It means serving patrons in a world in which government surveillance is not going away; indeed it looks like it will increase.
Why didn't they start this years ago when Obama extended and expanded the Patriot Act? Sounds like more leftist hypocrisy and hyperbole to me.
Sounds like more SOP conservative false equivalence to me: President Obama never threatend a crackdown on dissent, never threatened to jail his opponents, and never showed himself predisposed to seek revenge against critics with as many levers of power as are at his disposal.
you want your rural state to get proportional representation.
This.
If someone gave me the godlike power to craft a fair system of government for our country, it would probably be parliamentary with proportional representation, so as to prevent the situation that the Canadians are dealing with, where they have a parliament, but still have a "two party system," so they still have problems with the two parties not totally representing all Canadians between the two of them. I do think their "two parties" do a better job than ours at representing a bigger proportion of the population, but I'm sure there are some valid, but not popular viewpoints in Canada that aren't represented by the Conservatives nor the LIberals.
Most political systems have some degree of protection for rural areas to prevent them from being utterly steamrolled and dominated by the cities.
Very true, but we have that even without the Electoral College--we have individual constitutional rights that are supposed to serve that function. And if the "steamrolling" they fear is one that is political rather than tyrannical, I'm not sure why rural states should get to be "protected" from being in the minority as long as the thing being done doesn't violate those individual rights.
Consider the current situation, which more or less amounts to a tyranny of the minority, especially when you factor in the "southern states/rural states" Republican "majority" that exists despite not having received a majority of the votes in "The people's house" since 2010. In fact, they got fewer votes in 2012, 2014, and 2016 than they did in the "wave" election of 2010, but have vastly more seats after those elections than they got in 2010.
Tyranny by the minority is just as tyrannical as tyranny by the majority.
So, that one time you got drunk, and wondered "What's Autofellatio" and typed it into Google? Yep, that's why that Traffic Cop is looking at you funny. He's not judging, just trying to picture you blowing yourself.
Maybe its time to get rid of the entire union.....
Impossible--those flyover states also consume the bulk of the welfare dollars pad into by the productive coastal states. Break up the union, you create an instant refugee crisis for the productive states as unemployed rednecks who think "College is a scam so I ain't going--now where's my money-check?!?!?!" suddenly can't afford to exist because the productive big cities simply stop subsidizing them, as they're now part of a "different country."
Now, the possibility of "Regional autonomy" government solution (where the existing 50 states going one of several "provinces" that are governed separately, rather than at the Federal level) might be possible....But you still end up with basically the same problem: No province would want to get stuck with, say, Mississippi and Alabama, and Louisiana, the three lowest performing states economically and academically. Of the three, Louisiana is probably the "prize," what with the sea port and oil resources... But that's still not saying much.
Hillary Clinton won 300 counties while Trump won 5000. If you think that the election of a nation should be swayed by a handful of cities while the rest of the nation is completely ignored, well, you're an idiot.
Not so fast, Billy Bob... Some of those "counties" have fewer residents than single neighborhoods even a small city. So perhaps a better way to say it is "If you think rural voters are somehow so superior to city dwellers that they should get their way despite accumulating 2 million fewer votes for their preferred candidate, well, you're an idiot."
So bottom line, slavery is defunct, so we no longer need to appease slave states
Ah, there's the "it's racist". Thanks for conceding the argument.
Ah, I see what you did there by failing to quote the second half of my point (where I acknowledged it "was racist" when used to that purpose, but isn't anymore now that it isn't.)
Racism/slavery wasn't the only reason the electoral college was instituted... It absolutely was racist when instituted, but since the "3/5" part of it was struck down by the 14th amendment, it's now just a pointlessly old fashioned contrivance to "protect us" from the tyranny of ill-informed rural voters, rather than racist.
A much better argument than racism for eliminating it is in the inequality of value assigned to votes. For example, it takes four times as many votes in Michigan to gain the vote of an elector as it does in Wyoming--which is complete bullshit which allows a state with barely any people a much louder voice for each of its citizens than far more populous Michigan. And it really sucks when you look at how many votes you need in California to get an electoral vote vs. one of the bullshit states.
Yes, I do think of small states as "bullshit." Having lived in Indiana lo these past 15 years I feel I can speak from a place of some authority when I say that.
It's working exactly as designed, striking a balance of power between the states. It's a concept we have in the congress, population based representation in one house and equal state based representation in the other. Without the electoral college the president would effectively be chosen by only a handful of states. The college ensures that all of the states have at least some effective say in the matter.
Two things...
Even with the electoral college, the President is being chosen by a "handful of states." Specifically, the three "Swing" states which put Trump over the top. Even worse, the outcome of the entire country's future leadership is based on less than 10,000 people in one state, less that 20,000 in another, and less than 35,000 in a third--a total of far under 100,000 votes in a nation where more than 120 million votes were cast. This is, more or less... a rounding error... A number of votes that could be cast (or not cast) if it rains on election day.
And second of all, the original "Balance of power" the electoral college was created to preserve was between free and slave states. Specifically, southerners would not have adopted the constitution if they thought that higher population northern states would have been able to control the congress, and the presidency, by virtue of their greater numbers. So they came up with the 3/5 compromise (that allowed slave states to count 60% of their slaves for the purpose of calculating their congressional representation, and by proxy, their electoral college representation,) and kludged it onto the electoral college to "protect" their interests in the Presidency.
Setting aside whether or not the electoral college is, in and of itself "racist," (I don't think it is anymore, although it was conceived as such) the real issue I have with it is that it's an anachronism that isn't necessary. Because the other justification for it is that rural areas in 1797 didn't have very good communications with the outside world, and might be enticed to accidentally vote for a dangerous tyrant that they were unaware was a dangerous tyrant.
So bottom line, slavery is defunct, so we no longer need to appease slave states, and today, rural states have access to the Internet and full communications parity with the rest of the world. Which means there's no more justification for the continued existence of the Electoral College.
Restricting free speech is what the "hate speech" designation is all about.
Whose speech was "restricted"? This particular advertising network simply decided they no longer wish to sponsor this specific speech given the possibility that other advertisers would refuse to purchase ads through their network so as to avoid being associated with this sort of filth.
Yet if you load up Breitbart.com tonight, their hate speech is still blaring away, going strong. So no speech has, in fact, been restricted--someone just told a group of obnoxious braying jackasses they're no longer willing to sponsor their braying.
They can't provide any examples and they aren't banning 5000 other websites that post comparable or more hateful articles.
I'm sure they "can" provide examples, they just choose not to.
Since they acted after receiving a complaint about Breitbart and conducted an audit, how about you report some of those 5000 other hate web-sites you believe they're running advertisements on. See what happens.
So they're lying, they're pushing a hidden agenda
You have zero evidence to support those conclusions.
For example, maybe they just aren't interested in having a never ending debate with the alt-right nutter brigade about what constitutes hate speech, and simply wish to disassociate themselves from a group of people promoting hate, bigotry, and misogyny to avoid potential backlashes from advertisers who don't want to be associated with that sort of filth.
Saying something is "the most secure Windows ever" is roughly the equivalent of being the finest outdoor ice hockey player in Ecuador. That is to say, something which is only impressive out of context.
There's lotsa jobs with decent, but not breathtaking pay that don't require accumulating a huge debt - maybe they can be OK with being a welder, or a railroad locomotive engineer
What I always recommend to kids considering IT is to consider training as an elevator repairman. The job is totally protected from outsourcing--you cannot fix an elevator from India, under any circumstances, period, and the job pays six-figures in most U.S. labor markets. Plus, it mostly can't be outsourced to H1-Bs because it's a mechanical skill which does not qualify for an H1-B visa.
Generally, the experience of companies that outsource successfully involves selecting only work that can be made rote (which also means, in a few years, it will be automated out of the hands of the third-worlders it's being outsourced to at present,) and only using roles that don't involve trusted access to sensitive data. I interviewed with a company that outsourced their "rank and file" IT workers to Indiana with one of the big scumbag companies out there (*cough* COGNIZANT *cough*) and they ended up keeping all the real skilled work and the sensitive stuff in house. Because it turns out, people who live in India aren't really subject to U.S. laws. So even though they could sue the pants off of the outsource contractor in the event of a breach, "getting" the person who did it (with a jail term, scarlet letter for life to prevent future gainful employment) would be much more complicated, maybe impossible.
And the other thing that I've noticed: They end up outsourcing at least twice as many Indians for every American, chopping any "per person savings" in half instantly (because there are twice as many of them.)
Maybe this won't ALWAYS be the case, but I think it will be for the foreseeable future because the thing is, the best educated, highest skilled Indians have already come to the U.S. to work, and don't want to be H1-B slaves and/or stuck in India--they want to be here to swing for the fences, economically speaking.
...and that's assuming nobody notices a voter shutting down the machine, opening the case, installing a PCMCIA card, and bringing it back up... Pretty dubious, if you ask me. The level of conspiracy required to give someone enough time to not be detected while doing that would almost require a totally compromised election process to begin with--and if you have that, why bother compromising the machines?
Then our only choice for moving forward is to take away the GOP's majority in both houses of congress.
It is totally unacceptable for one party to simply choose to "negate" the results of elections that they do not like, and we've already had significant damage done to the credibility of our government, economy, and currency because of it, and another 2-8 years of gridlock would be a huge (yuuuuuuuuuuge) mistake.
Yeah, even in a legalized marijuana society, the smart people won't be paying for it with their debit card, because they know at some point those big data transactions will be used to disqualify them from healthcare, jobs, and life insurance. So, in a word, bullshit Tim, you will never kill cash until you kill the human greed instinct to track and monetize the innoccuous activities of others for your own nefarious ends.
Just like the out of style furniture your Grandma won't throw out in her living room ("It's good as new, only gets sat on twice per year!") why not provide NFL teams slipcovers that make better tablets look like Surface tablets on TV?
Then the NFL can pocket their product placement money, Microsoft can continue to pretend the Surface is not a piece of shit, and teams can have gear that actually works when they need it to.
Ask yourself - who benefits from media consolidation? And the answer is, among others, the established political insiders. So you can expect that this will be a very popular merger among the political class.
Very, very true.
Remember how every TV and radio station, pre-"consolidation era" (i.e. Telecommunications Act of 1996) had some amount of news and/or public service on their airwaves? Remember how, even when the public service stuff was often relegated to 5am Sunday Morning, the news content was mostly pretty decent... Even on stations where the person just read AP news wire copy, there was still decent news programming.
NOW, if you don't seek out news programming on the radio, you mostly won't find it outside of talk stations, news/talk stations, and all-news stations. Besides that, and NPR? Nope. Music station listeners who haven't sought out radio news in the last 15 years probably think the last event of mass importance was 9/11, because that was the last time "music" stations had any significant amount of news programming on them--even earlier in the smaller markets.
It's a damn shame, but also the exact desired outcome--because it isn't "efficient" for owners of hundreds of news stations to pay to have "news departments" and "news programming" on every station, they just don't do it anymore and pocket the funds that would have been spent on it. As a bonus to the political class, the information-level available to your average citizen just dropped another few ticks, and people who used to be occasionally exposed to news programming supplemented with wingnut news online, now only hear the wingnut view and get no "mainstream" (i.e. not-made-up from whole cloth) news.
I was in favor of the pipeline until this all started happening. Now? Fuck 'em: Hope they lose their goddamn shirts. Because their investment isn't worth more than the first amendment right to protest, and the first amendment right to report.
Slashdot Mirror
That's what he's really pissed about: Someone else out-earning him with "his" data.
It means serving patrons in a world in which government surveillance is not going away; indeed it looks like it will increase.
Why didn't they start this years ago when Obama extended and expanded the Patriot Act? Sounds like more leftist hypocrisy and hyperbole to me.
Sounds like more SOP conservative false equivalence to me: President Obama never threatend a crackdown on dissent, never threatened to jail his opponents, and never showed himself predisposed to seek revenge against critics with as many levers of power as are at his disposal.
you want your rural state to get proportional representation.
This.
If someone gave me the godlike power to craft a fair system of government for our country, it would probably be parliamentary with proportional representation, so as to prevent the situation that the Canadians are dealing with, where they have a parliament, but still have a "two party system," so they still have problems with the two parties not totally representing all Canadians between the two of them. I do think their "two parties" do a better job than ours at representing a bigger proportion of the population, but I'm sure there are some valid, but not popular viewpoints in Canada that aren't represented by the Conservatives nor the LIberals.
Most political systems have some degree of protection for rural areas to prevent them from being utterly steamrolled and dominated by the cities.
Very true, but we have that even without the Electoral College--we have individual constitutional rights that are supposed to serve that function. And if the "steamrolling" they fear is one that is political rather than tyrannical, I'm not sure why rural states should get to be "protected" from being in the minority as long as the thing being done doesn't violate those individual rights.
Consider the current situation, which more or less amounts to a tyranny of the minority, especially when you factor in the "southern states/rural states" Republican "majority" that exists despite not having received a majority of the votes in "The people's house" since 2010. In fact, they got fewer votes in 2012, 2014, and 2016 than they did in the "wave" election of 2010, but have vastly more seats after those elections than they got in 2010.
Tyranny by the minority is just as tyrannical as tyranny by the majority.
So, that one time you got drunk, and wondered "What's Autofellatio" and typed it into Google? Yep, that's why that Traffic Cop is looking at you funny. He's not judging, just trying to picture you blowing yourself.
Maybe its time to get rid of the entire union.....
Impossible--those flyover states also consume the bulk of the welfare dollars pad into by the productive coastal states. Break up the union, you create an instant refugee crisis for the productive states as unemployed rednecks who think "College is a scam so I ain't going--now where's my money-check?!?!?!" suddenly can't afford to exist because the productive big cities simply stop subsidizing them, as they're now part of a "different country."
Now, the possibility of "Regional autonomy" government solution (where the existing 50 states going one of several "provinces" that are governed separately, rather than at the Federal level) might be possible. ...But you still end up with basically the same problem: No province would want to get stuck with, say, Mississippi and Alabama, and Louisiana, the three lowest performing states economically and academically. Of the three, Louisiana is probably the "prize," what with the sea port and oil resources... But that's still not saying much.
Hillary Clinton won 300 counties while Trump won 5000. If you think that the election of a nation should be swayed by a handful of cities while the rest of the nation is completely ignored, well, you're an idiot.
Not so fast, Billy Bob... Some of those "counties" have fewer residents than single neighborhoods even a small city. So perhaps a better way to say it is "If you think rural voters are somehow so superior to city dwellers that they should get their way despite accumulating 2 million fewer votes for their preferred candidate, well, you're an idiot."
So bottom line, slavery is defunct, so we no longer need to appease slave states
Ah, there's the "it's racist". Thanks for conceding the argument.
Ah, I see what you did there by failing to quote the second half of my point (where I acknowledged it "was racist" when used to that purpose, but isn't anymore now that it isn't.)
Racism/slavery wasn't the only reason the electoral college was instituted... It absolutely was racist when instituted, but since the "3/5" part of it was struck down by the 14th amendment, it's now just a pointlessly old fashioned contrivance to "protect us" from the tyranny of ill-informed rural voters, rather than racist.
A much better argument than racism for eliminating it is in the inequality of value assigned to votes. For example, it takes four times as many votes in Michigan to gain the vote of an elector as it does in Wyoming--which is complete bullshit which allows a state with barely any people a much louder voice for each of its citizens than far more populous Michigan. And it really sucks when you look at how many votes you need in California to get an electoral vote vs. one of the bullshit states.
Yes, I do think of small states as "bullshit." Having lived in Indiana lo these past 15 years I feel I can speak from a place of some authority when I say that.
It's working exactly as designed, striking a balance of power between the states. It's a concept we have in the congress, population based representation in one house and equal state based representation in the other. Without the electoral college the president would effectively be chosen by only a handful of states. The college ensures that all of the states have at least some effective say in the matter.
Two things...
Even with the electoral college, the President is being chosen by a "handful of states." Specifically, the three "Swing" states which put Trump over the top. Even worse, the outcome of the entire country's future leadership is based on less than 10,000 people in one state, less that 20,000 in another, and less than 35,000 in a third--a total of far under 100,000 votes in a nation where more than 120 million votes were cast. This is, more or less... a rounding error... A number of votes that could be cast (or not cast) if it rains on election day.
And second of all, the original "Balance of power" the electoral college was created to preserve was between free and slave states. Specifically, southerners would not have adopted the constitution if they thought that higher population northern states would have been able to control the congress, and the presidency, by virtue of their greater numbers. So they came up with the 3/5 compromise (that allowed slave states to count 60% of their slaves for the purpose of calculating their congressional representation, and by proxy, their electoral college representation,) and kludged it onto the electoral college to "protect" their interests in the Presidency.
Setting aside whether or not the electoral college is, in and of itself "racist," (I don't think it is anymore, although it was conceived as such) the real issue I have with it is that it's an anachronism that isn't necessary. Because the other justification for it is that rural areas in 1797 didn't have very good communications with the outside world, and might be enticed to accidentally vote for a dangerous tyrant that they were unaware was a dangerous tyrant.
So bottom line, slavery is defunct, so we no longer need to appease slave states, and today, rural states have access to the Internet and full communications parity with the rest of the world. Which means there's no more justification for the continued existence of the Electoral College.
Restricting free speech is what the "hate speech" designation is all about.
Whose speech was "restricted"? This particular advertising network simply decided they no longer wish to sponsor this specific speech given the possibility that other advertisers would refuse to purchase ads through their network so as to avoid being associated with this sort of filth.
Yet if you load up Breitbart.com tonight, their hate speech is still blaring away, going strong. So no speech has, in fact, been restricted--someone just told a group of obnoxious braying jackasses they're no longer willing to sponsor their braying.
Seems fine to me.
They can't provide any examples and they aren't banning 5000 other websites that post comparable or more hateful articles.
I'm sure they "can" provide examples, they just choose not to.
Since they acted after receiving a complaint about Breitbart and conducted an audit, how about you report some of those 5000 other hate web-sites you believe they're running advertisements on. See what happens.
So they're lying, they're pushing a hidden agenda
You have zero evidence to support those conclusions.
For example, maybe they just aren't interested in having a never ending debate with the alt-right nutter brigade about what constitutes hate speech, and simply wish to disassociate themselves from a group of people promoting hate, bigotry, and misogyny to avoid potential backlashes from advertisers who don't want to be associated with that sort of filth.
Paranoid much? No part of their statement says what you claim it is. None.
Ultimate example of closing the barn door after the horse has run away.
I sure was, and still am! Texas wants to secede? I'll count my blessings--one fewer red state mooching off the productive blue ones.
Saying something is "the most secure Windows ever" is roughly the equivalent of being the finest outdoor ice hockey player in Ecuador. That is to say, something which is only impressive out of context.
What I always recommend to kids considering IT is to consider training as an elevator repairman. The job is totally protected from outsourcing--you cannot fix an elevator from India, under any circumstances, period, and the job pays six-figures in most U.S. labor markets. Plus, it mostly can't be outsourced to H1-Bs because it's a mechanical skill which does not qualify for an H1-B visa.
Generally, the experience of companies that outsource successfully involves selecting only work that can be made rote (which also means, in a few years, it will be automated out of the hands of the third-worlders it's being outsourced to at present,) and only using roles that don't involve trusted access to sensitive data. I interviewed with a company that outsourced their "rank and file" IT workers to Indiana with one of the big scumbag companies out there (*cough* COGNIZANT *cough*) and they ended up keeping all the real skilled work and the sensitive stuff in house. Because it turns out, people who live in India aren't really subject to U.S. laws. So even though they could sue the pants off of the outsource contractor in the event of a breach, "getting" the person who did it (with a jail term, scarlet letter for life to prevent future gainful employment) would be much more complicated, maybe impossible.
And the other thing that I've noticed: They end up outsourcing at least twice as many Indians for every American, chopping any "per person savings" in half instantly (because there are twice as many of them.)
Maybe this won't ALWAYS be the case, but I think it will be for the foreseeable future because the thing is, the best educated, highest skilled Indians have already come to the U.S. to work, and don't want to be H1-B slaves and/or stuck in India--they want to be here to swing for the fences, economically speaking.
...and that's assuming nobody notices a voter shutting down the machine, opening the case, installing a PCMCIA card, and bringing it back up... Pretty dubious, if you ask me. The level of conspiracy required to give someone enough time to not be detected while doing that would almost require a totally compromised election process to begin with--and if you have that, why bother compromising the machines?
Could you provide a link or citation for this? James Comey said no such thing.
Then our only choice for moving forward is to take away the GOP's majority in both houses of congress.
It is totally unacceptable for one party to simply choose to "negate" the results of elections that they do not like, and we've already had significant damage done to the credibility of our government, economy, and currency because of it, and another 2-8 years of gridlock would be a huge (yuuuuuuuuuuge) mistake.
Yeah, even in a legalized marijuana society, the smart people won't be paying for it with their debit card, because they know at some point those big data transactions will be used to disqualify them from healthcare, jobs, and life insurance. So, in a word, bullshit Tim, you will never kill cash until you kill the human greed instinct to track and monetize the innoccuous activities of others for your own nefarious ends.
Just like the out of style furniture your Grandma won't throw out in her living room ("It's good as new, only gets sat on twice per year!") why not provide NFL teams slipcovers that make better tablets look like Surface tablets on TV?
Then the NFL can pocket their product placement money, Microsoft can continue to pretend the Surface is not a piece of shit, and teams can have gear that actually works when they need it to.
Problem solved.
Ask yourself - who benefits from media consolidation? And the answer is, among others, the established political insiders. So you can expect that this will be a very popular merger among the political class.
Very, very true.
Remember how every TV and radio station, pre-"consolidation era" (i.e. Telecommunications Act of 1996) had some amount of news and/or public service on their airwaves? Remember how, even when the public service stuff was often relegated to 5am Sunday Morning, the news content was mostly pretty decent... Even on stations where the person just read AP news wire copy, there was still decent news programming.
NOW, if you don't seek out news programming on the radio, you mostly won't find it outside of talk stations, news/talk stations, and all-news stations. Besides that, and NPR? Nope. Music station listeners who haven't sought out radio news in the last 15 years probably think the last event of mass importance was 9/11, because that was the last time "music" stations had any significant amount of news programming on them--even earlier in the smaller markets.
It's a damn shame, but also the exact desired outcome--because it isn't "efficient" for owners of hundreds of news stations to pay to have "news departments" and "news programming" on every station, they just don't do it anymore and pocket the funds that would have been spent on it. As a bonus to the political class, the information-level available to your average citizen just dropped another few ticks, and people who used to be occasionally exposed to news programming supplemented with wingnut news online, now only hear the wingnut view and get no "mainstream" (i.e. not-made-up from whole cloth) news.
....I'm bumping along nicely on Spotify right now... Must have cached the DNS entries since I go there a lot.
I was in favor of the pipeline until this all started happening. Now? Fuck 'em: Hope they lose their goddamn shirts. Because their investment isn't worth more than the first amendment right to protest, and the first amendment right to report.