Once it became clear which way the wind was blowing, the US didn't have a whole lot of choice but support "Arab Spring". What was the alternative? Encourage a Syrian-style slaughter
The alternative was to stay out of it at that point. We also backed the Ayatollah in Iran in 1979 because "that's where the wind was blowing". That turned out well,eh?
Libya was like the Spanish Civil War in many respects. There was no "good side". Just as Spain had Communists vs. Fascists, Libya had Qaddafi vs. Islamists. Best to just stay out of it.
No more energy research, no more parks, no more public education, no more low income housing, no more roads & bridges. What a grand utopia he has planned for us.
I'm not a Paul supporter... his foriegn policy views have too much Truther nuttiness to them... but what makes you think eliminating these agencies would get rid of all of what you listed? Has it ever occured to you that much of this could still be done by consolidating the work of some of these departments in other agencies? Why couldn't we move things like geographic surveys to the Department of the Interior? Why do we have to have a seperate agency for that? It just adds another level of bueacracy, and thus cost. Why would eliminating the Department of Education kill public schools? Didn't they exist for over a hundred years before we had a department of education? Aren't public schools run at the state and local level, anyway? So eliminating the Department of Education would mean public schools would dry up and blow away? And are you seriously suggesting that roads would no longer be built if these agencies were eliminated?
The federal government is way too big, does way too much, and the essential stuff can be done in smaller or merged agencies. I'm all for his government reduction plan (except for the POTUS pay cut... I think that's just symbolic silliness). Next, he needs to add some cuts to DOD, where there are a lot of redundancies (why do we have a "national reconaissance office", "national geospatial intelligence agency", "Marine Corps Intelligence Activity", etc). Look up Wikipedia's page on the US Intelligence Community. You're telling me that all this can't be done with CIA, Army Intelligence, and Navy Intelligence? We've got 16 intel agencies and a layer of bueacracy above them.
Liberals want to cut the military, and conservatives want to cut civilian departments. The truth is, we should cut both.
arab spring seems to be a shitty operation by u.s. to topple unfriendly governments to install their own islamist supporters and to oblige the countries to financial system.
Right. Which explains why one of the first governments that was overthrown in the "Arab Spring" was Egypt... a staunch US ally that the US had poured many billions of dollars into. Congratulations. You managed to set a new record for cluelessness.
The cluelessness is on the United States Government for buying into the "Arab Spring" crap in the first place. Had they bothered to actually look at who was driving this stuff, they'd have seen groups like the Muslim Brotherhood all along. Yeah, Mubarek was a staunch US ally, and we encouraged his downfall because our own stupid politcal class bought into the silly and naive narrative that this was all about democracy and freedom and liberty, and that a liberal democratic state was coming to Egypt. Again, the naivete and stupidty here on our part was just mind boggling.
So now they're killing Copts in the streets (with the army's help), burning down churches, and moving to Sharia law. How's that freedom tasting now?
There was never an "Arab Spring". It was always an Islamist insurgency, and yes, the United States government encouraged and supported it, not because it believed Islamism was coming, but because it was thinking like a naive 19 year old from a college campus and bought the hype, especially the State Department. There's your cluelessness.
Words are one thing. Actions are another. And right now, the rebels are doing lovely things like forcibly removing blacks from Libya. The truth of it is that NATO just helped a bunch of Islamists take over Libya. They helped kill a guy that made a deal with the West (give up WMD's, turn over intelligence to us, get out of terrorism, and open your markets and play nice with us), and then turned around and started bombing him. Qaddafi, though a horrible man, did everything demanded of him in order to make peace with the West. That was the difference between him and Saddam. Saddam never abided by the sanctions, and never renounced his intention to establish a new empire in the Arab world (however hollow those dreams became after the Gulf War). Qaddafi took the deal instead.
Dictators are going to take two lessons from Libya: never trust the West when they offer you a deal, and nukes=respect, so get some atom bombs, stat.
Ever since the iLine, and Steve Jobs turning from a benevolent genius to a narcissistic, goose stepping lunatic, the scene has changed to apple being creative, and you can too, just as long as you're creative in the "Apple" sanctioned way.
Do you know anything about Steve Jobs' history?
He was always a "goose stepping lunatic", as you put it. He was always obsessed with his idea of perfection, to the point where many of the early software engineers on the Mac project absolutely hated his guts. If you disagreed with his ideas, you weren't just wrong, you were wrong, stupid, and bad.
One of the reasons he was forced out at Apple the first time was that he was absolutely awful to work with (there's a bracing account in one of the biographies about him of a trip he took to Sony's floppy drive factory in Japan, and he made such an ass of himself that Mike Markkula puled him aside and reprimanded him).
Steve Jobs was many things, but he was never, ever benevolent. He's always been a cult-of-personality dictator from his earliest days, and Jobs was always trying to push people into his vision of what genius and creativity was. This notion that he was some great supporter of freedom of computer users is nothing but marketing tripe. Jobs... and by extension, Apple... wasn't so much for freedom as they were for a world that they thought was cool, and they were going to make you pay plenty for the privilege of being part of it. You make it sound like Jobs was some kind of technical-artistic libertarian. Nothing could be further from the truth. Jobs wasn't fighting for your freedom to do things the way you wanted to. He was fighting for your dollars so you'd do things the way he wanted you to.
The only difference between Early Jobs and Late Jobs is that Late Jobs was actually a good businessman, due to hard lessons learned from his money-losing experience at NeXT.
Rats and other rodents will chew on anything soft enough to chew on.
Yes they will. I remember reading back in college about German armor divisions having lots of trouble on the eastern front due to rats and mice. In very cold conditions, the Wehrmacht would park their tanks in barns with lots of hay in an attempt to keep them from freezing up, and rodents would get into them and chew the wiring up. When I was younger, I had a couple of pet rats, and learned that they'll chew on pretty much anything. There's a hard, rock-like substance that you buy in pet stores for them, and they chew on it out of natural instinct to keep their teeth worn down. Rodent teeth never stop growing, so if they don't chew on something, their teeth will get too long and injure them.
Now, however, owing to the resurgence of pettiness as the primary means of political discourse, it's indistinguishable from the House except in the cost incurred in stealing the votes necessary to enter it.
It's indistinguishable from the House because, thanks to the 17th Amendment, it's nothing but another version of the House with longer terms and more power.
The Senate is functioning as it was designed to, as a break on both the House and the Presidency. The Senate was never supposed to be a rubber-stamp, for either the President or the House.
The whole point of a Senate is to have a group of men to take a deep look at what the House (which was always supposed to be the popular voice of the people) passes in the heat of the moment, and it was designed to prevent the President from becoming a Caesar. This is why treaties have to be voted on by the Senate, and why the President's appointments to his cabinet and to SCOTUS have to be reviewed, scrutinized, and voted on by the Senate. This is also why Senators were not popularly elected when the Constitution was written, but appointed by state legislators. The whole idea of the founders was to put a second party into the Congress that was indirectly responsible to the people (via their elected state houses), but not popularly elected, and thus less subject to the passions of the moment. I used to support popular election of Senators, but the older I've gotten, the more I think the founders had it right in the first place, and that the 17th Amendment was a mistake.
Also, if you want things to pass easier in the Senate... the way they do in the House, with a simple majority vote, well, the way is clear here. Just demand that the Senate drop their unique rules requiring 60 votes. That rule is not in the Constitution, but an internal Senate rule (which the Constitution permits).
Just be careful before you demand this. Because if the Senate goes to simple-majority vote, so can future Senates... ones where the other party is the majority.
Trade agreements are a form of treaty, and treaties have to be voted on by the Senate. The Constitution does this for a good reason, preventing the President from unilaterally committing the United States to international agreements. Wyden is right on this. And ACTA is clearly a trade agreement. Send this to the Senate first for a vote.
I interviewed at Amazon once, what he says is true about the offices, they didn't look very clean and impressive. That's a bad impression right there.
Well, duh. I've worked for a bunch of tech companies, and when they decided that spending a ton of money on a fancy office was better than spending the money on hardware and employees, that was always a pretty good sign that it was going downhill.
The writer goes to great lengths to discuss how Amazon does almost nothing right. He went on to state that Amazon's interface sucks (because of Bezos, natch), and how awful it was that the Apple human interface guy that was brought in was ignored.
Looking at the money Amazon is bringing in, looking at the way Amazon absolutely dominates their field... I don't think Jeff Bezos gives a rat's tail what one of his ex-coders thinks. Plus, Google's storybook offices are indeed the exception and not the rule. He paints this picture of Amazon's offices like they're something out of a Charles Dickens novel, and then goes on to savage Amazon and Bezos for not giving to charities (wonder what he thought of Apple?) and "political" matters (What political matters, Google guy? Did he not support your favored candidate or something?).
Methinks this fella has an axe to grind. He might have some points, but the Amazon rants come off as bitter, and frankly, just how bad are they doing things if they're that successful? Bezos may indeed be a tyrant, but... so what? So was Jobs and Larry Ellison and Ted Turner and most other driven business visionaries. Again, Google is the exception, not the rule here. And yet, for as great as he says they are, he sure seems to be unhappy about how they do things in the end.
People's Liberation Army (inc. ground, air, and naval forces) Active Duty - 2,285,000 Reserves - 800, 000 2010 Military Budget - $114,000,000,000 (ranked 2nd), 2.2% of GDP
United States Armed Forces Active Duty - 1,477,896 Reserves - 1,458,500 2010 Military budget - $698,105,000,000 (ranked 1st), 4.7% of GDP
The US Navy has a larger number of combat vessels, but not by much... 286 vs approx 230 for the Chinese Navy (and not including the PLAN's almost 300 small patrol missile boats, and counting neither sides' non-combat auxiliary ships). We do have a large advantage in aircraft, which offsets the heavy Chinese advantage in ground troops and armor. This also doesn't account for the nearly 1.5 million "paramilitary" forces of China... basically, forces that are technically kinds of police units, but receive infantry training and equipment, on the Soviet model, and are used for "internal security" and are under command of the PLA staff.
The US does indeed spend much more in dollar terms than China does, but that's because China has traditionally relied upon the Soviet model: high quantity of weapons and people at low costs. They're beginning to change that, moving to fewer numbers, with more expensive and capable weapons. Since WWII, the US has relied upon a fewer-but-more-advanced model of equipment procurement. New technologies are almost always developed here first, and so they naturally cost more, especially since the goal is always to have more advanced stuff than possible opponents. As a past Joint Chief said, "If it comes down to war, we don't want a fair fight. We want it heavily unfair, on our side".
Now, I think we have a lot of room to cut in DOD, but I certainly agree with that philosophy.
The US budget also includes money for a land war, and a second post-combat occupation force. You can question of the wisdom of either, but clearly it raises the budget numbers above normal peacetime levels, even for a technologicaly-advanced military force.
Bottom line, the US isn't "ten times" anything compared to Chinese forces, and the advantages we do have are slipping away, and will continue to do so as the US cuts it's military budget and China catches up in the technology gap (and increases their budget, which they'e done every year).
It's not the administration's fault, it's Congress. NASA HQ and the administration didn't even want to build SLS -- they wanted to bolster the commercial launch market instead -- and were forced to do it by the Congressional committee.
No, you don't get to do that. The Obama Administration eagerly embraced civilian launch alternatives. It was in no way forced to do so. It saw civilian launch systems as a good justification for cutting NASA at a time when he needed to show he was willing to cut something. It was actually many Republicans that complained about this, because it would have affected NASA installations in their districts. So it's completely dishonest to say "This isn't on Obama, the Congress made him do it". Bunk. OMB is an executive budget department, not Congressional (it is in fact a cabinet level office, with political appointments at the top). This is an Obama Administration priority.
I'm not an Obama supporter in general, but I do support him in this, because I agree with him (even if my own congresscritters do not).
But you CANNOT divorce him from this policy decision. Whether you think it's for good or ill, this is HIS position, and no one forced him to take it.
NASA budget: $19 billion US military budget: $685 billion (including $79 billion for R&D alone)
If you do a pie chart of the federal budget, NASA barely even gets a sliver.
That's one of the oddities I've seen among those who generally oppose government spending: They tend to have a wildly distorted view of where most of the federal spending actually goes. The big items that account for almost all of it are Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, the military, and interest on previously accumulated debt, so if you're really trying to reduce the size of government, you have to do something about those.
You're absolutely right about NASA not consuming nearly as much as other parts of the budget. But neither is NASA a mandated constitutional duty as defense is. So it's naturally going to get a lower priority as it's considered discretionary spending.
Now, that said, I completely agree with you on the issue of where the budget problems are (entitlements, entitlements, entitlements), but even being of a more hawkish disposition than not, I'll be the first to tell you that there's plenty to cut in DOD's budget as well ($7 billion for a freakin' destroyer?), but even then, the public probably isn't going to support a higher NASA budget much, especially in times of high unemployment. I think small, cheap probes to other worlds, and perhaps a manned mission to an asteroid, are about as good as we can expect to get. You could cut DOD in half, and you're still not going to get more dollars for NASA. Just the way it is.
"Some of them really do look around and say that the world NEEDS superheroes"
They may even be right, but they seem to have forgotten a core tenant of super-heroing: the secret identity. Spider-Man and Daredevil and Batman don't go on TV shows, use their real names, or wait for cops to arrive. They wear a mask, keep their identity secret, kick the crap out of bad guys, and then get out of dodge before the police arrive (a heavy subplot of the early days of Batman is that the cops were trying to nab him as hard as the criminals, remember?)
If you're going to be a costumed vigilante... a risky thing, no matter what, perhaps even dangerous to the point of stupid... then wear a mask, hang out in the shadows, and when you beat up the bad guys (or in this case, pepper sprayed them), leave, stat. Because with all of the red tape in the legal system, you're as likely to be arrested or locked up as a looney or as the bad guys you're trying to protect people from. That's life. There's no place where lawyers and red tape don't reach. If you can be arrested for using force for defending your own property (and in many places, yes, you can), then you're certainly going to get no slack when you wade into a bunch of punks. The law is going to see you as just another guy making trouble, arrest you, and charge you.
Fewer people are going to, with their boneheaded moves of late. I don't use anything McAfee makes, but after breaking so many plugins, perhaps the better advice would be "disable Firefox".
MS does research? For real? I thought all they did was buy startups and competitors, some of which had done research in the past, or are winding down R+D after the purchase.
Please don't confuse research grants from the bill gates charitable foundation with "MS does long term research".
You're already being hammered by other posters, so I won't add insult to injury here. I'll just say this: a friend of mine is a deeply knowledgeable man in computing. He's working on his PhD dissertation in CompSci. He's published several books, one for O'Reilly. He's a senior developer for a west coast tech company. He's pretty high up the food chain in a major open source project. And though he's a Linux guy to the core, he told me he once considered working for Microsoft Research, because it's one of the premier shops in the world. He echoed something that Gene Spafford from Purdue said, that Microsoft has some of the brightest people anywhere. MS spends a lot of money on research. They certainly acquire a lot of other companies, but make no mistake, they spend a considerable amount of money in their own labs as well.
"This is classic lying right wing Republican bullshit. Find an entertainment figure that you despise, then trash what they say in order to make Democrats seem like idiots. "
Lying? She said this on a televised fundraiser she threw, with lots of celebrities in the audience ( I don't know why, but I remember the camera panning in on Bruce Willis in particular).
Note: I went and looked it up, and it was her One Voice concert in 1986, done specifically to raise money for Democratic candidates for the Senate.
"So the Republicans are the party of stupid. And you fit right in."
I've heard this interpretation before, but an awful lot of Christians still cite Leviticus whenever it suits,
That's because Christianity isn't just "love+love more". Christ, Paul, and the other Apostles definitely established that. Jesus of Nazareth was not some hippy. He was a deeply radical messiah, and laid down the law, and demanded absolute priority of devotion. "He who loves father or brother more than me is not worthy of me".
I really hate it when people try to turn Christianity into some kind of "I'm OK, You're OK" movement, when Christ's own words demonstrate this to be as far as possible from the truth.
While Christ certainly prioritized some commands "love thy neighbor as thyself", he and his apostles made it very clear that while followers were not "under the law" anymore, a lot of the old moral codes were still in place.
Still think this was a wise financial decision to make?
If you need a nuclear deterrent, (and back then most people thought we did) then yes, especially compared to manned bombers. You're going to pay upfront costs for that deterrent. At least this way, you get double duty out of it.
... we've been doing this for years. Converting USAF ICBM's into non-warhead launch vehicles isn't exactly a new practice. We've been doing this since the late 50's. A lot of early NASA launches were on ex-USAF Atlas missiles. The earlier Minoaturs were based on decommissioned Minuteman II's. Now it's the Peacekeeper's turn. One day, Minuteman III's will be retired to launch duty too. It just makes sense to do so. I remember Barbara Streisand giving a speech back in the 80's, about how buying ICBMs was wasteful because "they'd never be used". Shows what she knew. We were sending up a lot of converted Titan missiles as launch platforms during that period. So I don't know why this is news. Using these converted missiles has been a standard (and economical) practice for a long, long time now.
Ah, I made the mistake of assuming you were a Brit. Regardless, there are negotiations going on right to between the UK and France on sharing that second flattop.
Continuing in the tradition of the Nimrod fiasco, you guys have a whole new MOD fiasco going: your aircraft carriers. On this side of the pond, we're told that you couldn't cancel the ships because penalties would have eventually cost as much as the completed ships themselves, and that you're going to sell off the first one you build. We hear India is interested. And we hear that the second one might be "shared" with France. Wow. Truly, Lord Nelson is rolling in his grave.
...among "open source" companies. Because their model is as close to a closed-source company as they can be without violating licenses. Want a non-paid copy of their OS? Sure, but we're going to make it hard for you to find, and you'd better be able to compile everything from source yourself.
Note: I'm not knocking Red Hat here. I think they're actually smart, and I think they're successful because they operate more as a profit-seeking enterprise than an idealistic "lets make a few bucks while we change the world" enterprise. Clearly, the balance sheet is more important to them than the idealism. That's how you make money. Red Hat is becoming more like Apple or Oracle than the Red Hat of old. Which means that unlike most open source companies, they'll probably remain profitable.
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Once it became clear which way the wind was blowing, the US didn't have a whole lot of choice but support "Arab Spring". What was the alternative? Encourage a Syrian-style slaughter
The alternative was to stay out of it at that point. We also backed the Ayatollah in Iran in 1979 because "that's where the wind was blowing". That turned out well,eh?
Libya was like the Spanish Civil War in many respects. There was no "good side". Just as Spain had Communists vs. Fascists, Libya had Qaddafi vs. Islamists. Best to just stay out of it.
Congress can't regulate commerce without a Department of Commerce? Funny. They did just that for many years.
No more energy research, no more parks, no more public education, no more low income housing, no more roads & bridges. What a grand utopia he has planned for us.
I'm not a Paul supporter... his foriegn policy views have too much Truther nuttiness to them... but what makes you think eliminating these agencies would get rid of all of what you listed? Has it ever occured to you that much of this could still be done by consolidating the work of some of these departments in other agencies? Why couldn't we move things like geographic surveys to the Department of the Interior? Why do we have to have a seperate agency for that? It just adds another level of bueacracy, and thus cost. Why would eliminating the Department of Education kill public schools? Didn't they exist for over a hundred years before we had a department of education? Aren't public schools run at the state and local level, anyway? So eliminating the Department of Education would mean public schools would dry up and blow away? And are you seriously suggesting that roads would no longer be built if these agencies were eliminated?
The federal government is way too big, does way too much, and the essential stuff can be done in smaller or merged agencies. I'm all for his government reduction plan (except for the POTUS pay cut... I think that's just symbolic silliness). Next, he needs to add some cuts to DOD, where there are a lot of redundancies (why do we have a "national reconaissance office", "national geospatial intelligence agency", "Marine Corps Intelligence Activity", etc). Look up Wikipedia's page on the US Intelligence Community. You're telling me that all this can't be done with CIA, Army Intelligence, and Navy Intelligence? We've got 16 intel agencies and a layer of bueacracy above them.
Liberals want to cut the military, and conservatives want to cut civilian departments. The truth is, we should cut both.
arab spring seems to be a shitty operation by u.s. to topple unfriendly governments to install their own islamist supporters and to oblige the countries to financial system.
Right. Which explains why one of the first governments that was overthrown in the "Arab Spring" was Egypt... a staunch US ally that the US had poured many billions of dollars into. Congratulations. You managed to set a new record for cluelessness.
The cluelessness is on the United States Government for buying into the "Arab Spring" crap in the first place. Had they bothered to actually look at who was driving this stuff, they'd have seen groups like the Muslim Brotherhood all along. Yeah, Mubarek was a staunch US ally, and we encouraged his downfall because our own stupid politcal class bought into the silly and naive narrative that this was all about democracy and freedom and liberty, and that a liberal democratic state was coming to Egypt. Again, the naivete and stupidty here on our part was just mind boggling.
So now they're killing Copts in the streets (with the army's help), burning down churches, and moving to Sharia law. How's that freedom tasting now?
There was never an "Arab Spring". It was always an Islamist insurgency, and yes, the United States government encouraged and supported it, not because it believed Islamism was coming, but because it was thinking like a naive 19 year old from a college campus and bought the hype, especially the State Department. There's your cluelessness.
In the words of the MB spokesman
Words are one thing. Actions are another. And right now, the rebels are doing lovely things like forcibly removing blacks from Libya.
The truth of it is that NATO just helped a bunch of Islamists take over Libya. They helped kill a guy that made a deal with the West (give up WMD's, turn over intelligence to us, get out of terrorism, and open your markets and play nice with us), and then turned around and started bombing him. Qaddafi, though a horrible man, did everything demanded of him in order to make peace with the West. That was the difference between him and Saddam. Saddam never abided by the sanctions, and never renounced his intention to establish a new empire in the Arab world (however hollow those dreams became after the Gulf War). Qaddafi took the deal instead.
Dictators are going to take two lessons from Libya: never trust the West when they offer you a deal, and nukes=respect, so get some atom bombs, stat.
Ever since the iLine, and Steve Jobs turning from a benevolent genius to a narcissistic, goose stepping lunatic, the scene has changed to apple being creative, and you can too, just as long as you're creative in the "Apple" sanctioned way.
Do you know anything about Steve Jobs' history?
He was always a "goose stepping lunatic", as you put it. He was always obsessed with his idea of perfection, to the point where many of the early software engineers on the Mac project absolutely hated his guts. If you disagreed with his ideas, you weren't just wrong, you were wrong, stupid, and bad.
One of the reasons he was forced out at Apple the first time was that he was absolutely awful to work with (there's a bracing account in one of the biographies about him of a trip he took to Sony's floppy drive factory in Japan, and he made such an ass of himself that Mike Markkula puled him aside and reprimanded him).
Steve Jobs was many things, but he was never, ever benevolent. He's always been a cult-of-personality dictator from his earliest days, and Jobs was always trying to push people into his vision of what genius and creativity was. This notion that he was some great supporter of freedom of computer users is nothing but marketing tripe. Jobs... and by extension, Apple... wasn't so much for freedom as they were for a world that they thought was cool, and they were going to make you pay plenty for the privilege of being part of it. You make it sound like Jobs was some kind of technical-artistic libertarian. Nothing could be further from the truth. Jobs wasn't fighting for your freedom to do things the way you wanted to. He was fighting for your dollars so you'd do things the way he wanted you to.
The only difference between Early Jobs and Late Jobs is that Late Jobs was actually a good businessman, due to hard lessons learned from his money-losing experience at NeXT.
Rats and other rodents will chew on anything soft enough to chew on.
Yes they will. I remember reading back in college about German armor divisions having lots of trouble on the eastern front due to rats and mice. In very cold conditions, the Wehrmacht would park their tanks in barns with lots of hay in an attempt to keep them from freezing up, and rodents would get into them and chew the wiring up. When I was younger, I had a couple of pet rats, and learned that they'll chew on pretty much anything. There's a hard, rock-like substance that you buy in pet stores for them, and they chew on it out of natural instinct to keep their teeth worn down. Rodent teeth never stop growing, so if they don't chew on something, their teeth will get too long and injure them.
Now, however, owing to the resurgence of pettiness as the primary means of political discourse, it's indistinguishable from the House except in the cost incurred in stealing the votes necessary to enter it.
It's indistinguishable from the House because, thanks to the 17th Amendment, it's nothing but another version of the House with longer terms and more power.
You assume the Senate is functioning...
But what about cases where it is not, like now?
The Senate is functioning as it was designed to, as a break on both the House and the Presidency. The Senate was never supposed to be a rubber-stamp, for either the President or the House.
The whole point of a Senate is to have a group of men to take a deep look at what the House (which was always supposed to be the popular voice of the people) passes in the heat of the moment, and it was designed to prevent the President from becoming a Caesar. This is why treaties have to be voted on by the Senate, and why the President's appointments to his cabinet and to SCOTUS have to be reviewed, scrutinized, and voted on by the Senate. This is also why Senators were not popularly elected when the Constitution was written, but appointed by state legislators. The whole idea of the founders was to put a second party into the Congress that was indirectly responsible to the people (via their elected state houses), but not popularly elected, and thus less subject to the passions of the moment. I used to support popular election of Senators, but the older I've gotten, the more I think the founders had it right in the first place, and that the 17th Amendment was a mistake.
Also, if you want things to pass easier in the Senate... the way they do in the House, with a simple majority vote, well, the way is clear here. Just demand that the Senate drop their unique rules requiring 60 votes. That rule is not in the Constitution, but an internal Senate rule (which the Constitution permits).
Just be careful before you demand this. Because if the Senate goes to simple-majority vote, so can future Senates... ones where the other party is the majority.
Trade agreements are a form of treaty, and treaties have to be voted on by the Senate. The Constitution does this for a good reason, preventing the President from unilaterally committing the United States to international agreements. Wyden is right on this. And ACTA is clearly a trade agreement. Send this to the Senate first for a vote.
I interviewed at Amazon once, what he says is true about the offices, they didn't look very clean and impressive. That's a bad impression right there.
Well, duh. I've worked for a bunch of tech companies, and when they decided that spending a ton of money on a fancy office was better than spending the money on hardware and employees, that was always a pretty good sign that it was going downhill.
The writer goes to great lengths to discuss how Amazon does almost nothing right. He went on to state that Amazon's interface sucks (because of Bezos, natch), and how awful it was that the Apple human interface guy that was brought in was ignored.
Looking at the money Amazon is bringing in, looking at the way Amazon absolutely dominates their field... I don't think Jeff Bezos gives a rat's tail what one of his ex-coders thinks. Plus, Google's storybook offices are indeed the exception and not the rule. He paints this picture of Amazon's offices like they're something out of a Charles Dickens novel, and then goes on to savage Amazon and Bezos for not giving to charities (wonder what he thought of Apple?) and "political" matters (What political matters, Google guy? Did he not support your favored candidate or something?).
Methinks this fella has an axe to grind. He might have some points, but the Amazon rants come off as bitter, and frankly, just how bad are they doing things if they're that successful? Bezos may indeed be a tyrant, but... so what? So was Jobs and Larry Ellison and Ted Turner and most other driven business visionaries. Again, Google is the exception, not the rule here. And yet, for as great as he says they are, he sure seems to be unhappy about how they do things in the end.
Our military is TEN TIMES that of China.
Exactly how are you determining that?
People's Liberation Army (inc. ground, air, and naval forces)
Active Duty - 2,285,000
Reserves - 800, 000
2010 Military Budget - $114,000,000,000 (ranked 2nd), 2.2% of GDP
United States Armed Forces
Active Duty - 1,477,896
Reserves - 1,458,500
2010 Military budget - $698,105,000,000 (ranked 1st), 4.7% of GDP
The US Navy has a larger number of combat vessels, but not by much... 286 vs approx 230 for the Chinese Navy (and not including the PLAN's almost 300 small patrol missile boats, and counting neither sides' non-combat auxiliary ships). We do have a large advantage in aircraft, which offsets the heavy Chinese advantage in ground troops and armor. This also doesn't account for the nearly 1.5 million "paramilitary" forces of China... basically, forces that are technically kinds of police units, but receive infantry training and equipment, on the Soviet model, and are used for "internal security" and are under command of the PLA staff.
The US does indeed spend much more in dollar terms than China does, but that's because China has traditionally relied upon the Soviet model: high quantity of weapons and people at low costs. They're beginning to change that, moving to fewer numbers, with more expensive and capable weapons. Since WWII, the US has relied upon a fewer-but-more-advanced model of equipment procurement. New technologies are almost always developed here first, and so they naturally cost more, especially since the goal is always to have more advanced stuff than possible opponents. As a past Joint Chief said, "If it comes down to war, we don't want a fair fight. We want it heavily unfair, on our side".
Now, I think we have a lot of room to cut in DOD, but I certainly agree with that philosophy.
The US budget also includes money for a land war, and a second post-combat occupation force. You can question of the wisdom of either, but clearly it raises the budget numbers above normal peacetime levels, even for a technologicaly-advanced military force.
Bottom line, the US isn't "ten times" anything compared to Chinese forces, and the advantages we do have are slipping away, and will continue to do so as the US cuts it's military budget and China catches up in the technology gap (and increases their budget, which they'e done every year).
It's not the administration's fault, it's Congress. NASA HQ and the administration didn't even want to build SLS -- they wanted to bolster the commercial launch market instead -- and were forced to do it by the Congressional committee.
No, you don't get to do that. The Obama Administration eagerly embraced civilian launch alternatives. It was in no way forced to do so. It saw civilian launch systems as a good justification for cutting NASA at a time when he needed to show he was willing to cut something. It was actually many Republicans that complained about this, because it would have affected NASA installations in their districts. So it's completely dishonest to say "This isn't on Obama, the Congress made him do it". Bunk. OMB is an executive budget department, not Congressional (it is in fact a cabinet level office, with political appointments at the top). This is an Obama Administration priority.
I'm not an Obama supporter in general, but I do support him in this, because I agree with him (even if my own congresscritters do not).
But you CANNOT divorce him from this policy decision. Whether you think it's for good or ill, this is HIS position, and no one forced him to take it.
NASA uses a lot of tax money
NASA budget: $19 billion
US military budget: $685 billion (including $79 billion for R&D alone)
If you do a pie chart of the federal budget, NASA barely even gets a sliver.
That's one of the oddities I've seen among those who generally oppose government spending: They tend to have a wildly distorted view of where most of the federal spending actually goes. The big items that account for almost all of it are Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, the military, and interest on previously accumulated debt, so if you're really trying to reduce the size of government, you have to do something about those.
You're absolutely right about NASA not consuming nearly as much as other parts of the budget. But neither is NASA a mandated constitutional duty as defense is. So it's naturally going to get a lower priority as it's considered discretionary spending.
Now, that said, I completely agree with you on the issue of where the budget problems are (entitlements, entitlements, entitlements), but even being of a more hawkish disposition than not, I'll be the first to tell you that there's plenty to cut in DOD's budget as well ($7 billion for a freakin' destroyer?), but even then, the public probably isn't going to support a higher NASA budget much, especially in times of high unemployment. I think small, cheap probes to other worlds, and perhaps a manned mission to an asteroid, are about as good as we can expect to get. You could cut DOD in half, and you're still not going to get more dollars for NASA. Just the way it is.
"Some of them really do look around and say that the world NEEDS superheroes"
They may even be right, but they seem to have forgotten a core tenant of super-heroing: the secret identity. Spider-Man and Daredevil and Batman don't go on TV shows, use their real names, or wait for cops to arrive. They wear a mask, keep their identity secret, kick the crap out of bad guys, and then get out of dodge before the police arrive (a heavy subplot of the early days of Batman is that the cops were trying to nab him as hard as the criminals, remember?)
If you're going to be a costumed vigilante... a risky thing, no matter what, perhaps even dangerous to the point of stupid... then wear a mask, hang out in the shadows, and when you beat up the bad guys (or in this case, pepper sprayed them), leave, stat. Because with all of the red tape in the legal system, you're as likely to be arrested or locked up as a looney or as the bad guys you're trying to protect people from. That's life. There's no place where lawyers and red tape don't reach. If you can be arrested for using force for defending your own property (and in many places, yes, you can), then you're certainly going to get no slack when you wade into a bunch of punks. The law is going to see you as just another guy making trouble, arrest you, and charge you.
Fewer people are going to, with their boneheaded moves of late. I don't use anything McAfee makes, but after breaking so many plugins, perhaps the better advice would be "disable Firefox".
As the Earth heats, we can expect to find less arable land.
That's news to Africans seeing the desert go green around them as it becomes more moist, not less.
Throughout Earth's history, hot = wet, most of the time.
MS does research? For real? I thought all they did was buy startups and competitors, some of which had done research in the past, or are winding down R+D after the purchase.
Please don't confuse research grants from the bill gates charitable foundation with "MS does long term research".
You're already being hammered by other posters, so I won't add insult to injury here. I'll just say this: a friend of mine is a deeply knowledgeable man in computing. He's working on his PhD dissertation in CompSci. He's published several books, one for O'Reilly. He's a senior developer for a west coast tech company. He's pretty high up the food chain in a major open source project. And though he's a Linux guy to the core, he told me he once considered working for Microsoft Research, because it's one of the premier shops in the world. He echoed something that Gene Spafford from Purdue said, that Microsoft has some of the brightest people anywhere. MS spends a lot of money on research. They certainly acquire a lot of other companies, but make no mistake, they spend a considerable amount of money in their own labs as well.
"This is classic lying right wing Republican bullshit. Find an entertainment figure that you despise, then trash what they say in order to make Democrats seem like idiots. "
Lying? She said this on a televised fundraiser she threw, with lots of celebrities in the audience ( I don't know why, but I remember the camera panning in on Bruce Willis in particular).
Note: I went and looked it up, and it was her One Voice concert in 1986, done specifically to raise money for Democratic candidates for the Senate.
"So the Republicans are the party of stupid. And you fit right in."
And you're still wrong. She said it.
I've heard this interpretation before, but an awful lot of Christians still cite Leviticus whenever it suits,
That's because Christianity isn't just "love+love more". Christ, Paul, and the other Apostles definitely established that. Jesus of Nazareth was not some hippy. He was a deeply radical messiah, and laid down the law, and demanded absolute priority of devotion. "He who loves father or brother more than me is not worthy of me".
I really hate it when people try to turn Christianity into some kind of "I'm OK, You're OK" movement, when Christ's own words demonstrate this to be as far as possible from the truth.
While Christ certainly prioritized some commands "love thy neighbor as thyself", he and his apostles made it very clear that while followers were not "under the law" anymore, a lot of the old moral codes were still in place.
Still think this was a wise financial decision to make?
If you need a nuclear deterrent, (and back then most people thought we did) then yes, especially compared to manned bombers. You're going to pay upfront costs for that deterrent. At least this way, you get double duty out of it.
... we've been doing this for years. Converting USAF ICBM's into non-warhead launch vehicles isn't exactly a new practice. We've been doing this since the late 50's. A lot of early NASA launches were on ex-USAF Atlas missiles. The earlier Minoaturs were based on decommissioned Minuteman II's. Now it's the Peacekeeper's turn. One day, Minuteman III's will be retired to launch duty too. It just makes sense to do so. I remember Barbara Streisand giving a speech back in the 80's, about how buying ICBMs was wasteful because "they'd never be used". Shows what she knew. We were sending up a lot of converted Titan missiles as launch platforms during that period. So I don't know why this is news. Using these converted missiles has been a standard (and economical) practice for a long, long time now.
Ah, I made the mistake of assuming you were a Brit. Regardless, there are negotiations going on right to between the UK and France on sharing that second flattop.
Continuing in the tradition of the Nimrod fiasco, you guys have a whole new MOD fiasco going: your aircraft carriers. On this side of the pond, we're told that you couldn't cancel the ships because penalties would have eventually cost as much as the completed ships themselves, and that you're going to sell off the first one you build. We hear India is interested. And we hear that the second one might be "shared" with France. Wow. Truly, Lord Nelson is rolling in his grave.
...among "open source" companies. Because their model is as close to a closed-source company as they can be without violating licenses. Want a non-paid copy of their OS? Sure, but we're going to make it hard for you to find, and you'd better be able to compile everything from source yourself.
Note: I'm not knocking Red Hat here. I think they're actually smart, and I think they're successful because they operate more as a profit-seeking enterprise than an idealistic "lets make a few bucks while we change the world" enterprise. Clearly, the balance sheet is more important to them than the idealism. That's how you make money. Red Hat is becoming more like Apple or Oracle than the Red Hat of old. Which means that unlike most open source companies, they'll probably remain profitable.