do that, I'd be happy to let it.
The problem is that the C and C++ languages are very strict about how out-of-order you are allowed to get. And for very good reason. Unless your compiler supports C99 and the restrict keyword any reads or writes through a pointer need to be completed by the next sequence point. That prevents most loops from accessing memory in an order that is not specified by the program.
Here's a matrix transpose that works on an XxY matrix of float.
void transpose(int X, int Y, float *in, float *out) {
// stupidest possible algorithm // assume in and out can't overlap
int i,j;
for (j=0;j<Y;j++) {
for (i=0;i<X;i++) {
out[i*Y+j]=in[j*X+i];
}
}
}
So a compiler would like to optimize this. The easiest way is to transpose sub-blocks of NxM, where N is the cache line, and M is an number of cache lines defined by the cache size, associativity, and the line fill time for a prefetch. But the compiler doesn't know what the cache line size is, or whether in and out overlap.
Regardless of what in and out are, the compiler has to reproduce the behavior that the one-float-at-a-time C code has. So a fully optimized version would be... check if in and out overlap, if they don't determine the alignment of in and out and the number of cache lines that can be prefetched based upon memory timings. In the loop appropriately prefetching while performing the sub-transposes in whatever order maximizes performance, of course, while using the best available instruction set. If the arrays do overlap, fall back to the slow version.
Call me when you find a compiler that does that, and produces a binary that is within 20% of optimal on every recent processor (last 3 years) from AMD and Intel.
Only in 16 bit instructions or some instructions that are rarely used (i.e. bcd arithmetic). ECX is still the loop counter, but you can index with any register. In 32bit mode EAX-EDX registers have been pretty generic since the 80386. On the other hand the lower half of ESI and EDI can't be accessed as two 8-bit registers. The only exception major exception is expanding multiply (32x32=64bit) and reducing divide (64/32=32bit), in that you can't specify individual registers for each portion of the result or dividend. You still need to pair EAX and EDX.
Coding in x86 ASM is never fun. Weird and odd and masochistically pleasurable for some, maybe, but not fun. Other architectures, on the other hand (like ARM), can be fun.
Coding assembly on RISC architectures is dead boring because all the instructions do what you expect them to and can be used on any general purpose register.
In the good old days, when x86 was 8086 there were no general purpose registers. The BX register could be used for indexing, but AX, CX and DX couldn't. CX could be used for counts (bit shifts, loops, string moves), but AX, BX, and DX couldn't. SI and DI were index registers that you could add to BX when dereferncing or could be used with CX for string moves. AX and DX could be used in a pair for a 32 bit value. If you wanted to multiply, you needed to use AX. If you wanted to divide, you needed to divide DX:AX by a 16 bit value and your result would end up in AX and the remainder in DX. Compared to the Z80 assembly language, we thought this was easy.
Being able to use %r2 for the same stuff you use %r1 for is just boring.
In non-trivial single threaded application code on a modern processor, the CPU core is spending about 95% of its time waiting on memory transfers. To fix that problem, it can make sense to prefetch and reorder memory accesses. Chances are you know better than your compiler how to do that. It also makes sense to start more threads on a processor with multiple hardware threads so you can do things while waiting for memory.
Most programmers won't even bother to do that, because the processor is fast enough to do what they want without the optimization. Only in heavy duty numerical code and in games does optimization by hand get done. Where you really need top performance regardless of the platform, coders will write multiple versions of an core routine and time them to find what's best on the machine being used.
Slashdot Mirror
The difference is that following this ruling the Chinese government can directly spend money to support or oppose candidates. If you thought "The Manchurian Candidate" was a scary thought, wait until we have a real candidate supported by China's dollar surplus.
Kennedy ... said, "No sufficient government interest justifies limits on the political speech of nonprofit or for-profit corporations."
It this or an equivalent is in the decision it also opens the door for churches to donate and support candidates from the pulpit with no recourse from the IRS. And the Catholic Church (or any other foreign government for that matter) is now entitled to spend unlimited money to influence elections.
Gotta love those "conservatives" on the court. They don't care who's in charge, as long as there's plenty of money involved.
As long as Roberts and Alito get their cut.
Yes, but individuals are taxed based upon their income rather than their profits after expenses. So individuals pay much much much much higher taxes than corporations.
But I'm all for getting rid of income taxes entirely. The only proper basis for taxes is wealth. Taxes should be a fixed percentage of personal wealth (i.e. assets-liabilities), with no sheltered assets and business ownership taxed based upon the higher of market or book value. You could get rid of corporate taxes entirely, since the taxes would be paid by the owners of the corporation.
Exactly. You take the "money" out of electing politicians, you restrict donations, etc, then the media gets the run the show even more than they do now because they get to decide what to report and what not to report.
Exactly. It was so unfair in the past. Now what the media reports will be based upon which corporation pays them the most money to lie on behalf of their candidate.
A foreign corporation will no longer need to donate to a PAC in order to make political contributions. Following this ruling it can buy advertising directly.
Therefore the rules applying to contributions to a PAC don't apply to the discussion at hand.
IBM does not yet appoint the president, Microsoft does not have a veto on laws.
And you said he sounded silly. Individual corporations typically don't have the power to veto legislation, but industry groups (formed colluding corporations) do. Rather than veto laws, the industry groups typically write the laws and get Congress to ratify them.
Given that companies don't have to disclose contributions in advance (or at all in the case of buying advertising for a candidate) or get majority shareholder approval in advance of contributing, it is impossible to prevent your assets from used for political purposes. Selling your shares after the fact doesn't help, especially when most corporations do not disclose their lobbying activities to their shareholders.
Ah. And your rights to donate campaign money (which is, to the penny, open to all public scrutiny and reporting), or the ability of you and your business partner to do the same - you think that's "corporatism?"
But that's not really what it's about. It's about corporations that you own stock in having the unlimited ability to donate your money achieve political goals you disagree with.
How does free (non-libelous, non-fraudulant) speech threaten democracy?
You didn't apparently see the hour long "documentary" that was the subject of this case. It was both libelous and fraudulent.
Unfortunately the courts have decided that speech for political purposes can be both libelous and fraudulent without limit or recourse.
If that weren't the case, wouldn't people claiming Obama falsified his birth certificate (definitely libelous and fraudulent) be held responsible for their lies? Wouldn't people that claimed Hillary Clinton either had Vince Foster killed, or pulled the trigger herself be in hot water. Wouldn't Rush Limbaugh be in trouble for claiming that Obama was siphoning off Haiti donations into his campaign funds? No, in this country you can lie about anything as long as it's political.
I don't think, at that time, there had ever been a company powerful enough to fully control a government. I also don't think that the founding fathers considered money to be synonymous with free speech. I don't think any of them would have considered guaranteeing free speech as an equivalent to guaranteeing the right to bribery.
You may not have noticed, but the Republican and Democratic (not Democrat, ya asswipe) parties are owned by corporations. Should any party rise to replace one of them, it would quickly be purchased.
The Constitution was designed, in part, to protect the people from the government. The founding fathers, remembering the East India Company, among others, were quite aware of the dangers of companies controlled by the government. I don't think they were fully aware of the dangers of a government controlled by companies.
Actually, it was the Supreme Court that decided that corporations are persons. (In truth a clerk inserted a statement to that effect into a Supreme Court decision without the Court deciding that.) But it's precedent now, and with the Roberts court precedent means everything, unless a majority of the court decides to discard 200 years of precedent, as it did in this case.
If the U.S. Constitution ensures the free speech rights of corporations, as the SCOTUS has judged, then clearly the Constitution is defective.
No, the SCOTUS is defective. Talk about legislating from the bench... Talk about deciding issues that weren't before the court...
If you'll remember the court decided to take this case even though it hadn't been appealed to the Supreme Court, and even though the Court wasn't in session at the time. The question before the court was "Do the makers of an hour long politically motivated attack ad need to disclose who funded of the ad as is required by law?" The court's answer to that question was "congress cannot limit the ability of the people who run corporations to spend assets they don't own on political campaigns." In other words, campaign financing restrictions only apply to individuals.
It's pretty apparent now that Roberts and Alito committed perjury during their confirmation hearings. Somehow, I doubt that they will be impeached.
Of course, this is the court that decided that a television news organization was just exercising free speech when it decided to air a falsified story in order to benefit a sponsor. This just extends that decision so that now it's legal for a sponsor to directly pay for a falsified news story attacking a political opponent.
Democracy wasn't working out here anyway. How much worse can this make it?
Right of free speech + right of association = right of groups, as corporations, to speak freely.
= right of people running corporations to spend the assets of the owners of the corporation on political speech they don't necessarily support.
A 'birther' wants to know that no one who lacks the qualifications for office may be elected yet will disregard any evidence presented as to the qualifications of a candidate they oppose. There's nothing catastrophic in this.
A 'tea-bagger' wants no taxation without representation yet all of them are currently represented by two senators and a congressman, apart from the tiny minority that choose to live in the District of Columbia (are there any?). Still they complain about taxation without representation. Again, I fail to see the 'danger' of this idea.
Fixed the parts you left out....
I doubt he has $290,000 per per person in medical coverage on his motorcycle insurance. Nor would most states require medical liability in that amount. California's requirements are: $15,000 for injury/death to one person, $30,000 for injury/death to more than one person, $5,000 for damage to property (known as 15/30/5 for short) Or in lieu of insurance you can post a $35,000 bond. In either case, I spent one night in the hospital following an emergency room visit and was billed $26,000. (Fortunately I am insured) If you're counting on that $15,000 to cover your medical costs in an accident you'd better hope nobody gets admitted to the hospital.
Of course anyone with significant assets should have 500/1000/500 in auto insurance and a couple million extra in blanket liability coverage. It seems the average cover of insured drivers in CA is about 25/50/25. I know quite a few people with significant assets that stick to the minimum, though.
But with everyone covered and everyone in the risk pool, everyone's costs go down.
No, my costs go up because I'm forced to either buy insurance (which I don't need) or pay a penalty (for not buying insurance).
No, because what you are doing by not buying health insurance is relying on the rest of us and our bankruptcy laws to bail you out if it turns out that you do need health coverage. If you show up at the emergency room in process of having an unexpected hemorrhagic stroke, you are going to get emergency care, an MRI, several days in the hospital, probably a rehab stay, and, most likely state disability and/or SSI if you are too disabled to work. And you will get these things without having to show an insurance card or a statement listing all of your assets. And when the bills show up, you'll hide as much of your assets as you can, then file for bankruptcy. At which point the hospital gets jack shit and makes up for the loss by charging the rest of us more.
And you'll do this because, as a selfish bastard, you are more than happy to live in a society that guarantees your access to healthcare without forcing you to pay for it.
What if I don't want to be part of the risk pool? What if I'd rather have the money my employer is going to spend on health insurance in my paycheck instead? The mandate is unpopular specifically because it takes away our freedom of choice.
That would be fine, if you could be also put outside of the benefit pool. But when you show up at the emergency room uninsured, the hospital is no longer allowed to dump you in the alley where you can die without inconveniencing the rest of us. You don't have a choice because the rest of us have to pay your bills if you are uninsured. So tough. If you want freedom to be uninsured, find a country where hospitals have the freedom not to serve you.
Uhm, thats funny, it would seem that every person on the planet with a basic understanding of electricity is wrong then.
Yes, because like most complicated parts of physics, a basic understand is an overly simplified view of what is going on. A current is more like the charge weighted mean of the velocity distribution of charged particles rather than something related to the velocity of individual charged particles. Apparently they've found a way for the charge weighted mean of the velocity distribution to propagate faster than light while the charges themselves remain subluminal. I would guess it's related to a radial projection effect.
I suppose I should RTF-papers to find out for sure.
And in case it wasn't apparent, a programmer writes multiple transpose functions both in C and assembly (for SIMD instructions) and determines at run time which version works best on the processor at hand. If the compiler wants to do that, I'd be happy to let it.
The problem is that the C and C++ languages are very strict about how out-of-order you are allowed to get. And for very good reason. Unless your compiler supports C99 and the restrict keyword any reads or writes through a pointer need to be completed by the next sequence point. That prevents most loops from accessing memory in an order that is not specified by the program.
Here's a matrix transpose that works on an XxY matrix of float.
void transpose(int X, int Y, float *in, float *out) {
}
So a compiler would like to optimize this. The easiest way is to transpose sub-blocks of NxM, where N is the cache line, and M is an number of cache lines defined by the cache size, associativity, and the line fill time for a prefetch. But the compiler doesn't know what the cache line size is, or whether in and out overlap.
Regardless of what in and out are, the compiler has to reproduce the behavior that the one-float-at-a-time C code has. So a fully optimized version would be... check if in and out overlap, if they don't determine the alignment of in and out and the number of cache lines that can be prefetched based upon memory timings. In the loop appropriately prefetching while performing the sub-transposes in whatever order maximizes performance, of course, while using the best available instruction set. If the arrays do overlap, fall back to the slow version.
Call me when you find a compiler that does that, and produces a binary that is within 20% of optimal on every recent processor (last 3 years) from AMD and Intel.
Only in 16 bit instructions or some instructions that are rarely used (i.e. bcd arithmetic). ECX is still the loop counter, but you can index with any register. In 32bit mode EAX-EDX registers have been pretty generic since the 80386. On the other hand the lower half of ESI and EDI can't be accessed as two 8-bit registers. The only exception major exception is expanding multiply (32x32=64bit) and reducing divide (64/32=32bit), in that you can't specify individual registers for each portion of the result or dividend. You still need to pair EAX and EDX.
Coding in x86 ASM is never fun. Weird and odd and masochistically pleasurable for some, maybe, but not fun. Other architectures, on the other hand (like ARM), can be fun.
Coding assembly on RISC architectures is dead boring because all the instructions do what you expect them to and can be used on any general purpose register.
In the good old days, when x86 was 8086 there were no general purpose registers. The BX register could be used for indexing, but AX, CX and DX couldn't. CX could be used for counts (bit shifts, loops, string moves), but AX, BX, and DX couldn't. SI and DI were index registers that you could add to BX when dereferncing or could be used with CX for string moves. AX and DX could be used in a pair for a 32 bit value. If you wanted to multiply, you needed to use AX. If you wanted to divide, you needed to divide DX:AX by a 16 bit value and your result would end up in AX and the remainder in DX. Compared to the Z80 assembly language, we thought this was easy.
Being able to use %r2 for the same stuff you use %r1 for is just boring.
In non-trivial single threaded application code on a modern processor, the CPU core is spending about 95% of its time waiting on memory transfers. To fix that problem, it can make sense to prefetch and reorder memory accesses. Chances are you know better than your compiler how to do that. It also makes sense to start more threads on a processor with multiple hardware threads so you can do things while waiting for memory.
Most programmers won't even bother to do that, because the processor is fast enough to do what they want without the optimization. Only in heavy duty numerical code and in games does optimization by hand get done. Where you really need top performance regardless of the platform, coders will write multiple versions of an core routine and time them to find what's best on the machine being used.