Social Security isn't a replacement for your personal 401(k), it's an insurance policy in case you get disabled or old. You can also think of it as a tax we pay so that we don't have old, sick, dying people filling up our sidewalks. (Well, to the extent that we would without it--we'd have six times the number of seniors in poverty that we do now.) You can't opt out of that any more than you can opt out of coverage by your local police and fire departments.
He's not saying that the top ten percent of income earners pay seventy percent of their income in taxes; he's saying that seventy percent of the tax revenue is provided by that top ten percent, which I'd like to see a reference for. Of course, saying that the rich pay most of the taxes is quite right, for the simple and obvious reason that they have the money. (That graph may be understating the reality; I wouldn't put it past the Heritage Foundation.)
It makes a vicious cycle: the more inequality we have, the larger a share of it the rich pay (under what we have, which is essentially a flat tax system). Clearly the rich are put-upon, so we must slash their taxes. This makes the rich even richer, and their taxes (a smaller proportion of a larger whole) are still a large portion of total tax revenues. We underfund the government, which sucks for poor people, who get poorer as they fall through an increasingly tattered safety net. Lather, rinse, repeat.
For every worker who becomes unemployed, I'd bet there are plenty more who move to lower-paying jobs, lose benefits, take pay cuts, and otherwise end up in a worse situation than they started in.
The way I see it is that Bush wants to expand domestic production of oil to 1) bring prices down and 2) keep the money here instead of sending it to people who want to kill us. Tell me, who's stopping us from drilling in ANWR? It's not the Alaskans! Also, gas is cheaper today than it was in 1979 (adjusted for inflation, of course) and there is no rationing and no gas lines.
The entire known reserves in ANWR would provide six months' worth of oil. It won't bring prices down, and it won't significantly reduce the amount of money sent to people who want to kill us. It will bring money to the people who want to drill there, but that's about it. I'm unconvinced that the nation has a meaningful policy on reducing the use of foreign oil, given that any move toward reducing consumption has been blocked over the last six years.
Gas is 2.87 a gallon nation-wide. It peaked at an average of about $3 per gallon last year and the year before. I'm unable to find good graphs with this previous year's data on them, but it looks like the peak was around $3 in today's dollars; I should remind you that we're not being embargoed, and it's still almost as bad as it was then.
I beg to differ on the "losing" portion of your propaganda. However, we have those on the left (including the media) who WANT us to lose this thing so it looks bad for Bush. How many Al Qaeda members did we kill yesterday? How about on any day at all since 9-11? Don't know do ya. Why? It's not reported. Every single US military death is (rightfully) reported with all its gory details, but you NEVER see an enemy head-count. Well, OK, you do sometimes, but they are labeled as "Iraqi civilians killed by US forces". Fact is, we are kicking major ass in Iraq and Afghanistan, but you won't see it reported because it doesn't meet the agenda.
The media disbanded the Iraqi army? The media put incompetent partisan hacks in charge of the reconstruction effort? The media decided that torture was a great idea? "Kicking major ass" isn't a foreign policy goal, it's a movie tagline--and it's a stupid euphemism for "killing lots of people". Pretending to be the Golden Horde doesn't work when you're also pretending to be George Marshall. Don't blather on about how you're the armies of goodness and light when you also want to kill kill kill, and those corpses were probably Al Qaeda anyway.
That would make you French, possibly Spanish or German. In the US unemployment is nearing a historic low, the stock market and economy a historic high and petroleum products are expensive but hardly horribly so if all the full-size SUVs I see on the road are any indication.
Falling real wages, an unemployment rate that's only dropping because people have been out of work so long they're considered to have left the workforce, a steadily rising poverty rate and a negative personal savings rate are also indications. They don't affect the sorts of people who drive SUVs quite as much as they affect some others, but these things do exist.
Well, if we stopped funding the Palestinian Authority and encouraged a bit of civil unrest in Iran then we'd be "entrenched" in a battle with terrorism that we'd be winning faster then we're winning it now.
(a) At what rate do you see us "winning"? Please provide a situation that you think the current policies are leading to (e.g., Kim Jong-Il abdicates and North Korea becomes the 51st state) and a timeline for getting there. (b) "Encouraged a bit of civil unrest"? Ah, because funding the mujahideen, the contras, Pinochet and any tin-pot dictator willing to fight anyone left of Jeanne Kirkpatrick has only served to instill a deep love of America and Americans in the people who came in contact with those groups. Has this ever led to the desired results? Has starting bloody civil wars in other countries ever led to kittens and happiness for us?
You aren't kiddin'. You can be the sort of shmuck who jets from one environmental riot to another and never be troubled by the hypocrisy.
Ah, the "limousine liberal" defense. In short, "I bet you're wealthy, so I don't have to listen to you".
Or the sort who decries the fascist government, loudly, publicly, repeatedly and without the slightest concern that they'll end up where people who loudly, publicly and repeatedly criticize a fascist government traditionally end up.
It's a bit of a catch-22, isn't it? If you can hear the criticism, then there's no rising tide of fascism. If you can't hear the critics, then there's no rising tide of fascism.
No, it made me feel humiliated, as did the rest of the country.
And this is meaningful? Do you really think that foreign policy should revolve around your ego? What else are you willing to have your country to do avoid the dreaded sting of unmanliness? Does feeling like a part of all that torturing and bombing help?
True, but how many more have been kidnapped because Iran showed that IT WORKED! and we wouldn't do a damn thing about it.
I give up, how many American citizens have been kidnapped by Iran since the end of the hostage crisis in 1981? I count six, which were the ones Ronald Reagan traded weapons for, but maybe I'm leaving some out. Speaking of which, if you're wondering how to embolden hostage-takers and terrorists, trading them weapons for hostages is a mighty fine way to do that. Or is appeasement okay when Reagan does it? I didn't get the memo.
If someone said that law enforcement should stop hunting child pornographers, I didn't see it. Could you point that out for me? What I saw was a general outpouring of disbelief that so many people could be fucked over by an investigation that went this wrong, and some horror at the suicides--I assume because most of us have ordered things online and there's no reason to assume that the same thing couldn't happen to us as well, given sufficiently Keystonish Kops.
And I think that agitating for due diligence and agitating for rigorous police work are pretty much the same thing--if it's important for the cops to catch child pornographers, then it's important for them to be competent enough to actually catch them, isn't it? I mean, apart from catching a whole bunch of innocent people, they utterly failed to catch the bad guys. I'd think you'd be right up there calling for these clowns to be fired.
In your following replies, you go on about how much worse criminals are than cops, but you miss the point--nobody was saying that we should get rid of cops because they're a bigger threat than criminals (though bad cops are a different kind of threat). I don't care how bad the criminals are, they never, ever justify shoddy police. In fact, the worse they are, the more we should be expecting from our cops.
If the people running these operations were serious about catching creeps rather than looking good, they'd go to the trouble of executing the operation competently. "But they're dangerous" is no more a valid excuse for lax standards in catching pedophiles than it is for lax standards in catching terrorists. If these people are really dangerous enough to require fail-safe (i.e., better to have an innocent guy in jail than a dangerous guy outside) prosecutorial methods, then they're dangerous enough to require that proper resources be committed to do it right. There's never an excuse for this kind of nonsense.
It's okay that you're a geek; I'm a geek, which is why I've heard of him. Dave Sim is a comics artist who was the leading light of the self-publishing movement of the 1980s and 90s; he wrote and drew (with some help on the backgrounds) Cerebus the Aardvark for its entire three hundred issue run. He's one of the most brilliant minds to ever work in comics; he's unsurpassed in the inventiveness and quality of his lettering, in his writing of accents (and people with colds), in his panel layout, in his wit and satire.
He's also slipped into more and more weirdness over the last ten years or so. He's started to believe that the visions he had in a schizophrenic break are religious inspiration, that the world is held in the thrall of a "feminist-homosexualist axis", and started his own religion which is some kind of syncretic mix of Christianity, Judaism and Islam. I haven't gotten to the end of Cerebus yet, but apparently it turned into Dave's pedantic internal monologue, which is a shame, since it was (and still is, at the point I'm reading it) extremely good. For some good essays about Sim's descent into--I use the word again only because it fits so well--weirdness, see Andrew Rilstone's essays on the subject. (Scroll down to "Aardvarks, and Other Comics".)
On the bright side, he's arranged for the copyright to Cerebus to fall into the public domain following his death and that of Gerhard, his background artist, which is the sort of thing I wish more artists and authors would do. (And hey, that was almost on-topic.) Sim himself has said that he'll probably be more popular after he's died, given his talent for alienating people.
I suppose that next thing we know, Canada will be following in the footsteps of their Australian brethren and extending their copyright regime from Life+50 to Life+70. Someone should probably call up the Project Gutenberg Canada organizers and tell them never mind.
Somehow I doubt knowing that a gun was registered will help after the fact in a murder-suicide. What are the cops going to do, exhume the killer and re-bury them in jail?
I used to think that we'd need neck-jacks and VR goggles and all sorts of other gimcrackery in order to mentally internalize our machinery and the internet as a whole. And here I find out, with me constantly thinking that I know something, and realizing that I just know how to easily find or verify it on the internet, that it just takes a certain level of ease-of-use.
You all do it; when someone asks you if you know what time it is, and you say yes, you're probably lying. You don't know--your watch does.
Since when do editors do that kind of shit? When was the last time you saw a halfway-critical review of Linux which had a note tacked on to the end saying, "oh, wait, no, really, a lot of people like it, please don't sue us"? I suppose the last bit says it all. Or maybe one of those hit pieces on Wikipedia saying, "a lot of people work really hard on it and it's actually not as bad as the author makes it sound"? What a damned tool.
I had no idea people (and here I speak of people who stand to lose their review-copy privileges, not anonymous Slashtards) were this afraid to criticize Microsoft. How can anyone take a professionally-written review of their software seriously if they know there's this much of a chilling effect going on?
Project Gutenberg uses plenty of scans from American Memory to make their etexts--they do pretty much what you describe. At the lowest level, they make a plaintext copy, but they also do formatting and in-text hyperlinking: for instance, linking footnotes to their references, or index page numbers to anchors in the text. (See the HTML version of this etext to see what I mean.) Browse to a random book from this random collection, and you'll see what the LoC provides for their collections currently. As Brewster Kahle will be involved, you might want to see what projects he's done and how they're provided: a random book from the Million Book Project is available as a DjVu document, as well (badly) OCR'd text.
Huh. I wrote most of that article about three years ago, after reading a description of the suit in Kings of the High Frontier and finding out that it was based on actual research. I was going to post a comment here linking to it, but a variety of people beat me to the punch.
What point was the OP making? That there could exist some evidence (which the OP was uninterested in actually looking for) that would exonerate Monsanto? You'd think Monsanto would be publishing said evidence instead of engaging on a cover-up.
Look, there could be police records out there showing that Monsanto execs dine on a daily supper of ground babies and kittens, but you'd be an idiot if you tried to make an argument based on that.
... the Terminator system works not by preventing pollination, or making the seeds infertile, but by causing the next generation of crops to die at an early age. So the second farmer got as many fertilized seeds as there would have been anyway, but a portion of them had acquired the Terminator gene, and were therefore nonviable.
At least, that's how it was explained to me some time ago. I could very well be wrong.
They just asked for proof of concept code before they'd declare a remote control vulnerability. That's not really much of a coverup. If you were OpenBSD, wouldn't you want to be really, really sure you'd found a remote root vulnerability?
Also, is IPv6 in the default install nowadays? If not, their slogan won't have to change.
A helpful guideline: Whenever a controversial law is proposed, and its supporters, when confronted with an egregious abuse it would permit, use a phrase along the lines of 'Perhaps in theory, but the law would never be applied in that way' - they're lying. They intend to use the law that way as early and as often as possible.
I don't know why the admins should have responsibility for libel. They have created the proverbial town square, using the analogy that they favor. Are they to blame if people occasionally shout libelous things in the town square? It is not like they own a tabloid where they are responsible for the editing and publication.
Their analogy sucks. Try this: They have created the proverbial service where they take whatever they hear in a bar and paste it on a public noticeboard, indefinitely archived, with the original speakers intentionally made anonymous so that they can never be held liable for what they say. However, they've been known to remove some things they don't like. (Again, if you disagree with this, I'll bet you cashy money that if you post the admins' SSNs and home addresses, the post will vanish.) When someone points out that the posted conversations are damaging, they clutch their pearls and whine about their right to libel and threaten.
Assuming that there is some public value in encouraging dissent and criticism, how are the admins to distinguish between legitimate and illegitimate accusations of libel? Or do you think the mere fact that somebody is *accused* of libel is enough that they should be silenced and evicted from the town square?
Nice strawman. Are you sure you're a law student? Do you know where the burden of proof lies for libel? As I said, give me your full name and the contact information of your school or employer. I'll post a variety of exciting stories about you. (Heck, I could just quote your own opinions.) Then we can wait for you to provide proof to me that you're not a monkey-raping meth addict, because we wouldn't want to silence me. You can explain that to your boss, and to the NAMBLA members salivating over your younger relatives.
Without commenting on the attitude of the admins as a whole, I think the "We deserve a gold star" part has been grossly spun out of context. The admins were against the site from the beginning, they played no part in its creation, tried to distance themselves from the site and its contest, and when the opportunity arose for them to shut it down, they did. The only thing you can really accuse them of is that people used their site to talk about the contest. Such a discussion could easily have taken place on Usenet, another message board, just through posting comments on a blog, etc.
Where I come from, "admins" means the people running the site. Was there some other sense I was unaware of?
Slashdot Mirror
Social Security isn't a replacement for your personal 401(k), it's an insurance policy in case you get disabled or old. You can also think of it as a tax we pay so that we don't have old, sick, dying people filling up our sidewalks. (Well, to the extent that we would without it--we'd have six times the number of seniors in poverty that we do now.) You can't opt out of that any more than you can opt out of coverage by your local police and fire departments.
If ANWR is so valuable as a strategic reserve, why would we ever take the oil out of it if we weren't using it as such?
He's not saying that the top ten percent of income earners pay seventy percent of their income in taxes; he's saying that seventy percent of the tax revenue is provided by that top ten percent, which I'd like to see a reference for. Of course, saying that the rich pay most of the taxes is quite right, for the simple and obvious reason that they have the money. (That graph may be understating the reality; I wouldn't put it past the Heritage Foundation.)
It makes a vicious cycle: the more inequality we have, the larger a share of it the rich pay (under what we have, which is essentially a flat tax system). Clearly the rich are put-upon, so we must slash their taxes. This makes the rich even richer, and their taxes (a smaller proportion of a larger whole) are still a large portion of total tax revenues. We underfund the government, which sucks for poor people, who get poorer as they fall through an increasingly tattered safety net. Lather, rinse, repeat.
For every worker who becomes unemployed, I'd bet there are plenty more who move to lower-paying jobs, lose benefits, take pay cuts, and otherwise end up in a worse situation than they started in.
Gas is 2.87 a gallon nation-wide. It peaked at an average of about $3 per gallon last year and the year before. I'm unable to find good graphs with this previous year's data on them, but it looks like the peak was around $3 in today's dollars; I should remind you that we're not being embargoed, and it's still almost as bad as it was then. The media disbanded the Iraqi army? The media put incompetent partisan hacks in charge of the reconstruction effort? The media decided that torture was a great idea? "Kicking major ass" isn't a foreign policy goal, it's a movie tagline--and it's a stupid euphemism for "killing lots of people". Pretending to be the Golden Horde doesn't work when you're also pretending to be George Marshall. Don't blather on about how you're the armies of goodness and light when you also want to kill kill kill, and those corpses were probably Al Qaeda anyway.
If someone said that law enforcement should stop hunting child pornographers, I didn't see it. Could you point that out for me? What I saw was a general outpouring of disbelief that so many people could be fucked over by an investigation that went this wrong, and some horror at the suicides--I assume because most of us have ordered things online and there's no reason to assume that the same thing couldn't happen to us as well, given sufficiently Keystonish Kops.
And I think that agitating for due diligence and agitating for rigorous police work are pretty much the same thing--if it's important for the cops to catch child pornographers, then it's important for them to be competent enough to actually catch them, isn't it? I mean, apart from catching a whole bunch of innocent people, they utterly failed to catch the bad guys. I'd think you'd be right up there calling for these clowns to be fired.
In your following replies, you go on about how much worse criminals are than cops, but you miss the point--nobody was saying that we should get rid of cops because they're a bigger threat than criminals (though bad cops are a different kind of threat). I don't care how bad the criminals are, they never, ever justify shoddy police. In fact, the worse they are, the more we should be expecting from our cops.
If the people running these operations were serious about catching creeps rather than looking good, they'd go to the trouble of executing the operation competently. "But they're dangerous" is no more a valid excuse for lax standards in catching pedophiles than it is for lax standards in catching terrorists. If these people are really dangerous enough to require fail-safe (i.e., better to have an innocent guy in jail than a dangerous guy outside) prosecutorial methods, then they're dangerous enough to require that proper resources be committed to do it right. There's never an excuse for this kind of nonsense.
It's okay that you're a geek; I'm a geek, which is why I've heard of him. Dave Sim is a comics artist who was the leading light of the self-publishing movement of the 1980s and 90s; he wrote and drew (with some help on the backgrounds) Cerebus the Aardvark for its entire three hundred issue run. He's one of the most brilliant minds to ever work in comics; he's unsurpassed in the inventiveness and quality of his lettering, in his writing of accents (and people with colds), in his panel layout, in his wit and satire.
He's also slipped into more and more weirdness over the last ten years or so. He's started to believe that the visions he had in a schizophrenic break are religious inspiration, that the world is held in the thrall of a "feminist-homosexualist axis", and started his own religion which is some kind of syncretic mix of Christianity, Judaism and Islam. I haven't gotten to the end of Cerebus yet, but apparently it turned into Dave's pedantic internal monologue, which is a shame, since it was (and still is, at the point I'm reading it) extremely good. For some good essays about Sim's descent into--I use the word again only because it fits so well--weirdness, see Andrew Rilstone's essays on the subject. (Scroll down to "Aardvarks, and Other Comics".)
On the bright side, he's arranged for the copyright to Cerebus to fall into the public domain following his death and that of Gerhard, his background artist, which is the sort of thing I wish more artists and authors would do. (And hey, that was almost on-topic.) Sim himself has said that he'll probably be more popular after he's died, given his talent for alienating people.
I suppose that next thing we know, Canada will be following in the footsteps of their Australian brethren and extending their copyright regime from Life+50 to Life+70. Someone should probably call up the Project Gutenberg Canada organizers and tell them never mind.
You live in Kitchener? Is Dave Sim a local fixture of wackiness, or is he enough of a hermit that even people who live there haven't heard of him?
Somehow I doubt knowing that a gun was registered will help after the fact in a murder-suicide. What are the cops going to do, exhume the killer and re-bury them in jail?
What would anyone have against the American Nihilist Underground Society?
I used to think that we'd need neck-jacks and VR goggles and all sorts of other gimcrackery in order to mentally internalize our machinery and the internet as a whole. And here I find out, with me constantly thinking that I know something, and realizing that I just know how to easily find or verify it on the internet, that it just takes a certain level of ease-of-use.
You all do it; when someone asks you if you know what time it is, and you say yes, you're probably lying. You don't know--your watch does.
Since when do editors do that kind of shit? When was the last time you saw a halfway-critical review of Linux which had a note tacked on to the end saying, "oh, wait, no, really, a lot of people like it, please don't sue us"? I suppose the last bit says it all. Or maybe one of those hit pieces on Wikipedia saying, "a lot of people work really hard on it and it's actually not as bad as the author makes it sound"? What a damned tool.
I had no idea people (and here I speak of people who stand to lose their review-copy privileges, not anonymous Slashtards) were this afraid to criticize Microsoft. How can anyone take a professionally-written review of their software seriously if they know there's this much of a chilling effect going on?
Project Gutenberg uses plenty of scans from American Memory to make their etexts--they do pretty much what you describe. At the lowest level, they make a plaintext copy, but they also do formatting and in-text hyperlinking: for instance, linking footnotes to their references, or index page numbers to anchors in the text. (See the HTML version of this etext to see what I mean.) Browse to a random book from this random collection, and you'll see what the LoC provides for their collections currently. As Brewster Kahle will be involved, you might want to see what projects he's done and how they're provided: a random book from the Million Book Project is available as a DjVu document, as well (badly) OCR'd text.
Longhorn is the new Cairo. Didn't you notice?
Huh. I wrote most of that article about three years ago, after reading a description of the suit in Kings of the High Frontier and finding out that it was based on actual research. I was going to post a comment here linking to it, but a variety of people beat me to the punch.
What point was the OP making? That there could exist some evidence (which the OP was uninterested in actually looking for) that would exonerate Monsanto? You'd think Monsanto would be publishing said evidence instead of engaging on a cover-up.
Look, there could be police records out there showing that Monsanto execs dine on a daily supper of ground babies and kittens, but you'd be an idiot if you tried to make an argument based on that.
... the Terminator system works not by preventing pollination, or making the seeds infertile, but by causing the next generation of crops to die at an early age. So the second farmer got as many fertilized seeds as there would have been anyway, but a portion of them had acquired the Terminator gene, and were therefore nonviable.
At least, that's how it was explained to me some time ago. I could very well be wrong.
They just asked for proof of concept code before they'd declare a remote control vulnerability. That's not really much of a coverup. If you were OpenBSD, wouldn't you want to be really, really sure you'd found a remote root vulnerability?
Also, is IPv6 in the default install nowadays? If not, their slogan won't have to change.