Like so many others who voted for Trump, you've been conned.
That's precious, given that Democrats and social justice activists are trying to block everything Trump tries to do, including such simple and sensible things as a 90 day review of visa handling from countries we are effectively at war with. Reforming the H-1B program would take many months even under the best of circumstances, and with Democrats trying to tie the Trump administration in knots, don't complain if it takes a lot longer than that.
No, I didn't vote for Trump, but I deplore the hypocrisy of people like you.
Currently, H-1B visas are given out by lottery, which makes little sense. It means that outsourcing firms just flood the process with applications for low-paid workers.
Trump has proposed reforming the H-1B program so that visas are handed out for the highest-paying jobs first. That would fix most of those problems. It may be something Trump can even do without congressional action.
I'd further like to see no tax benefit at all to having health insurance, but your proposal is a huge step in the right direction.
Just like the mortgage interest deduction. But it's politically impossible to get rid of it: it's a redistribution to the most powerful political group in the US, the middle class.
The biggest problem with the US health insurance is the way it's tied to employment: it means that people end up in weird employment-based risk pools, that they lose health care when they lose their jobs, and that people don't get the same kind of tax breaks when insured on their own.
There are plenty of the proverbially "advanced nations" that have private health care instead of "single payer"; however, they usually have private health plans that aren't tied to employers. That's what Congress should fix, first by giving individuals the same kind of tax breaks as employers for health plans, and then by gradually phasing out employer-based health plans altogether.
Heh. Well, we are sort of arguing about how big of paddles we need for the canoes needed to colonize the New World from Europe
No we are not. We are arguing about the rate of loss of atmosphere from Mars, which you obviously greatly overestimate.
Plus, may well be that as the atmosphere grows, so will the loss and that the elements lost will be the most needed in the volatiles that seem to be in rare supply on Mars.
Which part of "let's say loss rates scale up not just proportionately, but 100 fold" was too difficult to grasp for you?
I.e., they were weak and poorly justified. But Obama's appointees kept trying because they already knew what their boss wanted, they didn't need to be "ordered" or "told".
I put "quotes" around "order" because I was literally quoting the word. You understand what quoting means?
Obama didn't order the IRS to audit conservative organizations. Period. Full Stop
Yes, we agree. What Obama did is what all petty dictators and crooks do: they staff their organizations with their cronies, lackeys, and attack dogs, people who neither need to be ordered or told what to do.
This is not something that the president simply orders.
Obama also didn't "order" the IRS to audit conservative organizations either. Crooks in authority often don't "order" things, they imply things, or simply create a climate and reward systems where things they want to happen happen. So, those are weasel words, attempting to obfuscate the obvious fact that the president has the power to make such things happen, tolerate them, or stop them.
I think it's pretty clear that the Obama justice department submitted applications to FISA courts for surveillance of Trump associates and that these were turned down multiple times until it eventually approved a narrow version. These applications were based on the notion that people associated with Trump might have illegal financial ties to Russia, charges that keep getting repeated to this day by Democrats, so it seems outright bizarre that Democrats would now deny any attempt at investigating those ties.
So, of course, the Obama DOJ conducted wiretapping and surveillance of Trump tower and attempted to involve Trump in it, and Obama either encouraged this or tolerated it or didn't know about it. Any of those possibilities make Obama responsible for it. That is, the wiretapping of the presidential candidate of an opposing party is such a politically important issue that Obama is personally responsible even if he was out golfing and only heard about it on TV afterwards.
Even spy agencies like the CIA have a responsibility to protect the security and privacy of Americans.
It is the responsibility of US spy agencies not to violate the security and privacy of Americans; it is not their responsibility to fix security and privacy problems domestically.
You're probably confused because sometimes spy agencies say "in our operations, we protect the security and privacy of Americans", but that's in the same sense of "when we ship glass, we protect it from breaking", not "we protect all American glass from breaking ever".
Specifically, failure to uphold the constitutional rights of citizens, such as the right to privacy, is probably - at least in legal theory - unacceptable.
I think it's rather a stretch to go from a prohibition on unreasonable searches and seizures to "the CIA must disclose any and all bugs in anybody's computer software that could be used to gain unauthorized access to those computers".
Yes, but without this, you'll just immediately end up losing that atmosphere to space.
If that were true, Mars would have no atmosphere left. In fact, atmospheric loss rate is about 100 g/s, or about 3000 tons per year. The current Martian atmosphere is about 30 trillion tons of CO2. Let's say you increase that ten-fold, and let's say loss rates scale up not just proportionately, but 100 fold. You lose 3e5 tons of atmosphere a year from about 3e14 tons of total atmosphere. It would take geolotic time scales to have any appreciable atmospheric loss.
Any cite to back that theory up? A few feet of pavement on a residential street that only gets local traffic doesn't require all that much maintenance nor is the initial construction cost all that big. Meanwhile the 'affluent residents' are paying significantly higher property taxes.
The relevant question is how much property tax each group of people pays for their share of road frontage. A single family home will have maybe 100 ft of road frontage. In cheaper neighborhoods, the same frontage will support half a dozen rentals in a building worth several times (and hence paying several times as much in property taxes) as much as the single family home. So, the single family home owner gets their roads for much less than the owner of the multi-unit building. In addition, the road in front of the multi-unit building probably supports businesses too, while the road in front of the single family home provides little benefit to anybody else.
Roads aren't all that cheap either: 100 ft of 30 ft-wide road is about $12000, and that needs regular maintenance and lasts maybe 20 years. In addition, you need to add the initial cost of the land and the opportunity cost of not using it for some other purpose. If you take that into account, it eats up a substantial percentage of the property taxes paid by single family home owners.
And cities are figuring out that that's a bad deal, which is why you see more and more gated communities and/or special assessments for roads.
While not enough of a change to allow walking around without a space suit, this would make human exploration of the planet a much easier task.
Sure, if there are still humans in a few million years. But shielding the atmosphere and waiting for the planet to warm is not a feasible approach to terraforming.
If you want to terraform Mars right now, you first need to thicken the atmosphere by warming the polar caps. You then have lots of time protecting that atmosphere from solar wind.
The voters absolutely will 'tolerate' it. They requested it, and they voted for it. They want the residential streets to be used as residential access only. The residents ARE the voters.
The residents of each residential street are not "the voters", they are a tiny minority of voters among all the residents of the city. And the rest of the voters of the city are also excluded from using those roads as bypasses.
The people using their residential streets as a hyway bypass... are the ones that DON'T live there... and they don't get to vote on the traffic shaping in communities they don't own property in. That's kind of how it works.
Legally, of course. What I'm saying is that the interests don't work out. If you have tax payers pay for roads that are used and restricted like private roads, lots of people who don't benefit from those designations end up paying for the private roads, and mostly private roads of people who live in affluent parts of the town/city. You may be able to fool voters into doing that for a while, but eventually, they figure it out and are going to stop supporting it.
To put it another way, once you treat public residential roads like private roads, the arguments for having the tax payer pay for it pretty much go away.
If they want to limit the use of streets then they should make them private. That means I can dig up the freeway and put a building there, because it's public land so I can use it how I want, right?
Wow, you really surpass even your usual imbecility.
Since you don't seem to understand such elementary concepts, let me explain. I live on a private road. My neighbors and I bought the land for it, we built the road, and we maintain it. That's why we can decide who does and doesn't drive on it.
If you have multiple backups, you can fill in "bad blocks" in one backup with another backup; that's probably the simplest and most easy-to-use solution. You can calculate the probability of an unrecoverable error easily.
If you want something more efficient, you can use various forward error correction tools or file systems. Tahoe-LAFS is one such system, though perhaps more complex than you might want.
They are for use by all *for* a specific purpose. And in the case of side residential streets that specific purpose is for public to access the residences on that street.
If you want to limit the use of those streets in that way, then they should be private roads, paid for by only the residents of that street.
But there have been streets downtown in my city with 'local traffic only' signs on them for years, and you could be ticketed for commuting through them
Well, cities, towns, and police run all sorts of scams; that doesn't mean it's a good idea, or that voters will tolerate this behavior indefinitely.
The only consistently recognized biological effect of radiofrequency energy is heating.
That's true, but it really doesn't mean much. The only consistently recognized biological effect of eating salts is a salty taste. Nevertheless, many salts are deadly poisons.
and there are no other clearly established effects on the body from radiofrequency energy.
Again, true, but very narrow. "Effects on the body" are not something that's easily measured for practical reasons. There are clearly established effects on tissues and biological systems.
There is a strong argument that cell phones are not particularly dangerous: they are widely used and we don't see big epidemiological effects. All the other arguments people try to advance for the safety of cell phones are unscientific and unsupported.
"RF" means "radio frequency". There is almost no "solar RF" at ground level, in particular in the bands that we're talking about here. If there were, you'd get slow cooked.
If that's the case, then the entire human race needs to move to the bottom of salt mines, because the amount of radiation being produced by the sun ought to fry our brains by the time we're six months old.
Microwaves aren't the same as visible light. Shocking revelation, I know.
Slashdot Mirror
That's precious, given that Democrats and social justice activists are trying to block everything Trump tries to do, including such simple and sensible things as a 90 day review of visa handling from countries we are effectively at war with. Reforming the H-1B program would take many months even under the best of circumstances, and with Democrats trying to tie the Trump administration in knots, don't complain if it takes a lot longer than that.
No, I didn't vote for Trump, but I deplore the hypocrisy of people like you.
Currently, H-1B visas are given out by lottery, which makes little sense. It means that outsourcing firms just flood the process with applications for low-paid workers.
Trump has proposed reforming the H-1B program so that visas are handed out for the highest-paying jobs first. That would fix most of those problems. It may be something Trump can even do without congressional action.
Just like the mortgage interest deduction. But it's politically impossible to get rid of it: it's a redistribution to the most powerful political group in the US, the middle class.
Good to see you're still a complete moron.
The biggest problem with the US health insurance is the way it's tied to employment: it means that people end up in weird employment-based risk pools, that they lose health care when they lose their jobs, and that people don't get the same kind of tax breaks when insured on their own.
There are plenty of the proverbially "advanced nations" that have private health care instead of "single payer"; however, they usually have private health plans that aren't tied to employers. That's what Congress should fix, first by giving individuals the same kind of tax breaks as employers for health plans, and then by gradually phasing out employer-based health plans altogether.
No we are not. We are arguing about the rate of loss of atmosphere from Mars, which you obviously greatly overestimate.
Which part of "let's say loss rates scale up not just proportionately, but 100 fold" was too difficult to grasp for you?
I.e., they were weak and poorly justified. But Obama's appointees kept trying because they already knew what their boss wanted, they didn't need to be "ordered" or "told".
I put "quotes" around "order" because I was literally quoting the word. You understand what quoting means?
Yes, we agree. What Obama did is what all petty dictators and crooks do: they staff their organizations with their cronies, lackeys, and attack dogs, people who neither need to be ordered or told what to do.
Obviously facts don't matter to you.
You can make phone calls on the Pixel Phones as well?
Obama also didn't "order" the IRS to audit conservative organizations either. Crooks in authority often don't "order" things, they imply things, or simply create a climate and reward systems where things they want to happen happen. So, those are weasel words, attempting to obfuscate the obvious fact that the president has the power to make such things happen, tolerate them, or stop them.
I think it's pretty clear that the Obama justice department submitted applications to FISA courts for surveillance of Trump associates and that these were turned down multiple times until it eventually approved a narrow version. These applications were based on the notion that people associated with Trump might have illegal financial ties to Russia, charges that keep getting repeated to this day by Democrats, so it seems outright bizarre that Democrats would now deny any attempt at investigating those ties.
So, of course, the Obama DOJ conducted wiretapping and surveillance of Trump tower and attempted to involve Trump in it, and Obama either encouraged this or tolerated it or didn't know about it. Any of those possibilities make Obama responsible for it. That is, the wiretapping of the presidential candidate of an opposing party is such a politically important issue that Obama is personally responsible even if he was out golfing and only heard about it on TV afterwards.
If you think that your browsing data is private right now, you're just kidding yourself; privacy regulations are meaningless.
The way to make communications private is through technology, not regulations.
It is the responsibility of US spy agencies not to violate the security and privacy of Americans; it is not their responsibility to fix security and privacy problems domestically.
You're probably confused because sometimes spy agencies say "in our operations, we protect the security and privacy of Americans", but that's in the same sense of "when we ship glass, we protect it from breaking", not "we protect all American glass from breaking ever".
I think it's rather a stretch to go from a prohibition on unreasonable searches and seizures to "the CIA must disclose any and all bugs in anybody's computer software that could be used to gain unauthorized access to those computers".
If that were true, Mars would have no atmosphere left. In fact, atmospheric loss rate is about 100 g/s, or about 3000 tons per year. The current Martian atmosphere is about 30 trillion tons of CO2. Let's say you increase that ten-fold, and let's say loss rates scale up not just proportionately, but 100 fold. You lose 3e5 tons of atmosphere a year from about 3e14 tons of total atmosphere. It would take geolotic time scales to have any appreciable atmospheric loss.
The relevant question is how much property tax each group of people pays for their share of road frontage. A single family home will have maybe 100 ft of road frontage. In cheaper neighborhoods, the same frontage will support half a dozen rentals in a building worth several times (and hence paying several times as much in property taxes) as much as the single family home. So, the single family home owner gets their roads for much less than the owner of the multi-unit building. In addition, the road in front of the multi-unit building probably supports businesses too, while the road in front of the single family home provides little benefit to anybody else.
Roads aren't all that cheap either: 100 ft of 30 ft-wide road is about $12000, and that needs regular maintenance and lasts maybe 20 years. In addition, you need to add the initial cost of the land and the opportunity cost of not using it for some other purpose. If you take that into account, it eats up a substantial percentage of the property taxes paid by single family home owners.
And cities are figuring out that that's a bad deal, which is why you see more and more gated communities and/or special assessments for roads.
No, I didn't and I don't claim that.
Well, you're obviously talking about yourself there.
Sure, if there are still humans in a few million years. But shielding the atmosphere and waiting for the planet to warm is not a feasible approach to terraforming.
If you want to terraform Mars right now, you first need to thicken the atmosphere by warming the polar caps. You then have lots of time protecting that atmosphere from solar wind.
The residents of each residential street are not "the voters", they are a tiny minority of voters among all the residents of the city. And the rest of the voters of the city are also excluded from using those roads as bypasses.
Legally, of course. What I'm saying is that the interests don't work out. If you have tax payers pay for roads that are used and restricted like private roads, lots of people who don't benefit from those designations end up paying for the private roads, and mostly private roads of people who live in affluent parts of the town/city. You may be able to fool voters into doing that for a while, but eventually, they figure it out and are going to stop supporting it.
To put it another way, once you treat public residential roads like private roads, the arguments for having the tax payer pay for it pretty much go away.
Wow, you really surpass even your usual imbecility.
Since you don't seem to understand such elementary concepts, let me explain. I live on a private road. My neighbors and I bought the land for it, we built the road, and we maintain it. That's why we can decide who does and doesn't drive on it.
If you have multiple backups, you can fill in "bad blocks" in one backup with another backup; that's probably the simplest and most easy-to-use solution. You can calculate the probability of an unrecoverable error easily.
If you want something more efficient, you can use various forward error correction tools or file systems. Tahoe-LAFS is one such system, though perhaps more complex than you might want.
If you want to limit the use of those streets in that way, then they should be private roads, paid for by only the residents of that street.
Well, cities, towns, and police run all sorts of scams; that doesn't mean it's a good idea, or that voters will tolerate this behavior indefinitely.
That's true, but it really doesn't mean much. The only consistently recognized biological effect of eating salts is a salty taste. Nevertheless, many salts are deadly poisons.
Again, true, but very narrow. "Effects on the body" are not something that's easily measured for practical reasons. There are clearly established effects on tissues and biological systems.
There is a strong argument that cell phones are not particularly dangerous: they are widely used and we don't see big epidemiological effects. All the other arguments people try to advance for the safety of cell phones are unscientific and unsupported.
"RF" means "radio frequency". There is almost no "solar RF" at ground level, in particular in the bands that we're talking about here. If there were, you'd get slow cooked.
Microwaves aren't the same as visible light. Shocking revelation, I know.