Money is not speech. Money is money. But forbidding someone from spending their own money on bringing their message to more people is a limiting their freedom of speech.
So? There are laws against advertising Cigarettes on TV, magazines, billboards, etc. Advertising is certainly speech. There are laws against buying or selling things in certain areas (permitting), during certain days (blue laws), or for certain products (alcohol to minors, or entire "dry" counties). We have no problem regulating either the transfers of money, or even speech, when we feel there is a clear public interest in doing so.
What could possibly be a more compelling public interest than the integrity of our Democracy?
If I had to pay the up-front $700 cost of the latest-greatest smartphone, I'd never do it. When it's only $200, I can generally scrape that together.
Tied plans are hiding the true costs of the smartphones Americans buy, which is encouraging high-end sales. We all essentially have our next phone on layaway.
He was a Brit. Thus his books, instead of having trucks and drugstores, were populated with bizarre science fiction constructs like "lorries" and "chemists".
I am just amazed at the total lack of wreckage. I mean, none has been found. With the technology we have
To horrendously misquote Douglas Adams:
The ocean is big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind- bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist's, but that's just peanuts to the ocean.
, fifty or a hundred years from now, the first immortals will be born.
That would, IMHO, be an utter disaster for mankind. Human beings are really good at learning what their world is like when they are children, because they are more or less starting from scratch. What they absolutely suck at is adapting to change after they've figured all that out. We form our opinions and view of the world when we are growing up. We can see then with (relatively) unclouded eyes the way things are, and even reason out the way we think things ought to be. But that becomes relatively set. This is why Max Plank remarked:
A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.
It isn't just science either, it's pretty much every realm of human thought. I was born into a society (1967) where it was accepted that black people should be kept away from white people, women were inferior to men in every way and belonged in the home, and "gay" was not a state of being, but a repulsive activity that needed to be suppressed at all costs. Its true that lot of people's minds changed since then, but by and large what happened is that the old folks who felt strongest about society staying that way died . Social conservatism is far more prominent with older people at pretty much every level you check.
While I'd like to think that all that was wrong with the 70's is gone from me, the fact is its all still lurking down in my head, because that's the world I was born into. The best I can hope for to personally advance society is to raise my own kids without my prejudices, and then when its just me left that remembers the early 70's I can die and all that horrible shit will die with me.
Anyone trying to "fix" this is an active threat to humanity.
Actually, if you are going to go there, I'd highly suggest any prospective engineer go see a production of Titanic (the musical play, not the movie). There's this whole subplot of the owner constantly pressuring the captain and the engineers to cut corners and run outside the established safety margins, in order to meet a schedule that will help his own marketing and make himself a few extra nickels. Of course this causes a huge disaster, in which the designer, the engineers, and the captain take the fall and go down with the ship (along with 2/3 of the passengers). Meanwhile the owner scams himself a spot on the lifeboat (callously bumping off a pregnant woman).
Its the best illustration I've ever seen of what happens on large engineering project that go badly. Watch that, and you are prepared for a career in Engineering.
Reasons I've needed to roll my own Knuth-ish data structures or algorithms in the last 10 years:
Can't use dynamic allocation due to real-time constraints performance constraints (execution time consistency)
Can't use dynamic allocation due to needing special memory (eg: contiguous memory for a device driver)
Needed defined behavior in the face of constrained concurrency issues (eg: 1 reader, 1 writer), and didn't want something heavy like an OS lock.
Needed to add a feature to some old C code running on an old Unix box, and it required a sort of nearly-sorted input.
Perhaps I'm just being the cranky old guy here, but a software engineer will have things like this come up from time to time in their career. A good one should be capable of dealing with them.
That's essentially the way our turnpikes work. There's one highway that has exits less than a mile from where I work and about a mile from my house. However, taking it costs almost a dollar each way, so I do my 9 mile commute on city streets instead.
The two-tiered pricing model makes sense in some places (eg: Orlando, where the turnpikes are priced for tourists).
it suffices to compare my metropolitan areas to your metropolitan areas).
Not entirely. Our metropolitan areas tend to house mostly the destitute. Rich folks (aka: those with lots of disposable income available for things like high-speed internet access) in the USA live out in the suburbs and exurbs, where the better school districts are. From a European's perspective, our cities are inside-out.
Provide incentives for private industry, and get the fsck out of the way.
That actually makes a lot of sense for things that actually hold some promise of being a profitable business in the near future, like near-earth orbit launch vehicles.
However, it makes no sense whatsoever for things with no possible commercial market at the forseable end of them, like pure space exploration. Since there will (most likely) be no commercial pot of gold at the end of these tasks, any "incentive" offered would have to cover the entire cost of the endeavor, plus some extra for profit. If taxpayers are going to be footing the entire bill, we might as well have (I'd say damn well ought to have) a big say in how the money is spent and things are run. If not, these so called "private companies" will have all the negative incentives of a government bureaucracy, but none of the positive incentives to keep them in line.
If we're paying the entire bill, we ought to have the ability to fire the "CEO". Otherwise its just corporate Welfare.
I'd bet if you could look into those numbers, a lot of those higher earners are living in places where the Cost of Living is ridiculous. The prime example is Silicon Valley, which is gaining thousands of tech jobs a year, but there is simply no housing to be had for reasonable prices anywhere within an hour's commute. (And if you try living that hour away, you'll find locals picketing your horrible commute).
It would be interesting to see numbers "normalized" for cost of living differences.
That's just how things work in Russia. There's not really any Rule of Law there. So once a company gets lucrative, the government swoops in and takes it over. Any unfortunate owner who tries to stand in the way finds himself in jail, or worse.
What I don't understand is why anyone would invest a single dime of their own money in a business operating in a country where the instant an investment starts paying off, someone else will come reap all your rewards. It just makes no sense whatsoever to try to do business there.
Perhaps this is all a part of the vast right-wing conspiracy against green energy [salon.com]. Can't let the hippies win!
Nice to see someone at least trying to look past the smokescreen.
This was a law pushed on us by the corporate right-wing legislation factory ALEC. Actually, "pushed" is a bit strong. It would probably be more accurate to say the Oklahoma legislature goes to ALEC and asks, "what laws would you like us to pass today"?
Those of you who've been here a few years know the drill with ALEC: their avowed reasons for a law are almost always a cover, so arguing over the validity of their reasoning is pointless. The real reason for this law is that their corporate funders (yes, including the Koch brothers, who make their money in the coal burning business) think it would help them. The only way you'd stop ALEC from pushing stuff like this is to convince the Kochs that it would cost them money somehow.
Don't forget Hydro. By most measurements my electricity in Tulsa is far more "clean" than average. We get much less of our electricity from coal than most other places, with the balance being taken up by hydro power from all the dammed up lakes in this part of the state, and by Natural Gas (which bubbles up out of the ground on its own here).
The western part of the state doesn't have our wealth of available hydro power. However, they don't have nearly as many people either, and as you point out, they can easily make up the rest and more with wind power.
if you're in an area where many people rely on electicity for heating,
Not at issue here. Oklahoma is most definitely not one of those areas. Nearly everyone in this state uses Natural Gas for heating. It bubbles up out of the ground on its own here.
Yeah, but how often do you purchase a brand new luxury car? Anyone who does that is essentially flushing $10,000+ dollars down the drain the instant they drive their car off the lot. What's a few thousand here or there after that?
This is a guy running Mercedes, so that's his point of reference.
I have also heard that illegal immigrants get valid SSNs and pay taxes on them so that everything looks legit. IRS doesn't bother tracking them down...
Well, they "pay taxes" on that SSN in that they have payroll, withholding, and Social Security taxes taken out with it, just like every other employed person (but they won't be able to actually get a refund or retire on that SSN). It can be a bit of a boon for the real holder of that SSN, as they get money put in their Social Security account that they didn't work for. However, if it were me I'd still want it straightened out. Bureaucracies and weird situations like that cause nothing but problems.
If I were IRS director though, rooting that out would certainly be bottom of my priority list. There's way too many people out there paying too little in taxes to spend limited resources tracking down people paying too much in taxes.
often get 90%+ participation. For example, just last month Putin has obviously orchestrated a non-binding independence referendum in Venice: 89% of participants voted for independence with
That's actually a very insightful (and it turns out informative) refutation.
You see, it turns out that Venice poll was not actually a proper plebiscite, but rather an online poll. Online polls aren't exactly famous for being accurate representations of popular opinion. I can't find any official number for participation, but it looks like they were "expecting" no more than half the electorate to vote.
So what would they have found in a real vote? Actual opinion polls on the question were apparently finding about 2/3 support for the idea. A 66% vote for a popular measure in a Democracy would be perfectly in line with what one would expect to see in a real vote.
But maybe you're right, and I should look at a real independence referendum. They are preparing to have one of those in Scotland soon, right? What are the predictions for numbers there? Well, current opinion polls seem to show the electorate running at about 50% to 33%, with the rest undecided. So we can expect that when election day happens, whichever side wins, it won't be by larger than 77%, and likely far less.
Or how about we look at actual numbers from an actual vote? Puerto Rico had a referendum on statehood/independence/etc. again two years ago. 78% of those eligible voted (so indeed high by western standards, but not ridiculously so), and the results were about 54% to 46%.
So I may have to grant you that turnout numbers may be a bit higher than normal during a referendum like this, but that's still worlds away from making the "results" the Russians reported from Crimea look anything like a real vote.
I tried to efile a few years ago and discovered someone had already submitted a tax return under my SSN. So I had to send in all my tax forms and all my proof of identity in paper, along with a statement of fraud or something of the sort. And I had to file paper again the next year since my SSN was blocked from efiling due to the fraud alert.
I'm hearing this is a popular new fraud. People file fake returns with someone else's SSN, and collect and cash their refund.
Personally I wonder what would happen in my case, as I actually owe $3,000.:-)
That's exactly what I'm saying. Despotic governments are not places where no elections happen; they are places where all the numbers in elections are up near 100% for whatever the current guys carrying guns want it to be.
If your "election" looks more like the numbers you'd see out of North Korea, it carries about as much weight as a videotaped "confession" from a guy with visible bruising.
You are just proving everyone else's point. In a real Democracy, people feel free to stay home and not vote. In a real Democracy, really popular issues or politicians win with something like 60%. The biggest win I've ever seen for a local issue here in my hometown (probably roughly the size of Crimea) is 75%.
Where do you see participation numbers over 85%? Where do you see issues getting approved with more the 93% of the vote? Not in free countries. You see that in places like North Korea, the worst Arab Despotistims, and banana Republics. You see it in history here:
...on 12 March 1938, Austrian Nazis took over government, while German troops occupied the country.[50] On 13 March 1938, the Anschluss of Austria was officially declared. Two days later Hitler (an Austrian by birth), announced what he called the "re-unification" of his home country with the "rest of Germany" on Vienna's Heldenplatz. He established a plebiscite confirming the union with Germany in April 1938.
Parliamentary elections were held in Germany (including recently annexed Austria) on 10 April 1938. They were the final elections to the Reichstag during Nazi rule and took the form of a single-question referendum asking whether voters approved of a single Nazi-party list for the 813-member Reichstag as well as the recent annexation of Austria (the Anschluss). Turnout in the election was officially 99.5% with 98.9% voting "yes". In the case of Austria, Hitler's native soil, 99.71% of an electorate of 4,484,475 officially went to the ballots, with a positive tally of 99.73%.[51]
If you want to fool yourself about what went on, that's fine. But we are generally smart people here on Slashdot. Don't insult our intelligence by acting like we will believe this.
We are not stupid.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm sure by the time we have another democrat president, that administration
...
And I will state for the record that I am not a democrat.
You already did that above.
Money is not speech. Money is money. But forbidding someone from spending their own money on bringing their message to more people is a limiting their freedom of speech.
So? There are laws against advertising Cigarettes on TV, magazines, billboards, etc. Advertising is certainly speech. There are laws against buying or selling things in certain areas (permitting), during certain days (blue laws), or for certain products (alcohol to minors, or entire "dry" counties). We have no problem regulating either the transfers of money, or even speech, when we feel there is a clear public interest in doing so.
What could possibly be a more compelling public interest than the integrity of our Democracy?
If I had to pay the up-front $700 cost of the latest-greatest smartphone, I'd never do it. When it's only $200, I can generally scrape that together.
Tied plans are hiding the true costs of the smartphones Americans buy, which is encouraging high-end sales. We all essentially have our next phone on layaway.
He was a Brit. Thus his books, instead of having trucks and drugstores, were populated with bizarre science fiction constructs like "lorries" and "chemists".
I am just amazed at the total lack of wreckage. I mean, none has been found. With the technology we have
To horrendously misquote Douglas Adams:
The ocean is big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind- bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist's, but that's just peanuts to the ocean.
I just looked in my trashcan here at work, an I may have found MH370 wreckage. Almost certainly I have not, but still I may have.
Until confirmed one way or the other, CNN should really send a team over to my office to report on the movements of the neighborhood dogs.
In other news, the damage from democracy could be mitigated with some sane campaign contributions.
This IFIFY was sponsored by Americans for Prosperity, (founded and board chaired by David Koch).
, fifty or a hundred years from now, the first immortals will be born.
That would, IMHO, be an utter disaster for mankind. Human beings are really good at learning what their world is like when they are children, because they are more or less starting from scratch. What they absolutely suck at is adapting to change after they've figured all that out. We form our opinions and view of the world when we are growing up. We can see then with (relatively) unclouded eyes the way things are, and even reason out the way we think things ought to be. But that becomes relatively set. This is why Max Plank remarked:
A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.
It isn't just science either, it's pretty much every realm of human thought. I was born into a society (1967) where it was accepted that black people should be kept away from white people, women were inferior to men in every way and belonged in the home, and "gay" was not a state of being, but a repulsive activity that needed to be suppressed at all costs. Its true that lot of people's minds changed since then, but by and large what happened is that the old folks who felt strongest about society staying that way died . Social conservatism is far more prominent with older people at pretty much every level you check.
While I'd like to think that all that was wrong with the 70's is gone from me, the fact is its all still lurking down in my head, because that's the world I was born into. The best I can hope for to personally advance society is to raise my own kids without my prejudices, and then when its just me left that remembers the early 70's I can die and all that horrible shit will die with me.
Anyone trying to "fix" this is an active threat to humanity.
Add in some classical literature as well
Actually, if you are going to go there, I'd highly suggest any prospective engineer go see a production of Titanic (the musical play, not the movie). There's this whole subplot of the owner constantly pressuring the captain and the engineers to cut corners and run outside the established safety margins, in order to meet a schedule that will help his own marketing and make himself a few extra nickels. Of course this causes a huge disaster, in which the designer, the engineers, and the captain take the fall and go down with the ship (along with 2/3 of the passengers). Meanwhile the owner scams himself a spot on the lifeboat (callously bumping off a pregnant woman).
Its the best illustration I've ever seen of what happens on large engineering project that go badly. Watch that, and you are prepared for a career in Engineering.
Reasons I've needed to roll my own Knuth-ish data structures or algorithms in the last 10 years:
Perhaps I'm just being the cranky old guy here, but a software engineer will have things like this come up from time to time in their career. A good one should be capable of dealing with them.
That's essentially the way our turnpikes work. There's one highway that has exits less than a mile from where I work and about a mile from my house. However, taking it costs almost a dollar each way, so I do my 9 mile commute on city streets instead.
The two-tiered pricing model makes sense in some places (eg: Orlando, where the turnpikes are priced for tourists).
it suffices to compare my metropolitan areas to your metropolitan areas).
Not entirely. Our metropolitan areas tend to house mostly the destitute. Rich folks (aka: those with lots of disposable income available for things like high-speed internet access) in the USA live out in the suburbs and exurbs, where the better school districts are. From a European's perspective, our cities are inside-out.
Provide incentives for private industry, and get the fsck out of the way.
That actually makes a lot of sense for things that actually hold some promise of being a profitable business in the near future, like near-earth orbit launch vehicles.
However, it makes no sense whatsoever for things with no possible commercial market at the forseable end of them, like pure space exploration. Since there will (most likely) be no commercial pot of gold at the end of these tasks, any "incentive" offered would have to cover the entire cost of the endeavor, plus some extra for profit. If taxpayers are going to be footing the entire bill, we might as well have (I'd say damn well ought to have) a big say in how the money is spent and things are run. If not, these so called "private companies" will have all the negative incentives of a government bureaucracy, but none of the positive incentives to keep them in line.
If we're paying the entire bill, we ought to have the ability to fire the "CEO". Otherwise its just corporate Welfare.
Sony BMG CD's from 2005-2007 do the same thing with Windows.
Nice to see someone is finally bringing this same capability to Linux.
I'd bet if you could look into those numbers, a lot of those higher earners are living in places where the Cost of Living is ridiculous. The prime example is Silicon Valley, which is gaining thousands of tech jobs a year, but there is simply no housing to be had for reasonable prices anywhere within an hour's commute. (And if you try living that hour away, you'll find locals picketing your horrible commute).
It would be interesting to see numbers "normalized" for cost of living differences.
That's just how things work in Russia. There's not really any Rule of Law there. So once a company gets lucrative, the government swoops in and takes it over. Any unfortunate owner who tries to stand in the way finds himself in jail, or worse.
What I don't understand is why anyone would invest a single dime of their own money in a business operating in a country where the instant an investment starts paying off, someone else will come reap all your rewards. It just makes no sense whatsoever to try to do business there.
Perhaps this is all a part of the vast right-wing conspiracy against green energy [salon.com]. Can't let the hippies win!
Nice to see someone at least trying to look past the smokescreen.
This was a law pushed on us by the corporate right-wing legislation factory ALEC. Actually, "pushed" is a bit strong. It would probably be more accurate to say the Oklahoma legislature goes to ALEC and asks, "what laws would you like us to pass today"?
Those of you who've been here a few years know the drill with ALEC: their avowed reasons for a law are almost always a cover, so arguing over the validity of their reasoning is pointless. The real reason for this law is that their corporate funders (yes, including the Koch brothers, who make their money in the coal burning business) think it would help them. The only way you'd stop ALEC from pushing stuff like this is to convince the Kochs that it would cost them money somehow.
Don't forget Hydro. By most measurements my electricity in Tulsa is far more "clean" than average. We get much less of our electricity from coal than most other places, with the balance being taken up by hydro power from all the dammed up lakes in this part of the state, and by Natural Gas (which bubbles up out of the ground on its own here).
The western part of the state doesn't have our wealth of available hydro power. However, they don't have nearly as many people either, and as you point out, they can easily make up the rest and more with wind power.
if you're in an area where many people rely on electicity for heating,
Not at issue here. Oklahoma is most definitely not one of those areas. Nearly everyone in this state uses Natural Gas for heating. It bubbles up out of the ground on its own here.
Yeah, but how often do you purchase a brand new luxury car? Anyone who does that is essentially flushing $10,000+ dollars down the drain the instant they drive their car off the lot. What's a few thousand here or there after that?
This is a guy running Mercedes, so that's his point of reference.
I have also heard that illegal immigrants get valid SSNs and pay taxes on them so that everything looks legit. IRS doesn't bother tracking them down ...
Well, they "pay taxes" on that SSN in that they have payroll, withholding, and Social Security taxes taken out with it, just like every other employed person (but they won't be able to actually get a refund or retire on that SSN). It can be a bit of a boon for the real holder of that SSN, as they get money put in their Social Security account that they didn't work for. However, if it were me I'd still want it straightened out. Bureaucracies and weird situations like that cause nothing but problems.
If I were IRS director though, rooting that out would certainly be bottom of my priority list. There's way too many people out there paying too little in taxes to spend limited resources tracking down people paying too much in taxes.
often get 90%+ participation. For example, just last month Putin has obviously orchestrated a non-binding independence referendum in Venice: 89% of participants voted for independence with
That's actually a very insightful (and it turns out informative) refutation.
You see, it turns out that Venice poll was not actually a proper plebiscite, but rather an online poll. Online polls aren't exactly famous for being accurate representations of popular opinion. I can't find any official number for participation, but it looks like they were "expecting" no more than half the electorate to vote.
So what would they have found in a real vote? Actual opinion polls on the question were apparently finding about 2/3 support for the idea. A 66% vote for a popular measure in a Democracy would be perfectly in line with what one would expect to see in a real vote.
But maybe you're right, and I should look at a real independence referendum. They are preparing to have one of those in Scotland soon, right? What are the predictions for numbers there? Well, current opinion polls seem to show the electorate running at about 50% to 33%, with the rest undecided. So we can expect that when election day happens, whichever side wins, it won't be by larger than 77%, and likely far less.
Or how about we look at actual numbers from an actual vote? Puerto Rico had a referendum on statehood/independence/etc. again two years ago. 78% of those eligible voted (so indeed high by western standards, but not ridiculously so), and the results were about 54% to 46%.
So I may have to grant you that turnout numbers may be a bit higher than normal during a referendum like this, but that's still worlds away from making the "results" the Russians reported from Crimea look anything like a real vote.
I tried to efile a few years ago and discovered someone had already submitted a tax return under my SSN. So I had to send in all my tax forms and all my proof of identity in paper, along with a statement of fraud or something of the sort. And I had to file paper again the next year since my SSN was blocked from efiling due to the fraud alert.
I'm hearing this is a popular new fraud. People file fake returns with someone else's SSN, and collect and cash their refund.
Personally I wonder what would happen in my case, as I actually owe $3,000. :-)
That's exactly what I'm saying. Despotic governments are not places where no elections happen; they are places where all the numbers in elections are up near 100% for whatever the current guys carrying guns want it to be.
If your "election" looks more like the numbers you'd see out of North Korea, it carries about as much weight as a videotaped "confession" from a guy with visible bruising.
You are just proving everyone else's point. In a real Democracy, people feel free to stay home and not vote. In a real Democracy, really popular issues or politicians win with something like 60%. The biggest win I've ever seen for a local issue here in my hometown (probably roughly the size of Crimea) is 75%.
Where do you see participation numbers over 85%? Where do you see issues getting approved with more the 93% of the vote? Not in free countries. You see that in places like North Korea, the worst Arab Despotistims, and banana Republics. You see it in history here:
...on 12 March 1938, Austrian Nazis took over government, while German troops occupied the country.[50] On 13 March 1938, the Anschluss of Austria was officially declared. Two days later Hitler (an Austrian by birth), announced what he called the "re-unification" of his home country with the "rest of Germany" on Vienna's Heldenplatz. He established a plebiscite confirming the union with Germany in April 1938.
Parliamentary elections were held in Germany (including recently annexed Austria) on 10 April 1938. They were the final elections to the Reichstag during Nazi rule and took the form of a single-question referendum asking whether voters approved of a single Nazi-party list for the 813-member Reichstag as well as the recent annexation of Austria (the Anschluss). Turnout in the election was officially 99.5% with 98.9% voting "yes". In the case of Austria, Hitler's native soil, 99.71% of an electorate of 4,484,475 officially went to the ballots, with a positive tally of 99.73%.[51]
If you want to fool yourself about what went on, that's fine. But we are generally smart people here on Slashdot. Don't insult our intelligence by acting like we will believe this. We are not stupid.