I have a degree in postmodern literature, don't assume I can't blaze through your standard paperback in a couple hours, but a non-narrative government policy, with substantial room for interpretation, with flow-breaking formatting, with unintuitive legal definitions, with a lot of numbers (financial and otherwise) being thrown around, isn't exactly Tom Clancy airplane reading, and skimming and 'the gist' is exactly the kind of pseudo-reporting going on here.
Access to information is vital for being an informed member of society, and the government long ago decided it is worth subsidizing its availability. Don't think of it merely as access to the internet. We have libraries for free access to books, newspapers and magazines, government pamphlets/official documents, educational programs, public speakers and presentations, community cultural and political events, and even just intellectual hangouts. The internet is merely the world's best library, alongside being an economic juggernaut that is only going to drive more commerce in the future, and good broadband internet is a steal compared to the cost of bringing even a fraction of a decent metropolitan library's capacities to rural areas and the poor. The possibilities for furthering education (both k-12 and adult) alone should be good enough, as surely the increased tax base from an educated populace should more than pay for the subsidies, plus sometimes the government just isn't afraid of spending public money to ensure that the public can be informed about the government's activities; think how much money can be saved from having to print pamphlets, fliers, and forms. The internet isn't just for trolling forums and watching Youtube.
So the text has been out for several hours and this guy flipped through it (you can't honestly read 357 pages of children's fiction in that time, let alone government policy) enough to find a few stated ideas for taxes, and all of a sudden it's a net loss for consumers? When are those taxes going to take effect, and what is the inflation-adjusted amount in today's dollars? It's a lot easier to suggest taxes than to try and tell congress how to budget or regulate companies, so this statement of policy cannot honestly take into account any kind of subsidy that might be dreamed up by congress (save your complaints about how taxes pay for that, that's not the kind of cost we're talking about), nor any kind of price regulations that would decrease charges. A substantial part of the plan is supposed to be paid for by auctioning another part of the broadcast spectrum, and there's no way of knowing anything other than a ballpark estimate for that amount. It's not like this is anything other than the first public rough draft; items will change and funding will be battled over every day until the relevant budgets are passed.
Actually, I do have a degenerative disease in my wrists and I am looking to get a tablet specifically so that I can read again, because it isn't holding the book that is painful, but holding the pages open - at least on non-clothbound paperbacks. Netbook screens are too small and it is really difficult to read at a desk. I have used 15 inch laptops turned on their sides to get the maximum viewing range, but they are bulky and require contorted positions. Something magazine sized, light, and with a simple interface for scrolling and page turning, in full color, with PDF capabilities, would be a godsend.
Well, you could look at it as the majority party (and state populace, through propositions) passing programs that require too much funding, or the minority party blocking the new taxes being required to pay for the programs. However, the tricky thing is Proposition 13, which was passed in an anti-Tax hysteria back in the 70s, requires a two-thirds majority in the state legislature to raise taxes (to pass the yearly budget, technically) and a two-thirds majority to pass a tax through the state initiative system, while requiring only a standard majority to pass new laws that would require funding (it also keeps property taxes at lower levels than most other states, though that is quite a bit more complicated). It's pretty common for taxes to get past the 50% mark without hitting the 67% mark, so it really only takes a 34% minority to block any increase in revenue, and guess who the usual suspects are? California has only gotten by because it is one of the largest economies in the world and is able to get massive amounts of money anyway, but after 2008 lost somewhere along the lines of an entire quarter of its tax revenue from the recession, and the republicans in the legislature have been as adamantly against tax increases as those in congress are against health care, seeing this as a great opportunity to strike against all their least favorite social programs.
This kind of systematized academic attention to games is long overdue, specifically in the soft sciences and humanities. Video games have now become the most profitable means of entertainment, and it is kind of amazing that so little attention is paid to them in terms of serious academic study. As a literature grad, I can tell you that many of the books I've devoted serious academic effort to have print runs that would make shovelware developers for the DS laugh. Although that's kind of an apples-to-oranges comparison (for the purpose of building analytical skills, there's nothing wrong with examining a minor work, it actually is valuable to be unable to find any prior critical work to build off of), it could help raise the esteem and perceptions of relevance for the discipline outside the Academy.
The vast majority of games have a pretty shallow narrative structure, but there are still themes, relationships, ideologies, moralities, and philosophies encoded into the choices and actions we are presented with (or instructed to make) over the course of the game. And that's not even considering the larger context of cultural markers and meanings games are embedded in. As games grow in both popularity and narrative/cultural sophistication (were we presented with choices like 'kill innocents to maintain your cover with the terrorists' before this decade? Is that a function of a maturing playerbase demanding 'realism', more awareness of the importance of moral choices by developers, shifting cultural beliefs about terrorism/warfare/entertainment in the face of omnipresent concerns this decade?), there is a lot of fertile ground to be mined in artistic and cultural criticism, and a much wider scope for psychological, sociological, and educational research. Games are not innocent or 'harmless' and have the same capacity for meaning as any fairy tale, comic book, film, or nightly news report. Actions in a video game can be seen as 'natural' consequences, rather than as constrained choices in a constructed system, much like books and films and Fox News (or any other news network, though Fox are the true masters of narrative-building) reports; what happens is justified by the internal logic and prevailing ideology of the narrative - and if you think you can see through them easily and they have no impact on your ways of thinking, just look at how many people here quote Ayn Rand or Heinlein in their sigs*. When the generation that grew up with video games from birth reaches 40, I wouldn't be surprised to see ideological quotes from games there; though games are much more indirect and admittedly don't have nearly as many choice soundbites, I wonder if the fact that a player is performing the actions himself is more psychologically effective than simply being exposed to a narrative (although the narrative depth and sophistication of even the best games pales in comparison to even merely decent writers of fiction).
We give toddlers toys to build reflexes and train physical functions, but also to help build mental pathways for things such as seeing differences in colors and shapes, cause and effect, and rudimentary knowledge of currency and careers; we can see video games as toys as well in this sense, built to entertain, but also to develop and test critical thinking and reasoning skills (well, decent games do) and to allow players to take on various roles in the world (be it mayor or covert operative). In order to build more educational games, we need to NOT look at them as textbooks but more like a laboratory. Games are for doing, not reading; hypertextual footnotes to a textbook are okay. Like conventional textbooks, however, there are implicit and unstated assumptions built into the structure of games; in order to be successful as educational tools, you need to examine the entire superstructure to try and build what you want to teach into the very playing of the game. This must be how we see games as education, not merely computerized flash cards posing math questions or multiple-choice answers providing a smal
For thematic organizing principles? As a meta-commentary on the contents? To establish a mood for the chapter? To shed light on the meaning of narrative events, or perhaps to ironically change perspective on them? To parody the structure of another book, or undermine a novel's own structure? For any number of perfectly valid, reasonable, and appropriate artistic reasons that have nothing whatsoever to do with commercializing those portions? Chapter titles are as much a part of a coherent whole as any other part of the text, and though they often serve merely as linear indicators, plenty of writers have artistically meaningful chapter titles.
I'd say MOST people have paid more than a tenth of their own health care. Medicare taxes on every dollar earned (the majority of workers earning far less than the cutoff) is probably half of it right there, and (inflation adjusted) health insurance benefits/premiums (if your employer didn't have to pay them, you'd get a higher wage, after all) more than makes up for the rest. And as for 'other peoples' money', well, insurance is a shared risk pool of other peoples' money, so you paid for the right to have access to money in excess of your own contribution if the circumstances ever called for it. How much you should be allowed to spend is a fair point of contention, but don't pretend people are making out like bandits for a service they paid what the insurance companies themselves considered a fair amount for.
It means someone who is constantly hovering over their kid's shoulder (in some cases almost quite literally) as in overprotectively smothering them and often interfering with school and other activities.
Nothing, really, nothing has been accomplished in the attempt to help out the poor? What sort of metrics are you basing that on, and philosophically why do you think 'nothing' is accomplished? What is your standard of success?
I'd like to see NASA funded as much as anyone, but don't you think that it'd be just a little unfair to quite literally take the food off of childrens' plates and cut insurance that we all fairly pay for, so that government contractors, aerospace engineers, tech magnates, global communications corporations, etc, can get richer? Who is going to see the most profit from NASA anyway? Sure, we all know Tang, velcro, and pens that can write in zero-gravity were cool space inventions, but most of the derived benefits took years, decades to trickle down to the lowest levels of economic status, while trillions of dollars were made over the same amount of time by those who were already in place to capitalize on the inventions (takes money to make money, etc). I realize that harsh taxes will discourage investment, but don't you think it'd be fairer if those reaping the lion's share of the benefits be the ones to invest the most? Why don't we raise taxes on them, if they're so eager to get the benefit, or rather, cut some of their government benefits. What say we cut some school lunch programs, and then cut 20% of naval patrols in areas containing known pirates, or maybe just not deliver mail every third monday, all of which could save some money towards NASA? Infrastructure, law, military defense, why don't you see these as literal 'entitlements' as well? The people who benefit most from NASA aren't the ones who have to worry about their children's dinner or losing everything because of a few months unemployment.
You know, just because you use the word 'write' in both 'songwriting' and 'writing software' doesn't mean they are ANYTHING at all alike. Software is a material good that can be objectively valued, music is art and cannot be rationally valued. As you say, when you write a program for someone, specific to the client, they know what they want and how that will benefit them, and your expertise is subject to a cost/benefit analysis - you can create X amount of profit for doing work. Not all songwriting is like that, especially the kind with royalties. Composers are solicited for films and games, jingles are composed for commercial clients - and those artists get paid a salary or a contracted amount, up front. Pop songwriting is a lot more like writing your own program. If you open-source it and give it out free as in beer, then that's one thing, but if you wrote it to try and make money off it, as an independent software developer, then wouldn't you like to be able to charge for it as long as people are willing to pay for it? Should you only get the first months' sales? Should other people be allowed to sell your work for their own profit simply because they have the mechanical ability to? Pop songwriting and the royalties that drive it are a completely different economic beast than getting paid for specific value.
Royalties are simply the most rational way of paying songwriters - the ratio of successful songs to unsuccessful songs is so large that it makes no economic sense to do it any other way, and the randomness of the music market prevents any real sort of cost/benefit analysis - even huge stars can flop, one-hit wonders can pay off spectacularly, and you have to take hundreds of risks before you find a profitable performer. A successful artist has to write a large number of unsuccessful songs before they can profit from one, regardless of the relative merit of their work.
How would you feel if you wrote dozens of good programs, but only got compensated for one if the client hit a improbably large sales target, and you only got a small lump sum anyway? The music industry is a bitch, but it works like it does for a reason, and its crimes are crimes of disproportion rather than inherent evil.
It is one thing to rail against abusive organizations, but you have to think about the little guy here. Music as a good is worth what people will pay for it, nothing more and nothing less, it has no inherent value and it is impossible to know in advance just how much it is worth. You have to allow the possibility of profit, however improbable, or the quality of music will decrease even further beyond your lofty standards. Royalties are a merit-driven method of compensation, or as close as we can get allowing for market distortions from publicity campaigns, and are still very relevant (more than ever, in fact) in the post-CD age. Royalties are the only method of compensation that make sense with a lack of scarcity - either through subscription or advertising, royalties can be paid from online radio, with (at least the possibility of) accurate and fair accounting since it is easy to track exactly how many times a song has been heard.
And yes, of course people used to get paid for specifically commissioned work, BEFORE THERE WAS RADIO. Royalties have been around as long as modern music has. A patronage system simply doesn't make sense anymore because of the broadness and tastes of the market - you make way more money selling to crowds of teenyboppers or hipsters than to a single customer, and you need the sieve of the market to find talent amongst the millions of musicians producing today. Plenty of terrible work has been commissioned over the centuries as well - think of how many classical composers, or artists of any kind, that you can name from the past 500 or so years, compared to the number of artists you can name from your lifetime. Aside from being completely apples to oranges, there is a serious survivorship bias in comparing the cream of the premodern crop.
Yes, but you're also getting all your money up front. You went into your employment knowing the terms and conditions of payment. Royalties have been how musicians have been paid for the better part of a century, and only in the past decade have copyright issues become well-known enough by the general public for a conversation about a transition to a new model of payment to begin. Copyright used to be sane, and hardly in perpetuity, but it is not the fault of the common songwriter that large rights-owning corporations have abused the legislative process. If you change the rules midgame, that's hardly fair to the original creators.
It is impossible to determine the true profit of a song in advance. Engineers can get a lump sum up front because it is much easier to determine the objective worth of their work; with songwriting, success is mostly random. Some professional songwriters can hit on a formula that might be successful within the context of a given trend, especially with the backing of media corporations, but fashion changes quickly and there are very few who are able to be consistently successful over the long run. A piece of art is priceless, or valueless, in both senses of the word - it is simply as valuable as people are willing to pay. If you write a program or build a structure, you can estimate to a pretty fair degree how much value you'll be able to extract from it, but there is such great variance with music, even with millions in marketing backing a project, that there is no way to pay people up front. I suppose there are songwriting groups and in-house guys that can make a salary, but outside of highly commercial productions that's just not how people write music.
If current practices are unsustainable, then popular music as we know it may be unsustainable. It is hard enough to make a living as a musician now, lots of mildly successful musicians still have day jobs, but without the small amount of revenue from royalties many might just give up. Also, being a songwriter doesn't necessarily mean being a performer, or a touring artist, so you can't just say 'give your music away for free and make it up in t-shirt and ticket sales.' Sure, there are site-specific jobs like in-house composer for films and games or commercial jingles, but they are the people least likely to receive royalties anyway, having already signed away rights to their employer. You could sell rights to use your songs in advertisements, but you need a certain degree of exposure in the first place to have enough street cred to be worth associating with a product, so that money tends to go to those already successful.
Note that this isn't an issue of selling CDs - in fact, royalties from streaming sites might just be the primary source of income in the near future with the popularity of places like last.fm and Spotify. Proper allocation and collection of royalties is more important than ever these days. Don't throw the baby out with the bathwater because of these jerks, we're just getting to the point that the granularity of royalties makes sense, now that actual accurate playcounts can be generated (and individual songs purchased rather than albums), resulting in fairer distribution of collected fees based on harder data than chart sales and radio playlists.
Every field has its jargon, and writing about writing is no different. These words are used for specificity, as well as to avoid repetition, and boredom (on the author's part, at least). People write like this to show off, yes, but it also takes a lot of effort to be so precisely complex. If this was a serious academic paper rather than a blog entry it would be edited to read a little more efficiently, but at some point you can't break down concepts any further without either watering down the idea or taking so much time to explain your vocabulary that it becomes more effort than is worthwhile. When a person writes like this, he is writing for a specific audience, one that would understand the name-dropping and the true import of words like 'verisimilitude', pointers that refer to entire conceptual frameworks rather than strict dictionary definitions. That the author submitted the story here demonstrates an almost comical misunderstanding of the average reader here.
Remember how Time's 2006 Person of the Year was YOU? And everyone hated it and thought it was a terrible choice, because user-generated content is often idiotic, base, lowest common denominator, whatever (not trying to be biased, that's just how I remember this place reacting)? That no one cares about your stupid band, your podcast, your profile, or your feed? That the average web user's narcissism might not be the best method of content generation, that social networking concepts were being shoehorned into places for sake of bandwagon jumping, at the expense of added noise and reduced quality content?
In other words: do you really need to put your face on Mario's body? Does that truly enhance your game playing experience? Should game storylines be written around a shallow method of providing a surface-level customization for added 'personalization'? The article takes issue with inappropriate uses of character customization, a trend that has begun to spread from its traditional place in choice-and-consequence RPGs (Fallout, not Final Fantasy) to pretty much any kind of game (often, seemingly randomly), a move that has begun to change the manner of storytelling in video games. The author thinks that this customization, in attempting to bring players further into the narrative, is actually alienating them by presenting them with meaningless choices, confusing identification with understandability, distancing the player from whatever intent the storyline has by introducing surface-level similarity at the cost of a more coherent characterization of the game's hero. Think of the Time cover writ large; a mirror over the face of a video game's protagonist. If there were a technology to easily switch your face with that of an actor's in a movie, would that help you understand the film or extract any additional meaning from it? Does every story need to be turned into a choose-your-own-adventure with branching paths, at the cost of a greater unifying vision? And what purpose does customization serve in the cases where there are no branching paths, when it is thrown in because of market trends?
Assuming you care about video game narratives at all, let alone as any sort of art, of course. I don't think slashdotters are the right crowd for this kind of article. You need a few years of undergraduate literature and film classes to write like this, I don't think this place has the background in narrative theory necessary to be interested in the points this guy is making. Frankly, you guys should consider yourselves lucky not to understand this guy's writing, it probably means you are gainfully employed.
And pollutes like crazy. When you consider the coming wave of environmentally driven taxes, if negative externalities are realistically factored in, it won't be that cheap for much longer.
I bought Final Fantasy 3 and Chrono Trigger at Toys R Us. $69.95 and $79.95, and never lower, trust me. I was a 12 year old kid and those extra 30-40 bucks I paid stung like hell. They were that expensive because they used a 24 and 32 megabit cartridge, respectively, back when most games were 8 to 16 Mb, very few even reached 24, and those were big sellers like Super SF2 and Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3. Since they were cartridges the doubling in size was the primary factor in driving the costs up, along with the fact that the games were not produced in massive quantities (the American versions sold about one-tenth as well as the Japanese did, we're talking around 100-200,000 in America), resulting in (a) an inability to lower the cost to make it up in volume, and (b) a scarcity that didn't allow supply to outstrip demand even months later, as indicated by the fact that used copies were still $20 more than most other games' used copies, which I also remember, having unfortunately sold both of my copies before they became collector's items.
What about when you're uninsured? When a trip to the clinic with an x-ray or two thrown in swells into a $400-500 bill, before even diagnosing something you know you damn well can't afford? Would universal health care help there, if people were able to afford a routine, preventative trip?
It depends on what kind of 'solution' you are interested in. The U.S. already has an anti-ballistic missile system designed to stop small-scale launches (a single missile from North Korea, an accidental launch of a Russian or Chinese missile). However, there is no technology that would work in a larger-scale conflict. Nuclear weapons and delivery methods are simply too effective. As has been said many times, hitting a missile out of the air is like hitting a bullet with a bullet, only harder. Technology isn't a quick or easy fix, you have to stop it at the source - it's easier to prevent someone firing a gun than stopping the bullet once it's launched.
A modern ICBM is very hard to track; it only burns fuel for about 5 minutes, then continues to ascend for 20 minutes, reaching a height of over 1000 kilometers. A MIRVed missile will then break apart into (up to) eight separate warheads, as well as releasing chaff, reflective balloons, and decoy warheads. These warheads then fall to Earth at 4 km/s in less than two minutes, in a variable pattern (something like this ). That is a little under 30 minutes to see the launch, determine the ballistic course, and launch enough missiles from hundreds of miles away to attempt to intercept hundreds of real warheads amongst the greater amount of decoys and penetration aids. Oh, and some warheads can be set to detonate in the atmosphere to create an EMP effect, throwing off radar and other tracking systems. Radar and ABM sites will also be among the first targets. We have a hard enough time shooting down slow-moving single targets (the military has effective tactical anti-missile technology such as the Patriot and AEGIS, but there are orders of magnitude of difference between tactical missiles and ICBMs), but the very idea of a strategic nuclear defense is laughable. We've spent hundreds of billions of dollars on a system that we hope can take out a rogue missile or two.
There's a huge difference between what Reagan wanted with SDI and what is technologically possible even today. Our current ABM programs are designed to shoot down single missiles, from rogue countries or an accidental Russian/Chinese launch. They are in no way feasible for stopping any sort of full-on attack or retaliation. As a strategic weapon, ICMBs and submarine-launched ballistic missiles are FAR from obsolete. Drones and micro-cruise missiles are TACTICAL weapons; you're not going to fight a full nuclear conflict with them.
I will grant that the idea of a full-scale nuclear assault is an obsolete idea, and nuclear missiles are obsolete in the sense that they will never be used as part of any realistic military objective, and maintaining massive quantities at a moment's notice is a wasteful relic of a reality over two decades past.
About half of the U.S.'s current arsenal are submarine based ballistic and cruise missiles. You can pretty much count on the majority of these surviving. That alone is enough of a strikeback capability, especially considering that if, indeed, the Russians (nobody else is capable of a meaningful first strike) dedicated their arsenal (or the majority of it) to a first strike, you don't need to attack silos and air bases but can instead concentrate on countervalue strikes on cities - indeed, assuming that both sides have similarly sized arsenals, the Russians could end up taking worse damage, as they would have to send a huge amount of warheads to Wyoming, North Dakota, South Dakota, and Colorado to attack mostly uninhabited areas containing Minuteman III launch silos to limit America's ICBM-based launch capacity. Which, clearly, makes no sense; first strikes haven't been realistically 'winnable' since the early 60s when the U.S. still had a much larger stockpile, and especially since the onset of modern-day nuclear submarines. If both sides have the same, or near the same amount of weapons, it is utterly futile, barring some fantastically complex spy system that would manage to neutralize the subs, to launch any sort of mass attack (it gets considerably more murky if you consider a limited nuclear exchange, but we've managed to go this long without one) and expect to get away without a devastating counterattack.
MAD as a doctrine has managed to prevent nuclear war so far, and I don't see why it shouldn't apply even as we scale down the amount of weapons involved - even the loss of 'a few' major cities (compared to a couple dozen at the height of the cold war) would likely spell the end of the political power of both nations, and a few hundred nukes detonating on your continent is still gonna give a significant portion of your population issues with fallout. Let us not forget the power of the EMP, either - every piece of non-hardened electronics in either country could be disabled with a few high-altitude airbursts. Nuclear destruction isn't simply a function of how large a crater and how many you leave behind - it has permanent and long-lasting effects afterwards.
He's not the naive one if you actually think you could disable Russia's launch sites with conventional weaponry, especially if you count their bombers and subs as part of the total launch capacity, which you kind of have to in this scenario - also considering you have to disable them all simultaneously or there are going to be a few launches as soon as they realize their arsenal is at all threatened. Because bombing missile sites within Russia? That's an act of war.
Why do we need a substantially larger number of ICBMs than the Russians? So what if they were going to shut them down anyway, it just means we maintain a parity anyway and save a few hundreds of millions in the process. I doubt Obama actually WANTS those excess launchers in the first place. 500 ICBMs is more than enough to overcome any possible Russian military defense, plus we also have 14 Ohio-class nuclear submarines that each carry 14 Trident II missiles, capable of carrying multiple (testing photos have shown five to six) warheads each - as well as 4 subs equipped with 154 nuclear cruise missiles. At least 50% of our total nuclear capacity is sub-based, which is much more secure and efficient than our land-based ICBMs. Britain gets away with having their entire arsenal sub-based, and shifting an even greater amount of ours to subs makes sense financially and militarily. We don't need 2000 warheads these days - China poses no military threat, and even if we cut our arsenal in half we still have more than enough to deter any nuclear attack - what, do you want to keep enough to pretend to ourselves that we have a credible first strike option against Russia?
Or looking at it the other way, what do we gain by forcing the Russian governemnt to spend billions of dollars it doesn't have to replace aging technology? Don't you think there could be some destabilizing of their government by forcing funds in that direction, giving more power to military contractors, hawks, and maintaining a dated and mutually harmful status quo, taking away money that could be better spent on social welfare or just not taxed at all (or, at least, not spent on the military)?
The Chinese actually have a really smart nuclear policy: no first use. In a nuclear war, there are different kinds of targets: counterforce (sending warheads to blow up other warheads in an attempt to minimize retaliation) and countervalue (detonating warheads over strategic cities). The Chinese have never had the arsenal necessary to threaten a convincing first strike (the whole purpose of a first strike being to do enough damage to another nation's capacity to strike back that losses are kept to an 'acceptable' amount), but they have had just enough capability to threaten a significant counterstrike to the aggressor's cities. The whole point of submarine and mobile missiles is to maintain the ability to send a large enough retaliatory response if a nation implements a nuclear strike against them; Britain's entire nuclear arsenal is submarine-based so that it would be impossible to wipe out a strategically meaningful amount of their total capacity (submarines carry MIRV'd missiles, which are basically impossible to defend against with any modern antiballistic missile system). Having a hidden, unpredictable, mobile striking capacity is actually a good thing: it keeps everyone honest. While there's always the possibility of limited war, with such a small arsenal, there'd be no way to meaningfully survive a counterattack and hence no reason to initiate war, and similiarly, with a sub and truck based launch platform, there's no way to guarantee you'd be able to take out enough of their retaliatory capacity in a first strike.
I can't speak to the buildup of their conventional capacity, but China's nuclear intentions are about as honest as you're going to get from a nuclear power.
That might be your definition, but that's not really what it is. There's no universal standard, but here's what The Economist says, according to Wikipedia:
In February 2009, the Economist magazine announced that over half the world's population now belongs to the middle class, as a result of rapid growth in emerging countries. It characterized the middle class as having a reasonable amount of discretionary income, so that they do not live from hand to mouth as the poor do, and defined it as beginning at the point where people have roughly a third of their income left for discretionary spending after paying for basic food and shelter. This allows people to buy consumer goods, improve their health care, and provide for their children's education. Most of the emerging middle class consists of people who are middle-class by the standards of the developing world but not the rich one, since their money incomes do not match developed country levels, but the percentage of it which is discretionary does.
An apartment, a 'working' car, tv, computer, and food money do NOT make someone middle class - depending on the part of the country you live in, these can be easily met at a couple bucks above minimum wage, or even AT minimum wage if you buy cheaply. I lived in San Jose for under $1000 a month meeting all of those criteria, and I wouldn't call myself middle class (even qualified for food stamps, but too lazy to get them). Consumer electronics are so much cheaper these days compared to what they used to be that you can't use their availability as a class marker; a 30 inch flatscreen tv is $250 at Best Buy, computers are practically free if you know anyone who doesn't need their five-year old computer after they upgrade. A working car is still not exactly cheap, but there'll always be beaters out there with no AC or radio. Decent furniture costs more than your 'luxuries' these days, though I did get a sweet couch off Craigslist for $120. Generally, there's so many cheap goods out there that you can get all of these things free from friends and family or cheaply if you don't mind being half a decade behind the curve. Now, that's a single guy in his early 20s, but a family income is another story...
I'd say most people in the U.S. meet this standard, but this is in no way what being 'middle class' in America means. If you start bringing in statistics like median or average income, you'll see how easily you can be under the poverty line and still afford these basics of life. The REAL indicator of where middle-class citizenship starts should be whether or not you can afford private health insurance.
Often the law is anything but clear - have you actually read it? It's not meant to be plain-text decipherable to the layman, and will often have unclear language specifically designed to muddle judgments and allow carefully constructed arguments to slip past the spirit of the law. That's why the sneakiest, cleverest lawyers get the biggest paychecks, and why we have fights over justices in the first place. Objective standards change over time - nowhere else is this MORE evident than the Supreme Court. Sometimes the 'objective' stance is unfair, unconstitutional - determining that is where the perspective comes from, and *exactly the point* of the discussion and fight over appointing new justices.
Slashdot Mirror
I have a degree in postmodern literature, don't assume I can't blaze through your standard paperback in a couple hours, but a non-narrative government policy, with substantial room for interpretation, with flow-breaking formatting, with unintuitive legal definitions, with a lot of numbers (financial and otherwise) being thrown around, isn't exactly Tom Clancy airplane reading, and skimming and 'the gist' is exactly the kind of pseudo-reporting going on here.
Access to information is vital for being an informed member of society, and the government long ago decided it is worth subsidizing its availability. Don't think of it merely as access to the internet. We have libraries for free access to books, newspapers and magazines, government pamphlets/official documents, educational programs, public speakers and presentations, community cultural and political events, and even just intellectual hangouts. The internet is merely the world's best library, alongside being an economic juggernaut that is only going to drive more commerce in the future, and good broadband internet is a steal compared to the cost of bringing even a fraction of a decent metropolitan library's capacities to rural areas and the poor. The possibilities for furthering education (both k-12 and adult) alone should be good enough, as surely the increased tax base from an educated populace should more than pay for the subsidies, plus sometimes the government just isn't afraid of spending public money to ensure that the public can be informed about the government's activities; think how much money can be saved from having to print pamphlets, fliers, and forms. The internet isn't just for trolling forums and watching Youtube.
So the text has been out for several hours and this guy flipped through it (you can't honestly read 357 pages of children's fiction in that time, let alone government policy) enough to find a few stated ideas for taxes, and all of a sudden it's a net loss for consumers? When are those taxes going to take effect, and what is the inflation-adjusted amount in today's dollars? It's a lot easier to suggest taxes than to try and tell congress how to budget or regulate companies, so this statement of policy cannot honestly take into account any kind of subsidy that might be dreamed up by congress (save your complaints about how taxes pay for that, that's not the kind of cost we're talking about), nor any kind of price regulations that would decrease charges. A substantial part of the plan is supposed to be paid for by auctioning another part of the broadcast spectrum, and there's no way of knowing anything other than a ballpark estimate for that amount. It's not like this is anything other than the first public rough draft; items will change and funding will be battled over every day until the relevant budgets are passed.
Actually, I do have a degenerative disease in my wrists and I am looking to get a tablet specifically so that I can read again, because it isn't holding the book that is painful, but holding the pages open - at least on non-clothbound paperbacks. Netbook screens are too small and it is really difficult to read at a desk. I have used 15 inch laptops turned on their sides to get the maximum viewing range, but they are bulky and require contorted positions. Something magazine sized, light, and with a simple interface for scrolling and page turning, in full color, with PDF capabilities, would be a godsend.
Well, you could look at it as the majority party (and state populace, through propositions) passing programs that require too much funding, or the minority party blocking the new taxes being required to pay for the programs. However, the tricky thing is Proposition 13, which was passed in an anti-Tax hysteria back in the 70s, requires a two-thirds majority in the state legislature to raise taxes (to pass the yearly budget, technically) and a two-thirds majority to pass a tax through the state initiative system, while requiring only a standard majority to pass new laws that would require funding (it also keeps property taxes at lower levels than most other states, though that is quite a bit more complicated). It's pretty common for taxes to get past the 50% mark without hitting the 67% mark, so it really only takes a 34% minority to block any increase in revenue, and guess who the usual suspects are? California has only gotten by because it is one of the largest economies in the world and is able to get massive amounts of money anyway, but after 2008 lost somewhere along the lines of an entire quarter of its tax revenue from the recession, and the republicans in the legislature have been as adamantly against tax increases as those in congress are against health care, seeing this as a great opportunity to strike against all their least favorite social programs.
This kind of systematized academic attention to games is long overdue, specifically in the soft sciences and humanities. Video games have now become the most profitable means of entertainment, and it is kind of amazing that so little attention is paid to them in terms of serious academic study. As a literature grad, I can tell you that many of the books I've devoted serious academic effort to have print runs that would make shovelware developers for the DS laugh. Although that's kind of an apples-to-oranges comparison (for the purpose of building analytical skills, there's nothing wrong with examining a minor work, it actually is valuable to be unable to find any prior critical work to build off of), it could help raise the esteem and perceptions of relevance for the discipline outside the Academy.
The vast majority of games have a pretty shallow narrative structure, but there are still themes, relationships, ideologies, moralities, and philosophies encoded into the choices and actions we are presented with (or instructed to make) over the course of the game. And that's not even considering the larger context of cultural markers and meanings games are embedded in. As games grow in both popularity and narrative/cultural sophistication (were we presented with choices like 'kill innocents to maintain your cover with the terrorists' before this decade? Is that a function of a maturing playerbase demanding 'realism', more awareness of the importance of moral choices by developers, shifting cultural beliefs about terrorism/warfare/entertainment in the face of omnipresent concerns this decade?), there is a lot of fertile ground to be mined in artistic and cultural criticism, and a much wider scope for psychological, sociological, and educational research. Games are not innocent or 'harmless' and have the same capacity for meaning as any fairy tale, comic book, film, or nightly news report. Actions in a video game can be seen as 'natural' consequences, rather than as constrained choices in a constructed system, much like books and films and Fox News (or any other news network, though Fox are the true masters of narrative-building) reports; what happens is justified by the internal logic and prevailing ideology of the narrative - and if you think you can see through them easily and they have no impact on your ways of thinking, just look at how many people here quote Ayn Rand or Heinlein in their sigs*. When the generation that grew up with video games from birth reaches 40, I wouldn't be surprised to see ideological quotes from games there; though games are much more indirect and admittedly don't have nearly as many choice soundbites, I wonder if the fact that a player is performing the actions himself is more psychologically effective than simply being exposed to a narrative (although the narrative depth and sophistication of even the best games pales in comparison to even merely decent writers of fiction).
We give toddlers toys to build reflexes and train physical functions, but also to help build mental pathways for things such as seeing differences in colors and shapes, cause and effect, and rudimentary knowledge of currency and careers; we can see video games as toys as well in this sense, built to entertain, but also to develop and test critical thinking and reasoning skills (well, decent games do) and to allow players to take on various roles in the world (be it mayor or covert operative). In order to build more educational games, we need to NOT look at them as textbooks but more like a laboratory. Games are for doing, not reading; hypertextual footnotes to a textbook are okay. Like conventional textbooks, however, there are implicit and unstated assumptions built into the structure of games; in order to be successful as educational tools, you need to examine the entire superstructure to try and build what you want to teach into the very playing of the game. This must be how we see games as education, not merely computerized flash cards posing math questions or multiple-choice answers providing a smal
For thematic organizing principles? As a meta-commentary on the contents? To establish a mood for the chapter? To shed light on the meaning of narrative events, or perhaps to ironically change perspective on them? To parody the structure of another book, or undermine a novel's own structure? For any number of perfectly valid, reasonable, and appropriate artistic reasons that have nothing whatsoever to do with commercializing those portions? Chapter titles are as much a part of a coherent whole as any other part of the text, and though they often serve merely as linear indicators, plenty of writers have artistically meaningful chapter titles.
I'd say MOST people have paid more than a tenth of their own health care. Medicare taxes on every dollar earned (the majority of workers earning far less than the cutoff) is probably half of it right there, and (inflation adjusted) health insurance benefits/premiums (if your employer didn't have to pay them, you'd get a higher wage, after all) more than makes up for the rest. And as for 'other peoples' money', well, insurance is a shared risk pool of other peoples' money, so you paid for the right to have access to money in excess of your own contribution if the circumstances ever called for it. How much you should be allowed to spend is a fair point of contention, but don't pretend people are making out like bandits for a service they paid what the insurance companies themselves considered a fair amount for.
It means someone who is constantly hovering over their kid's shoulder (in some cases almost quite literally) as in overprotectively smothering them and often interfering with school and other activities.
Nothing, really, nothing has been accomplished in the attempt to help out the poor? What sort of metrics are you basing that on, and philosophically why do you think 'nothing' is accomplished? What is your standard of success?
I'd like to see NASA funded as much as anyone, but don't you think that it'd be just a little unfair to quite literally take the food off of childrens' plates and cut insurance that we all fairly pay for, so that government contractors, aerospace engineers, tech magnates, global communications corporations, etc, can get richer? Who is going to see the most profit from NASA anyway? Sure, we all know Tang, velcro, and pens that can write in zero-gravity were cool space inventions, but most of the derived benefits took years, decades to trickle down to the lowest levels of economic status, while trillions of dollars were made over the same amount of time by those who were already in place to capitalize on the inventions (takes money to make money, etc). I realize that harsh taxes will discourage investment, but don't you think it'd be fairer if those reaping the lion's share of the benefits be the ones to invest the most? Why don't we raise taxes on them, if they're so eager to get the benefit, or rather, cut some of their government benefits. What say we cut some school lunch programs, and then cut 20% of naval patrols in areas containing known pirates, or maybe just not deliver mail every third monday, all of which could save some money towards NASA? Infrastructure, law, military defense, why don't you see these as literal 'entitlements' as well? The people who benefit most from NASA aren't the ones who have to worry about their children's dinner or losing everything because of a few months unemployment.
Royalties are simply the most rational way of paying songwriters - the ratio of successful songs to unsuccessful songs is so large that it makes no economic sense to do it any other way, and the randomness of the music market prevents any real sort of cost/benefit analysis - even huge stars can flop, one-hit wonders can pay off spectacularly, and you have to take hundreds of risks before you find a profitable performer. A successful artist has to write a large number of unsuccessful songs before they can profit from one, regardless of the relative merit of their work.
How would you feel if you wrote dozens of good programs, but only got compensated for one if the client hit a improbably large sales target, and you only got a small lump sum anyway? The music industry is a bitch, but it works like it does for a reason, and its crimes are crimes of disproportion rather than inherent evil.
It is one thing to rail against abusive organizations, but you have to think about the little guy here. Music as a good is worth what people will pay for it, nothing more and nothing less, it has no inherent value and it is impossible to know in advance just how much it is worth. You have to allow the possibility of profit, however improbable, or the quality of music will decrease even further beyond your lofty standards. Royalties are a merit-driven method of compensation, or as close as we can get allowing for market distortions from publicity campaigns, and are still very relevant (more than ever, in fact) in the post-CD age. Royalties are the only method of compensation that make sense with a lack of scarcity - either through subscription or advertising, royalties can be paid from online radio, with (at least the possibility of) accurate and fair accounting since it is easy to track exactly how many times a song has been heard.
And yes, of course people used to get paid for specifically commissioned work, BEFORE THERE WAS RADIO. Royalties have been around as long as modern music has. A patronage system simply doesn't make sense anymore because of the broadness and tastes of the market - you make way more money selling to crowds of teenyboppers or hipsters than to a single customer, and you need the sieve of the market to find talent amongst the millions of musicians producing today. Plenty of terrible work has been commissioned over the centuries as well - think of how many classical composers, or artists of any kind, that you can name from the past 500 or so years, compared to the number of artists you can name from your lifetime. Aside from being completely apples to oranges, there is a serious survivorship bias in comparing the cream of the premodern crop.
It is impossible to determine the true profit of a song in advance. Engineers can get a lump sum up front because it is much easier to determine the objective worth of their work; with songwriting, success is mostly random. Some professional songwriters can hit on a formula that might be successful within the context of a given trend, especially with the backing of media corporations, but fashion changes quickly and there are very few who are able to be consistently successful over the long run. A piece of art is priceless, or valueless, in both senses of the word - it is simply as valuable as people are willing to pay. If you write a program or build a structure, you can estimate to a pretty fair degree how much value you'll be able to extract from it, but there is such great variance with music, even with millions in marketing backing a project, that there is no way to pay people up front. I suppose there are songwriting groups and in-house guys that can make a salary, but outside of highly commercial productions that's just not how people write music.
If current practices are unsustainable, then popular music as we know it may be unsustainable. It is hard enough to make a living as a musician now, lots of mildly successful musicians still have day jobs, but without the small amount of revenue from royalties many might just give up. Also, being a songwriter doesn't necessarily mean being a performer, or a touring artist, so you can't just say 'give your music away for free and make it up in t-shirt and ticket sales.' Sure, there are site-specific jobs like in-house composer for films and games or commercial jingles, but they are the people least likely to receive royalties anyway, having already signed away rights to their employer. You could sell rights to use your songs in advertisements, but you need a certain degree of exposure in the first place to have enough street cred to be worth associating with a product, so that money tends to go to those already successful.
Note that this isn't an issue of selling CDs - in fact, royalties from streaming sites might just be the primary source of income in the near future with the popularity of places like last.fm and Spotify. Proper allocation and collection of royalties is more important than ever these days. Don't throw the baby out with the bathwater because of these jerks, we're just getting to the point that the granularity of royalties makes sense, now that actual accurate playcounts can be generated (and individual songs purchased rather than albums), resulting in fairer distribution of collected fees based on harder data than chart sales and radio playlists.
Every field has its jargon, and writing about writing is no different. These words are used for specificity, as well as to avoid repetition, and boredom (on the author's part, at least). People write like this to show off, yes, but it also takes a lot of effort to be so precisely complex. If this was a serious academic paper rather than a blog entry it would be edited to read a little more efficiently, but at some point you can't break down concepts any further without either watering down the idea or taking so much time to explain your vocabulary that it becomes more effort than is worthwhile. When a person writes like this, he is writing for a specific audience, one that would understand the name-dropping and the true import of words like 'verisimilitude', pointers that refer to entire conceptual frameworks rather than strict dictionary definitions. That the author submitted the story here demonstrates an almost comical misunderstanding of the average reader here.
Remember how Time's 2006 Person of the Year was YOU? And everyone hated it and thought it was a terrible choice, because user-generated content is often idiotic, base, lowest common denominator, whatever (not trying to be biased, that's just how I remember this place reacting)? That no one cares about your stupid band, your podcast, your profile, or your feed? That the average web user's narcissism might not be the best method of content generation, that social networking concepts were being shoehorned into places for sake of bandwagon jumping, at the expense of added noise and reduced quality content?
In other words: do you really need to put your face on Mario's body? Does that truly enhance your game playing experience? Should game storylines be written around a shallow method of providing a surface-level customization for added 'personalization'? The article takes issue with inappropriate uses of character customization, a trend that has begun to spread from its traditional place in choice-and-consequence RPGs (Fallout, not Final Fantasy) to pretty much any kind of game (often, seemingly randomly), a move that has begun to change the manner of storytelling in video games. The author thinks that this customization, in attempting to bring players further into the narrative, is actually alienating them by presenting them with meaningless choices, confusing identification with understandability, distancing the player from whatever intent the storyline has by introducing surface-level similarity at the cost of a more coherent characterization of the game's hero. Think of the Time cover writ large; a mirror over the face of a video game's protagonist. If there were a technology to easily switch your face with that of an actor's in a movie, would that help you understand the film or extract any additional meaning from it? Does every story need to be turned into a choose-your-own-adventure with branching paths, at the cost of a greater unifying vision? And what purpose does customization serve in the cases where there are no branching paths, when it is thrown in because of market trends?
Assuming you care about video game narratives at all, let alone as any sort of art, of course. I don't think slashdotters are the right crowd for this kind of article. You need a few years of undergraduate literature and film classes to write like this, I don't think this place has the background in narrative theory necessary to be interested in the points this guy is making. Frankly, you guys should consider yourselves lucky not to understand this guy's writing, it probably means you are gainfully employed.
And pollutes like crazy. When you consider the coming wave of environmentally driven taxes, if negative externalities are realistically factored in, it won't be that cheap for much longer.
I bought Final Fantasy 3 and Chrono Trigger at Toys R Us. $69.95 and $79.95, and never lower, trust me. I was a 12 year old kid and those extra 30-40 bucks I paid stung like hell. They were that expensive because they used a 24 and 32 megabit cartridge, respectively, back when most games were 8 to 16 Mb, very few even reached 24, and those were big sellers like Super SF2 and Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3. Since they were cartridges the doubling in size was the primary factor in driving the costs up, along with the fact that the games were not produced in massive quantities (the American versions sold about one-tenth as well as the Japanese did, we're talking around 100-200,000 in America), resulting in (a) an inability to lower the cost to make it up in volume, and (b) a scarcity that didn't allow supply to outstrip demand even months later, as indicated by the fact that used copies were still $20 more than most other games' used copies, which I also remember, having unfortunately sold both of my copies before they became collector's items.
What about when you're uninsured? When a trip to the clinic with an x-ray or two thrown in swells into a $400-500 bill, before even diagnosing something you know you damn well can't afford? Would universal health care help there, if people were able to afford a routine, preventative trip?
It depends on what kind of 'solution' you are interested in. The U.S. already has an anti-ballistic missile system designed to stop small-scale launches (a single missile from North Korea, an accidental launch of a Russian or Chinese missile). However, there is no technology that would work in a larger-scale conflict. Nuclear weapons and delivery methods are simply too effective. As has been said many times, hitting a missile out of the air is like hitting a bullet with a bullet, only harder. Technology isn't a quick or easy fix, you have to stop it at the source - it's easier to prevent someone firing a gun than stopping the bullet once it's launched.
A modern ICBM is very hard to track; it only burns fuel for about 5 minutes, then continues to ascend for 20 minutes, reaching a height of over 1000 kilometers. A MIRVed missile will then break apart into (up to) eight separate warheads, as well as releasing chaff, reflective balloons, and decoy warheads. These warheads then fall to Earth at 4 km/s in less than two minutes, in a variable pattern (something like this ). That is a little under 30 minutes to see the launch, determine the ballistic course, and launch enough missiles from hundreds of miles away to attempt to intercept hundreds of real warheads amongst the greater amount of decoys and penetration aids. Oh, and some warheads can be set to detonate in the atmosphere to create an EMP effect, throwing off radar and other tracking systems. Radar and ABM sites will also be among the first targets. We have a hard enough time shooting down slow-moving single targets (the military has effective tactical anti-missile technology such as the Patriot and AEGIS, but there are orders of magnitude of difference between tactical missiles and ICBMs), but the very idea of a strategic nuclear defense is laughable. We've spent hundreds of billions of dollars on a system that we hope can take out a rogue missile or two.
There's a huge difference between what Reagan wanted with SDI and what is technologically possible even today. Our current ABM programs are designed to shoot down single missiles, from rogue countries or an accidental Russian/Chinese launch. They are in no way feasible for stopping any sort of full-on attack or retaliation. As a strategic weapon, ICMBs and submarine-launched ballistic missiles are FAR from obsolete. Drones and micro-cruise missiles are TACTICAL weapons; you're not going to fight a full nuclear conflict with them.
I will grant that the idea of a full-scale nuclear assault is an obsolete idea, and nuclear missiles are obsolete in the sense that they will never be used as part of any realistic military objective, and maintaining massive quantities at a moment's notice is a wasteful relic of a reality over two decades past.
About half of the U.S.'s current arsenal are submarine based ballistic and cruise missiles. You can pretty much count on the majority of these surviving. That alone is enough of a strikeback capability, especially considering that if, indeed, the Russians (nobody else is capable of a meaningful first strike) dedicated their arsenal (or the majority of it) to a first strike, you don't need to attack silos and air bases but can instead concentrate on countervalue strikes on cities - indeed, assuming that both sides have similarly sized arsenals, the Russians could end up taking worse damage, as they would have to send a huge amount of warheads to Wyoming, North Dakota, South Dakota, and Colorado to attack mostly uninhabited areas containing Minuteman III launch silos to limit America's ICBM-based launch capacity. Which, clearly, makes no sense; first strikes haven't been realistically 'winnable' since the early 60s when the U.S. still had a much larger stockpile, and especially since the onset of modern-day nuclear submarines. If both sides have the same, or near the same amount of weapons, it is utterly futile, barring some fantastically complex spy system that would manage to neutralize the subs, to launch any sort of mass attack (it gets considerably more murky if you consider a limited nuclear exchange, but we've managed to go this long without one) and expect to get away without a devastating counterattack.
MAD as a doctrine has managed to prevent nuclear war so far, and I don't see why it shouldn't apply even as we scale down the amount of weapons involved - even the loss of 'a few' major cities (compared to a couple dozen at the height of the cold war) would likely spell the end of the political power of both nations, and a few hundred nukes detonating on your continent is still gonna give a significant portion of your population issues with fallout. Let us not forget the power of the EMP, either - every piece of non-hardened electronics in either country could be disabled with a few high-altitude airbursts. Nuclear destruction isn't simply a function of how large a crater and how many you leave behind - it has permanent and long-lasting effects afterwards.
He's not the naive one if you actually think you could disable Russia's launch sites with conventional weaponry, especially if you count their bombers and subs as part of the total launch capacity, which you kind of have to in this scenario - also considering you have to disable them all simultaneously or there are going to be a few launches as soon as they realize their arsenal is at all threatened. Because bombing missile sites within Russia? That's an act of war.
Why do we need a substantially larger number of ICBMs than the Russians? So what if they were going to shut them down anyway, it just means we maintain a parity anyway and save a few hundreds of millions in the process. I doubt Obama actually WANTS those excess launchers in the first place. 500 ICBMs is more than enough to overcome any possible Russian military defense, plus we also have 14 Ohio-class nuclear submarines that each carry 14 Trident II missiles, capable of carrying multiple (testing photos have shown five to six) warheads each - as well as 4 subs equipped with 154 nuclear cruise missiles. At least 50% of our total nuclear capacity is sub-based, which is much more secure and efficient than our land-based ICBMs. Britain gets away with having their entire arsenal sub-based, and shifting an even greater amount of ours to subs makes sense financially and militarily. We don't need 2000 warheads these days - China poses no military threat, and even if we cut our arsenal in half we still have more than enough to deter any nuclear attack - what, do you want to keep enough to pretend to ourselves that we have a credible first strike option against Russia?
Or looking at it the other way, what do we gain by forcing the Russian governemnt to spend billions of dollars it doesn't have to replace aging technology? Don't you think there could be some destabilizing of their government by forcing funds in that direction, giving more power to military contractors, hawks, and maintaining a dated and mutually harmful status quo, taking away money that could be better spent on social welfare or just not taxed at all (or, at least, not spent on the military)?
The Chinese actually have a really smart nuclear policy: no first use. In a nuclear war, there are different kinds of targets: counterforce (sending warheads to blow up other warheads in an attempt to minimize retaliation) and countervalue (detonating warheads over strategic cities). The Chinese have never had the arsenal necessary to threaten a convincing first strike (the whole purpose of a first strike being to do enough damage to another nation's capacity to strike back that losses are kept to an 'acceptable' amount), but they have had just enough capability to threaten a significant counterstrike to the aggressor's cities. The whole point of submarine and mobile missiles is to maintain the ability to send a large enough retaliatory response if a nation implements a nuclear strike against them; Britain's entire nuclear arsenal is submarine-based so that it would be impossible to wipe out a strategically meaningful amount of their total capacity (submarines carry MIRV'd missiles, which are basically impossible to defend against with any modern antiballistic missile system). Having a hidden, unpredictable, mobile striking capacity is actually a good thing: it keeps everyone honest. While there's always the possibility of limited war, with such a small arsenal, there'd be no way to meaningfully survive a counterattack and hence no reason to initiate war, and similiarly, with a sub and truck based launch platform, there's no way to guarantee you'd be able to take out enough of their retaliatory capacity in a first strike.
I can't speak to the buildup of their conventional capacity, but China's nuclear intentions are about as honest as you're going to get from a nuclear power.
An apartment, a 'working' car, tv, computer, and food money do NOT make someone middle class - depending on the part of the country you live in, these can be easily met at a couple bucks above minimum wage, or even AT minimum wage if you buy cheaply. I lived in San Jose for under $1000 a month meeting all of those criteria, and I wouldn't call myself middle class (even qualified for food stamps, but too lazy to get them). Consumer electronics are so much cheaper these days compared to what they used to be that you can't use their availability as a class marker; a 30 inch flatscreen tv is $250 at Best Buy, computers are practically free if you know anyone who doesn't need their five-year old computer after they upgrade. A working car is still not exactly cheap, but there'll always be beaters out there with no AC or radio. Decent furniture costs more than your 'luxuries' these days, though I did get a sweet couch off Craigslist for $120. Generally, there's so many cheap goods out there that you can get all of these things free from friends and family or cheaply if you don't mind being half a decade behind the curve. Now, that's a single guy in his early 20s, but a family income is another story...
I'd say most people in the U.S. meet this standard, but this is in no way what being 'middle class' in America means. If you start bringing in statistics like median or average income, you'll see how easily you can be under the poverty line and still afford these basics of life. The REAL indicator of where middle-class citizenship starts should be whether or not you can afford private health insurance.
Often the law is anything but clear - have you actually read it? It's not meant to be plain-text decipherable to the layman, and will often have unclear language specifically designed to muddle judgments and allow carefully constructed arguments to slip past the spirit of the law. That's why the sneakiest, cleverest lawyers get the biggest paychecks, and why we have fights over justices in the first place. Objective standards change over time - nowhere else is this MORE evident than the Supreme Court. Sometimes the 'objective' stance is unfair, unconstitutional - determining that is where the perspective comes from, and *exactly the point* of the discussion and fight over appointing new justices.