"The mother of all parliaments is located in London, not Washington."
And if that Parliament actually represented all British subjects at the time, we might not have had the American Revolution, would we? "No taxation without representation" and all that.
I'm also curious about the history of the voting qualifications for elections of members of the House of Commons as compared to the House of Representatives (but I suspect that would be an exhaustive research project on both sides). And even before the ratification of the Seventeenth Amendment I'd say the US Senate was a bit more democratic in nature than the House of Lords, which is still stacked with aristocracy.
We also held a presidential election and two legislative elections in the middle of it (as did the Confederacy), and that doesn't count state elections on both sides. The democratic process, at least in the national government, has continued unabated since the ratification of the current constution in 1788.
"Now if they could just apply the same reasoning to bootlegged booze"
What "same reasoning?" It's still considered copyright violation if you distributed the recording free of charge (say, on a P2P network), but federal law is pretty explicit that you don't need to pay alchohol taxes on homemade beer or wine intended for personal/family/household use, up to 200 gallons per year. Heck, you can legally brew the stuff even if you're not legally old enough to purchase it.
Don't like bootleg laws? Remember: beer wants to be free (as in speech as in beer as in speech)!
Re:America is not allowed to control its immigrati
on
The Jobs Crunch
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Well, there's the whole "all men are created equal" bit that suggests that citizenship to those that truly desire it should not be denied to anybody by basis of accident of birth (or are you suggesting a "divine right of natural-born citizens?"), and our constitution only says Congress can set naturalization policy (how people can become citizens) and doesn't say anything about them being able to set immigration quotas and who gets to go through said naturalization process.
So it's not so much that you're white, it's that you don't have a moral leg to stand on in light of what this country is supposed to be based on. If you're worried about maintaining any sort of social demographic by way of law (be that immigration law or otherwise), you're in the wrong country.
From a statistical piont of view, the Philippines, Poland and Nigeria make an interesting combination of countries to take such a minority opinion. Personally, I can't think of much the three have in common (or any two of them, for that matter): a former US colony, a former Warsaw Pact member and one of the "more better" governments in Africa.
At any rate, the BBC article mentions that 35 countries were polled, but only list results from a handful (mostly G7 members and ahem "Old Europe," from the looks of it). Where are the rest of the numbers?
Yes, but you don't hear many people crying out to make the metric system illegal in the US, do you? Nor do you see people get bent out of shape by measuring in decimal gallons, but try to use common fractions in a metric unit and you can start a riot.
And knowing what year a measurement in US gallons was made isn't as important as knowing what year a liter measurement was made, by about a factor of 20. If only BIPM stuck with defining the unit of volume by the unit of length (like the US has done since the beginning of the Nineteenth Century) instead of flip-flopping back and forth between cubic decimeters and kilograms the way they did...
Back to the topic of prefixes, they're all well and good until you have to deal with the historical error of basing the unit of mass first on the mililiter instead of the liter. 10 meters is a dekameter, 10 seconds is a dekasecond, 10 kelvin is a dekakelivn, but the BIPM won't allow you to say "dekakilogram" any more, even though the base unit of mass in SI is the kilogram. Nothing is stopping you from saying "dekapound" though; there's no SI monopoly on prefixes.
"My expectation is that if we eliminate the Fed's monopoly on currency provision, the Fed will continue exist -- it will just have to compete with other currency options on a truly level playing field without the government demanding that its currency be accepted instead of others. People can decide whether they want to hold their wealth in green pieces of paper backed only by seven trillion dollars in debt, or in currency coined of, or backed by, some scarce commodity."
Gripe: A currency backed on a valuable commodity (say, gold) is then cast to the winds on that commodity's market. If the price of gold goes down (say, a large chunk of it falls out of the sky), the value of your currency goes down. At least with a floating currency you have a little more control over what happens to it than simply relying on geology.
Also don't forget that currency backed by a precious metal effectively sets the price for that precious metal. I remember seeing someone gripe about a Nevada proposal to mint $20 silver coins with only ~$5 worth of silver content because of the apparent disparity between what's in the coin and what's written on it. Doing that isn't "cheating" so much as increasing the value of silver within the State of Nevada by 400% So much for free market ideology.
And then there's what goes along with pinning your currency to precious metals: restrictions on what you can do with said precious metals. The US stopped minting circulating coins that contained gold in the 1930's, silver was removed from circulating coints in the 1960's, and yet laws restricting the amount of precious metals any person can own or transfer at one time were only repealed in the Ford administration.
And let's not forget the purpose of those laws: keeping people from wreaking havoc with the larger economy by messing with the precious metal markets. Today, somebody who has a gold meteorite land in his backyard can do mean and nasty things to the gold market. But what if the US dollar is pegged to the value of gold again? Even without precious metal standards we have foreign governments trying to tweak the value of the US dollar in their favor; in order to consistently undercut the cost of labor in the North American Free Trade Area, the PRC has pegged their yuan to the dollar; in order to prop up the yen (and hence their exports), the Japanese banking system is buying US dollars at a premium, trying to reverse the dollar's current inflation. Things like this won't be quite so easy for our government to catch and diplomatically complain about when they're done to whatever the dollar is based on and not the dollar directly.
(Heck, the fact that China has pegged their currency to something makes me question the wisdom of the US doing something similar.)
Comment: The new federalist in me would like to point out that states still have the right to mint their own gold and silver coin (see previous allusion to Nevada). Why should the national government get involved in something the states can do on their own?
If he's so insistent on fuck^H^H^H^H having a direct influence on monetary policy, why doesn't he start relatively small and just print up some United States Notes (as opposed to Federal Reserve Notes) like the Kennedy administration did?
"If you or I want to unseat or kill a thug like Saddam Hussein, we're morally free to do so. He's a tyrant and a murderer. We'd only be acting on behalf of his victims."
"Morally free," yes. "Legally free?" No. Private citizens only get to do stuff like that against nations the US had declared war on. Congress is the only thing authorized to make war on another government, and is constitutionally authorized to have mean and nasty things done to you if you try to exercise Congress' authority on your own like that.
After all, some Americans may see a "moral freedom" to, say, actively support Quebecois independence like that. In fact, there's a long history of US citizens trying to get involve
How is that "government intervention" if the lands in question are already owned by the government? As the owners of the property, it is well within their rights as the seller to place restrictions in the deed.
"They used the phrases "tens of centimeters" and "tens of degrees celsius"."
What they've done there is given you the order of magnitude for the measurements. Letting you know that it's in "tens of centimeters" is very accurate since you now know it's not picometers or kilometers. You now know the proper exponent to use in scientific notation.
<SARCASM SLANT="anti-metrication"> Of course, now the question is "Why 'tens of centimeters' instead of 'decimeters' and why 'tens of degrees Celcius' instead of 'dekadegrees Celsius?" After all, standardized symbols "dm" and "daC" are supposed to be all metric and international and more understandable than the English word "ten," yadda yadda... </SARCASM>
Let's see... the People's Republic of China gets as many votes as the Federated States of Micronesia (namely, one), so it's not democratic in the popular sense (double entendre!)
"Democratic" can be more broadly defined as being selected by a mechanism through which the people at large have ultimate control. The US ambassador to the UN is selected by a democratically-elected president and approved by a democratically-elected Senate, so it can be said that the American people have ultimate (though indirect) control of the US vote in the UN, and from what I gather the situation in Ireland and the rest of the "Western" world is fairly similar. However, the people in many UN member states in Asia and Africa (to name a few) have no influence in their government or their government's choice of UN ambassadors short of armed rebellion, so Annan's position cannot be easily called "democratic" even in that broader definition.
The UN is not a democracy, it is an oligarchy. Just because a slim minority in that oligarchy are chosen by a democratic process doesn't make the body as a whole democratic. In that sense, Annan and Allawi came into their jobs in exactly the same way, they were just chosen by different people (some of whom you apparently don't agree with).
Require member states to have a verifiably democratic government (much like what is required of US member states), and maybe toss in a "lower house" to the General Assembly that are elected by direct popular vote, and then we can start talking about "UN democracy."
"If you think I'm talking waffle then google 'canary wharf IRA' and compare that with last weekends round of talks where sworn enemies are now sitting around a table to talk."
Diplomacy only works when both sides are rational and the parties at the table actually care about what happens to the people they claim to represent.
Of course, I get all my virus news from emails from Bill Gates and AOL. They're always nice enough to attach a cure for the virus as well. Would you like me to forward them on to you as soon as I get them?
Franklin Roosevelt was rich but he certainly wasn't rich enough to bankroll the entire Manhattan Project on his own. Instead, he went to the democratically-elected Congress (you know, the arm of the US government that controls the purse strings of the nation?), told them "I'm building an atomic bomb" and they opened our wallets and said "How much?" (with our consent, what with the people electing them and all).
If you still don't like the idea of the people giving their consent to a secret project through a representative democracy, consider that they only built 3 in secret. The thousands of nuclear and eventually thermonuclear weapons that came in the decades afterwards were and are known about by the general public. After all, how does mutually-assured destruction work if the information isn't out there to assure potential attackers that the destruction would be mutual?
In 1958 Truman was cooling his heels in retirement and Eisenhower was well into his second term.
Only so long as those politicial views are categorized as "Republican" or "Democrat." "We've got both kinds of music..." Ever wonder why voter turn-out sucks?
Nader is a natural-born citizen older than 35. IMO, that's all he should ultimately need to be on the ballot.
I don't like Kerry. I don't like Ashcroft, which means I don't like Bush. I'm not all that keen on Nader here, the Green Party is just... no, I've got some big philosophical differences with Badnarik, and I don't thump a Bible enough for the so-called Constitution Party. What the hell is preferential voting going to do for me when I don't like any of the options? "This candidate doesn't suck ass as much as that candidate?"
"Well not really, tyically young people *are* more ready to question authority,"
Depends on what you call "authority." They may question their parents and the government, but how many younger people question MTV (or TV in general)? The "Don't trust anybody older than 30" is generally only applied to those people who wear a tie while being authoritative.
"He is the head of his party. His party happens to be in control of at least 2/3 of the branches of government."
There's no law saying his fellow party members must support him in all things and the solution to a weak-willed Congress isn't to try to find a way to influence them to your side but to start electing congresscritters with a spine.
"When the government actively works to wipe out such shortages, the government is damaging market forces."
But if the government actively works to maintain (if not sharpen) such shortages, it's "OK?"
"Allow me to explain. The USA, in isolation, is a relatively free market"
I just find it interesting how you are able to say "isolation" and "free" in the same sentence. The US is free so long as we keep our borders shut; we'll take your ideas and your money but not your people. Heck, if you want to make sure to maintain those precious labor shortages you seem so keen on, perhaps we should require workers have a government license before they're allowed to have a job.
Consider the current state of the US merchant fleet. US sailors are known as some of the most competent in the world, but also known as some of the most expensive, and as a result they can be as rare as hen's teeth. Congress' solution? Place more restrictions on who can serve on US-flagged vessels and on when US businesses can used foreign-flagged vessels (restrictions dating from the 1920's and 1930's). Result? US-flagged vessels have become as rare as US sailors, and the only time you're sure to see a US-flagged traffic is between two US ports (where they're legally required). If it were possible to get Alaskan oil and Hawaiian produce to the contiguous 48 without crossing international waters or borders, we might not have a merchant fleet at all any more. So much for what was once the largest merchant fleet in the world.
Cheap labor is out there, and closing your eyes and clicking your heels won't make it go away. Higher tariffs won't make the problem go away. Preventing outsourcing of labor is questionable for the short-term and ultimately flawed for the long-term; either US labor prices fall now as US businesses offshore, or they fall later as foreign businesses with access to those labor pools drive US businesses under. The only way you're going to solve the problem is to make the Chinese/Indian/whatever labor pools go away, and to do that you have two choices: genocide and immigration.
Don't like illegal aliens? Don't like H1-Bs? Fine. But make it easier for people to come into, live in, and work in the country so long as their intent is to stay long-term and become citizens. Heck, make it easier to achieve statehood. It will be painful (or at least distasteful) to US labor interests in the short term, but these people would be protected by US labor laws and it will ultimately benefit the US economy in the long term. The developing world cannot tempt jobs and business opportunities away from the US with cheap labor if said cheap labor is coming to the US.
However, it seems that, when confronted with the choice between immigration and genocide, many Americans would rather see the latter than the former.
"Stop spending $100s of billions on counterproductive wars, farm subsidies, ineffective weapons systems, etc."
All Bills for raising Revenue shall originate in the House of Representatives;
(...)
The Congress shall have Power To lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises, to pay the Debts and provide for the common Defence and general Welfare of the United States;
Number of bills vetoed by President Bush since being sworn into office: 0
I'm curious how many people who are quick to blame the White House for economic woes know who their congresscritters are, let alone who they're running against this November.
"Only if 3Com provided a IOS-like command line interface"
The only non-NIC 3com device I'm familiar with is my $300 OfficeConnect Dual 56k LAN modem (I didn't see anything else out there like it at the time). While "everything" is "supposed" to be configurable, there is an undocumented, unsupported, disavowed CLI interface accessable through Telnet that does a lot more than their port 80 stuff can do (like, say, filtering). Unfortunately, it's malformed (as if the people who made it cobbled it together like a hobby, with no real intent in making it completely functional) and it seems the odds of it being able to do even everything it claims to be able to do seems slim to none.
Between that and the way it locks up for inexplicable reasons (to the point where the disavowed Telnet interface is the only responsive interface at all) and needs to be hung up or reset... but it's not as if anybody else makes a small end-user router with two 56k modems, or at least not anybody that would sell me just one without having to set up a freakin' commercial account (are you listening, Cisco?)...
"The wars, revolutions and what-not that you refer to were under way when the intervention took place."
They're also examples of where things got much, much worse because the US didn't intervene.
"Nothing of the sort was happening in Iraq."
It did in the past, only we didn't do anything beyond enforcing no-fly zones and those that didn't get gassed got sent to prisons where they were fed into wood chippers and the like.
So the standard is to only intervene in successful revolutions?
Again, considering what was happening in Iraq, do you believe that no new revolution was festering in the country? To be successful, the revolutionaries would also have to have their own chemical weapons and be more willing to use them (a gas attack on Baghdad, perhaps). And it certainly wouldn't be limited to Iraq's borders; they'd lash out at everybody they perceived as Sadam's allies (Syrians, Palestinians, maybe the West for not helping them enough in their opinions...). After all, much (if not most) of the Islamist terrorism we're seeing now are people lashing out at Western countries because they see us as being allied with the governments of their own countries (whether that alliance is real or not).
Slashdot Mirror
"The mother of all parliaments is located in London, not Washington."
And if that Parliament actually represented all British subjects at the time, we might not have had the American Revolution, would we? "No taxation without representation" and all that.
I'm also curious about the history of the voting qualifications for elections of members of the House of Commons as compared to the House of Representatives (but I suspect that would be an exhaustive research project on both sides). And even before the ratification of the Seventeenth Amendment I'd say the US Senate was a bit more democratic in nature than the House of Lords, which is still stacked with aristocracy.
"You've had a civil war, after all,"
We also held a presidential election and two legislative elections in the middle of it (as did the Confederacy), and that doesn't count state elections on both sides. The democratic process, at least in the national government, has continued unabated since the ratification of the current constution in 1788.
"Now that I am dead, I can say anything I want without getting fired."
:)
Screw that, I'm saving one of those emails for a certain female coworker that's easy on the eyes.
"I AM NOT! It's just a trick to escape the IRS..."
So the whole Nigerian thing worked out for you?
"Now if they could just apply the same reasoning to bootlegged booze"
What "same reasoning?" It's still considered copyright violation if you distributed the recording free of charge (say, on a P2P network), but federal law is pretty explicit that you don't need to pay alchohol taxes on homemade beer or wine intended for personal/family/household use, up to 200 gallons per year. Heck, you can legally brew the stuff even if you're not legally old enough to purchase it.
Don't like bootleg laws? Remember: beer wants to be free (as in speech as in beer as in speech)!
Well, there's the whole "all men are created equal" bit that suggests that citizenship to those that truly desire it should not be denied to anybody by basis of accident of birth (or are you suggesting a "divine right of natural-born citizens?"), and our constitution only says Congress can set naturalization policy (how people can become citizens) and doesn't say anything about them being able to set immigration quotas and who gets to go through said naturalization process.
So it's not so much that you're white, it's that you don't have a moral leg to stand on in light of what this country is supposed to be based on. If you're worried about maintaining any sort of social demographic by way of law (be that immigration law or otherwise), you're in the wrong country.
"but not many people are going to understand FOI or GIS."
I know what they are! They're spells from Phantasy Star... aren't they?
From a statistical piont of view, the Philippines, Poland and Nigeria make an interesting combination of countries to take such a minority opinion. Personally, I can't think of much the three have in common (or any two of them, for that matter): a former US colony, a former Warsaw Pact member and one of the "more better" governments in Africa.
At any rate, the BBC article mentions that 35 countries were polled, but only list results from a handful (mostly G7 members and ahem "Old Europe," from the looks of it). Where are the rest of the numbers?
Yes, but you don't hear many people crying out to make the metric system illegal in the US, do you? Nor do you see people get bent out of shape by measuring in decimal gallons, but try to use common fractions in a metric unit and you can start a riot.
And knowing what year a measurement in US gallons was made isn't as important as knowing what year a liter measurement was made, by about a factor of 20. If only BIPM stuck with defining the unit of volume by the unit of length (like the US has done since the beginning of the Nineteenth Century) instead of flip-flopping back and forth between cubic decimeters and kilograms the way they did...
Back to the topic of prefixes, they're all well and good until you have to deal with the historical error of basing the unit of mass first on the mililiter instead of the liter. 10 meters is a dekameter, 10 seconds is a dekasecond, 10 kelvin is a dekakelivn, but the BIPM won't allow you to say "dekakilogram" any more, even though the base unit of mass in SI is the kilogram. Nothing is stopping you from saying "dekapound" though; there's no SI monopoly on prefixes.
"My expectation is that if we eliminate the Fed's monopoly on currency provision, the Fed will continue exist -- it will just have to compete with other currency options on a truly level playing field without the government demanding that its currency be accepted instead of others. People can decide whether they want to hold their wealth in green pieces of paper backed only by seven trillion dollars in debt, or in currency coined of, or backed by, some scarce commodity."
Gripe: A currency backed on a valuable commodity (say, gold) is then cast to the winds on that commodity's market. If the price of gold goes down (say, a large chunk of it falls out of the sky), the value of your currency goes down. At least with a floating currency you have a little more control over what happens to it than simply relying on geology.
Also don't forget that currency backed by a precious metal effectively sets the price for that precious metal. I remember seeing someone gripe about a Nevada proposal to mint $20 silver coins with only ~$5 worth of silver content because of the apparent disparity between what's in the coin and what's written on it. Doing that isn't "cheating" so much as increasing the value of silver within the State of Nevada by 400% So much for free market ideology.
And then there's what goes along with pinning your currency to precious metals: restrictions on what you can do with said precious metals. The US stopped minting circulating coins that contained gold in the 1930's, silver was removed from circulating coints in the 1960's, and yet laws restricting the amount of precious metals any person can own or transfer at one time were only repealed in the Ford administration.
And let's not forget the purpose of those laws: keeping people from wreaking havoc with the larger economy by messing with the precious metal markets. Today, somebody who has a gold meteorite land in his backyard can do mean and nasty things to the gold market. But what if the US dollar is pegged to the value of gold again? Even without precious metal standards we have foreign governments trying to tweak the value of the US dollar in their favor; in order to consistently undercut the cost of labor in the North American Free Trade Area, the PRC has pegged their yuan to the dollar; in order to prop up the yen (and hence their exports), the Japanese banking system is buying US dollars at a premium, trying to reverse the dollar's current inflation. Things like this won't be quite so easy for our government to catch and diplomatically complain about when they're done to whatever the dollar is based on and not the dollar directly.
(Heck, the fact that China has pegged their currency to something makes me question the wisdom of the US doing something similar.)
Comment: The new federalist in me would like to point out that states still have the right to mint their own gold and silver coin (see previous allusion to Nevada). Why should the national government get involved in something the states can do on their own?
If he's so insistent on fuck^H^H^H^H having a direct influence on monetary policy, why doesn't he start relatively small and just print up some United States Notes (as opposed to Federal Reserve Notes) like the Kennedy administration did?
"If you or I want to unseat or kill a thug like Saddam Hussein, we're morally free to do so. He's a tyrant and a murderer. We'd only be acting on behalf of his victims."
"Morally free," yes. "Legally free?" No. Private citizens only get to do stuff like that against nations the US had declared war on. Congress is the only thing authorized to make war on another government, and is constitutionally authorized to have mean and nasty things done to you if you try to exercise Congress' authority on your own like that.
After all, some Americans may see a "moral freedom" to, say, actively support Quebecois independence like that. In fact, there's a long history of US citizens trying to get involve
"That sounds like government intervention."
How is that "government intervention" if the lands in question are already owned by the government? As the owners of the property, it is well within their rights as the seller to place restrictions in the deed.
"They used the phrases "tens of centimeters" and "tens of degrees celsius"."
What they've done there is given you the order of magnitude for the measurements. Letting you know that it's in "tens of centimeters" is very accurate since you now know it's not picometers or kilometers. You now know the proper exponent to use in scientific notation.
<SARCASM SLANT="anti-metrication">
Of course, now the question is "Why 'tens of centimeters' instead of 'decimeters' and why 'tens of degrees Celcius' instead of 'dekadegrees Celsius?" After all, standardized symbols "dm" and "daC" are supposed to be all metric and international and more understandable than the English word "ten," yadda yadda...
</SARCASM>
"the democratically appointed Kofi Annan"
"Democratically?"
Let's see... the People's Republic of China gets as many votes as the Federated States of Micronesia (namely, one), so it's not democratic in the popular sense (double entendre!)
"Democratic" can be more broadly defined as being selected by a mechanism through which the people at large have ultimate control. The US ambassador to the UN is selected by a democratically-elected president and approved by a democratically-elected Senate, so it can be said that the American people have ultimate (though indirect) control of the US vote in the UN, and from what I gather the situation in Ireland and the rest of the "Western" world is fairly similar. However, the people in many UN member states in Asia and Africa (to name a few) have no influence in their government or their government's choice of UN ambassadors short of armed rebellion, so Annan's position cannot be easily called "democratic" even in that broader definition.
The UN is not a democracy, it is an oligarchy. Just because a slim minority in that oligarchy are chosen by a democratic process doesn't make the body as a whole democratic. In that sense, Annan and Allawi came into their jobs in exactly the same way, they were just chosen by different people (some of whom you apparently don't agree with).
Require member states to have a verifiably democratic government (much like what is required of US member states), and maybe toss in a "lower house" to the General Assembly that are elected by direct popular vote, and then we can start talking about "UN democracy."
"If you think I'm talking waffle then google 'canary wharf IRA' and compare that with last weekends round of talks where sworn enemies are now sitting around a table to talk."
Diplomacy only works when both sides are rational and the parties at the table actually care about what happens to the people they claim to represent.
"And, they want the bad news to come from them."
Of course, I get all my virus news from emails from Bill Gates and AOL. They're always nice enough to attach a cure for the virus as well. Would you like me to forward them on to you as soon as I get them?
Franklin Roosevelt was rich but he certainly wasn't rich enough to bankroll the entire Manhattan Project on his own. Instead, he went to the democratically-elected Congress (you know, the arm of the US government that controls the purse strings of the nation?), told them "I'm building an atomic bomb" and they opened our wallets and said "How much?" (with our consent, what with the people electing them and all).
If you still don't like the idea of the people giving their consent to a secret project through a representative democracy, consider that they only built 3 in secret. The thousands of nuclear and eventually thermonuclear weapons that came in the decades afterwards were and are known about by the general public. After all, how does mutually-assured destruction work if the information isn't out there to assure potential attackers that the destruction would be mutual?
In 1958 Truman was cooling his heels in retirement and Eisenhower was well into his second term.
"but they are still free to express their ideas."
Only so long as those politicial views are categorized as "Republican" or "Democrat." "We've got both kinds of music..." Ever wonder why voter turn-out sucks?
Nader is a natural-born citizen older than 35. IMO, that's all he should ultimately need to be on the ballot.
Preferential voting?
I don't like Kerry. I don't like Ashcroft, which means I don't like Bush. I'm not all that keen on Nader here, the Green Party is just... no, I've got some big philosophical differences with Badnarik, and I don't thump a Bible enough for the so-called Constitution Party. What the hell is preferential voting going to do for me when I don't like any of the options? "This candidate doesn't suck ass as much as that candidate?"
"Well not really, tyically young people *are* more ready to question authority,"
Depends on what you call "authority." They may question their parents and the government, but how many younger people question MTV (or TV in general)? The "Don't trust anybody older than 30" is generally only applied to those people who wear a tie while being authoritative.
"He is the head of his party. His party happens to be in control of at least 2/3 of the branches of government."
There's no law saying his fellow party members must support him in all things and the solution to a weak-willed Congress isn't to try to find a way to influence them to your side but to start electing congresscritters with a spine.
"When the government actively works to wipe out such shortages, the government is damaging market forces."
But if the government actively works to maintain (if not sharpen) such shortages, it's "OK?"
"Allow me to explain. The USA, in isolation, is a relatively free market"
I just find it interesting how you are able to say "isolation" and "free" in the same sentence. The US is free so long as we keep our borders shut; we'll take your ideas and your money but not your people. Heck, if you want to make sure to maintain those precious labor shortages you seem so keen on, perhaps we should require workers have a government license before they're allowed to have a job.
Consider the current state of the US merchant fleet. US sailors are known as some of the most competent in the world, but also known as some of the most expensive, and as a result they can be as rare as hen's teeth. Congress' solution? Place more restrictions on who can serve on US-flagged vessels and on when US businesses can used foreign-flagged vessels (restrictions dating from the 1920's and 1930's). Result? US-flagged vessels have become as rare as US sailors, and the only time you're sure to see a US-flagged traffic is between two US ports (where they're legally required). If it were possible to get Alaskan oil and Hawaiian produce to the contiguous 48 without crossing international waters or borders, we might not have a merchant fleet at all any more. So much for what was once the largest merchant fleet in the world.
Cheap labor is out there, and closing your eyes and clicking your heels won't make it go away. Higher tariffs won't make the problem go away. Preventing outsourcing of labor is questionable for the short-term and ultimately flawed for the long-term; either US labor prices fall now as US businesses offshore, or they fall later as foreign businesses with access to those labor pools drive US businesses under. The only way you're going to solve the problem is to make the Chinese/Indian/whatever labor pools go away, and to do that you have two choices: genocide and immigration.
Don't like illegal aliens? Don't like H1-Bs? Fine. But make it easier for people to come into, live in, and work in the country so long as their intent is to stay long-term and become citizens. Heck, make it easier to achieve statehood. It will be painful (or at least distasteful) to US labor interests in the short term, but these people would be protected by US labor laws and it will ultimately benefit the US economy in the long term. The developing world cannot tempt jobs and business opportunities away from the US with cheap labor if said cheap labor is coming to the US.
However, it seems that, when confronted with the choice between immigration and genocide, many Americans would rather see the latter than the former.
I'm curious how many people who are quick to blame the White House for economic woes know who their congresscritters are, let alone who they're running against this November.
"Offshore Wind Energy report by Deltf Univ, Netherlands, on the economics of a wind power system offshore in Europe."
Imagine what we could do with one of those in the Gulf of Mexico right now!
"Only if 3Com provided a IOS-like command line interface"
The only non-NIC 3com device I'm familiar with is my $300 OfficeConnect Dual 56k LAN modem (I didn't see anything else out there like it at the time). While "everything" is "supposed" to be configurable, there is an undocumented, unsupported, disavowed CLI interface accessable through Telnet that does a lot more than their port 80 stuff can do (like, say, filtering). Unfortunately, it's malformed (as if the people who made it cobbled it together like a hobby, with no real intent in making it completely functional) and it seems the odds of it being able to do even everything it claims to be able to do seems slim to none.
Between that and the way it locks up for inexplicable reasons (to the point where the disavowed Telnet interface is the only responsive interface at all) and needs to be hung up or reset... but it's not as if anybody else makes a small end-user router with two 56k modems, or at least not anybody that would sell me just one without having to set up a freakin' commercial account (are you listening, Cisco?)...
Will this happen the same week I get my fusion-powered flying car?
Maybe they should try bankrupting GE while they're at it...
"The wars, revolutions and what-not that you refer to were under way when the intervention took place."
They're also examples of where things got much, much worse because the US didn't intervene.
"Nothing of the sort was happening in Iraq."
It did in the past, only we didn't do anything beyond enforcing no-fly zones and those that didn't get gassed got sent to prisons where they were fed into wood chippers and the like.
So the standard is to only intervene in successful revolutions?
Again, considering what was happening in Iraq, do you believe that no new revolution was festering in the country? To be successful, the revolutionaries would also have to have their own chemical weapons and be more willing to use them (a gas attack on Baghdad, perhaps). And it certainly wouldn't be limited to Iraq's borders; they'd lash out at everybody they perceived as Sadam's allies (Syrians, Palestinians, maybe the West for not helping them enough in their opinions...). After all, much (if not most) of the Islamist terrorism we're seeing now are people lashing out at Western countries because they see us as being allied with the governments of their own countries (whether that alliance is real or not).