Seems your placement when it comes to education is a bold faced lie
Students First, which was founded by Michele Rhee (if you don't know who she is then you haven't been paying attention to education) in 2010 to advocate for measured performance based improvements in American public schools, grades California an 'F' for 2013 along with 10 other states placing us in the bottom quintile of US public schools. Exactly how bad it is depends upon whom you ask but by any objective measure California public schools compare poorly with those in most other US states. California taxpayers are definitely not receiving good value for their money when it comes to education. As for the 50% requirement, California Proposition 98 (1988) amended the state constitution to mandate it.
I don't understand how you can call government services a waste of money on essential things
I'm not against spending money on essential things and I believe that education is one of those things. However, that doesn't mean that I will accept failure on the part of the schools to achieve results with that money. The left argues that we should throw more money at the problem indiscriminately, but how will that improve performance? That will only reward failure on the part of teachers and school administrators to do the jobs that we've already paid them to do. I submit that if they cannot meet our standards that we must fire them and get people who can. I don't mind paying for performance, but I refuse to pay for failure. I don't stand for it when companies that I invest in fail to perform to my expectations so why should I accept it when government wastes my tax money?
Things like medical care that would cover more people and cost less is a taboo here because too many rich people would have to wait more than 5 minutes to see their doctor,
If you want healthcare, pay for it out of your own damn pocket or purchase insurance. Healthcare is expensive in the United States primarily because it lacks an effective mechanism to communicate prices to consumers in a competitive market. Try asking your doctor how much something might cost and they cannot even tell you because they have no idea. What other good or service is there where you cannot get the price upfront? We would never put up with this elsewhere in the economy so why do we continue to pay for our health care in this manner? There's a long and complex history to that, and I won't profess to give a whole answer here, but suffice it to say that government policies, and especially tax incentives, have encouraged Americans to purchase their healthcare in the most opaque and inefficient way possible. If your interested, you can read more here.
Fucking sociopath libertarians.
Am I to understand that the intellectually superior and enlightened left, when failing to carry the argument, resorts to name calling? If that's what four years of Harvard or Yale got you then I suggest you ask them for a refund.
Lots of Americans seem to equate paying taxes with flushing money in the toilet
From where many of us are standing, there isn't much difference to us personally.
Libertarian utopia where you never paid taxes you'd wish the current system was back.
Libertarians are not anarchists. We acknowledge that some government is necessary and proper and that government requires taxes to pay for it. That being said, we most definitely prefer a smaller government that does fewer things and therefore costs less money, but whether the government is large or small every American ought to be angry when taxes are wasted.
Know those roads you drive in that hopefully don't have giant potholes in them? Your taxes paid for that.
Out here in California the roads are chock full of potholes because the Democrats who run this state have diverted the gas tax money to everything but repair and maintenance of the roads. Potholes my ass.
Got kids? Well, if you use public schools, your money went to help educate your kids and your neighbor's kids.
Out here in California the public schools are ranked between 48-50th in the nation. They suck despite receiving over 50% of the state budget every year. Yes, that's right. California is a large state that takes in vast amounts of tax revenue every year, at least 50% of which goes to schools, and yet our public K-12 education system is among the worst in the nation. Yes indeed, we sure are getting a good value for our tax money here. I'd rather have the money in my pocket and send my kids to private school, thanks.
You should not be so swift to dismiss them. Although it's true that some of them aren't very articulate when it comes to making the case against waste, fraud and abuse, it would be a mistake to dismiss those concerns merely because you don't like some of the messengers. The waste of our tax money by government is a serious and well documented issue that's worthy of discussion and investigation. The taxes that the government receives represent the blood, sweat and tears of hard working Americans and it's galling to us that they spend it with such frivolity and a clear lack of respect for the people who entrusted it to them in the first place. Government workers and elected officials have a duty to the people to spend tax money carefully, wisely and frugally, but from what we can see they spend it with reckless abandon on stupid programs and worthless projects or just plain waste it on state employees who spend their days doing absolutely nothing productive. Don't you understand that government is extraordinarily wasteful or have you fallen so far under Obama's spell that you're willing to overlook the truth even when its staring you in the face?
Do you have any idea how much money is wasted in local and state bureaucracy, abuse, graft and plain old inefficiency?
oh_my_080980980 has no clue because he's most likely a taker and not a maker. It's always the people who don't pay taxes and have zero understanding of economics who lash out with personal attacks against people like you and I who present reasoned arguments against paying more taxes or have the nerve to demand better accountability for how our taxes are being spent. You're absolutely right, the government bureaucrats and their political masters have zero respect for the average working American who pays taxes. In fact, they hold us in contempt. We are right to call them out on wasteful spending of our tax money and lack of respect for what hard working Americans have sacrificed to earn it.
Somalia my ass.
Indeed. The Somolia strawman is a perennial favorite of the left and adds exactly nothing to the discussion. It does nothing to refute the many excellent arguments against larger government, more spending and higher taxes.
It's not yet half gone. There's still plenty of petroleum remaining and probably enough to last well into the 21st century or even the early 22nd with unconventional sources.
You would think programmers would be more comfortable with computers.
Did you take CS classes or study for a degree in that discipline? It's actually much more theoretical and mathematical than most outsiders think, even at the upper division undergraduate and especially at the graduate levels of study. They're more interested in complexity theory, automata theory and the like. This is almost the complete opposite of software engineering, which focuses heavily upon the application of programming and organizational techniques to solve problems of an immediate and practical nature. In fact, some schools are now splitting these tracts into separate areas of study to better reflect these differences, as in in other sciences, between the theoretical science on the one hand and the practical engineering application on the other.
10-54 billion (depending on how you count) subsidies we give to fossil fuel companies
You have to be careful when your hear people with an agenda talk about raising or cutting taxes or who gets subsidized and by how much. For example, is it a "subsidy" when energy companies avail themselves of the same tax breaks available to any other business? Perhaps, but singling out the energy companies receiving this "subsidy", without mentioning that many of the same breaks are available to all businesses, is disingenuous at best. While it's true that the fossil fuel companies have benefited from political largesse over the years, including special perks, they're hardly unique in that regard. It seems to me that most people who complain about subsidies to fossil fuel companies, especially those who don't complain about similar subsidies to industries which they favor, have an axe to grind and ought to be taken with a huge grain of salt.
So cross that out and instead write in that you will negotiate when they make an offer. Don't take shit from HR department flunkies. Grow a pair and stand up for yourself. The people in management respect those who respect themselves and if they don't do you really want to work there anyway?
Have you seen the proxy statements of any of the major Fortune 500 US public companies? There's always a list of shareholder resolutions at the end of the business to be voted on during or before the annual meeting and executive compensation resolutions are yearly favorites. In practice it makes little difference because most shareholders don't actually vote their shares which means that management gets to vote those shares on their behalf in a manner that reflects their "best interests". I'm sure you can guess how the board votes those shares on resolutions concerning their pay.
Everything that can be invented has been invented.
Does that mean that we can close the US Patent Office now? The fewer bullshit software and business method patents that get approved going forward the better.
If you just downloaded it -- you almost certainly leak flash, DNS, and java.
Which is why it's best to use a TOR bundle, with leaky plugins absent and a portable browser settings preset to proper defaults, instead of trying to retrofit an existing browser installation.
Even without admitting the practical malicious nature of node operators, it's less secure because you're bouncing plaintext over more nodes with more opportunities to intercept and read or edit.
But only at the exit nodes, unless the intermediate "hop" nodes on the circuit are also in cahoots (possible, but unlikely). It was my understanding that the plaintext was only visible at the exit nodes, the TOR circuit itself remains encrypted so that intermediate nodes cannot decrypt the contents of the traffic intended for downstream destinations. That is after all the entire point of TOR.
Tor without encryption just tells MORE people what you are doing.
It's more precise to say that it tells MORE people what SOMEONE is doing, although precisely who is very difficult to determine provided that certain precautions are observed (not logging into your POP3 mail server using an unencrypted channel routed through TOR, as the Iranian diplomats did, comes to mind). The point after all is to disguise the origin, content and return destination of unencrypted traffic while it's traversing the TOR circuit , not what was actually sent to or requested from a destination on the public Internet. Exit nodes can and probably do sniff or log traffic exiting onto the public Internet and going back over the TOR circuit. However, the origin or final destination of that traffic remains obscure to the Exit node itself provided that traffic itself doesn't inherently suggest it's own destination, as in the aforementioned unencrypted POP3 login example. Although it's true that there have been some published attacks on the TOR network, none to my knowledge have been shown to be either practical or complete and all of them were easily thwarted by more nodes, more users and more traffic which increases the number of possible end to end paths and imposes prohibitive costs on those trying to corner the market in available intermediate nodes. Of course, many things are possible given enough time, money and effort so it's still best to avoid pissing off first world nations using the TOR network, as Mr. Assange is now acutely aware.
That's ironic considering that Steve himself offered for sale a blue box device, produced by Wozniak, for no other purpose than "to make money". Those who benefited from the hacking culture and heritage ought not to be so quick to pull the ladder up after themselves or slam shut behind them the doors through which they themselves passed.
How is that any different from a new hire or, in some cases, an entrenched employee?
Internships are by definition temporary or at least seasonal so most interns are by definition new hires, albeit with nearly zero experience, hence the intern designation. The entrenched employee or bad new hire do occur, but general lack of experience makes poor code more likely amongst interns. That being said, it's also more tolerable in most cases because interns are expected to still be learning the basics and aren't usually given mission critical assignments in any case.
Bad code happens and it can happen from anybody.
We all have our bad days, that's for sure. However, the older and wiser developers amongst us recognize when we need to put something down for a while and come back to it later or at least how to stub out critical components for a better future implementation. Despite what the Silicon Valley hack-a-thon culture would have you believe, your best code is almost certainly not written after a 12 hour non-stop binge combined with too much caffeine, junk food snacks and little or no sleep.
Nothing scientific, just my own personal experience.
Considering their strict recruiting process, I'm pretty sure they'd be able to check that.
This isn't usually immediately ascertainable. In fact, it often requires months of work and code reviews, hence the industry standard probationary period, to separate those who are learning but improving from those who just aren't going to work out. That's partly why companies will pay to retain good software developers because finding and recruiting them, to say nothing of replacing them, is both difficult and expensive.
It's not like if everyone was making 200k/y+ in IT.
Indeed they aren't, but people often lie when discussing relative salaries because few want to admit publicly that they aren't one of the ones making six figures.
Except that the code they write is often of poor quality or doesn't follow company guidelines or isn't the best approach to the problem at hand. Some of this is to be expected, they're interns after all and many of them have little or no real project experience. However, to say that the average intern is better than your senior employees strains credulity. Just because somebody works "all of the time" to "get things done" doesn't mean that the work is of good quality. It's more likely that these interns produce work that's of the same quality that one might expect of an apprentice still learning the skills and tools of the trade. I remember getting paid about half that much when I was an intern, but that was over a decade ago now (makes one wonder about the value of a dollar anymore).
Alright, then how about this. If support costs for iphones are an issue then offer the SIM card with service to anyone who wants to pay the standard rates, without the dataplan, but charge for each support call. If users don't want to pay for each support call, they can buy the data plan with the support calls thrown in gratis. What really pisses off geeks and other expert users is having to pay $30 per month for something that we don't use or use only rarely because we're always in range of WiFi. If that doesn't work then how about offering prepay on data for those times when we do want to use it, as the toll roads do. For example, toll roads may offer a monthly "subscription" to regular users, like the data plan, but they don't refuse service to non-subscribers and offer a regular toll rate for a single pay as you go use of the road. If AT&T, Verizon, Sprint and the rest won't offer these pricing options then maybe its time to get the FCC and the regulators involved again hmm?
There's very little a California city won't do for money.
The authorities out here on the left coast love to find new ways to take your money whether it be through taxes, fees, fines or just generally running up the cost of living with all their bullshit. The weather's nice, but even mostly sunny skies only goes so far once the government gets grabby enough with your money.
Harvard, Yale, etc. are the source of our leaders -- our elites
And what has it gotten us? The worst financial crisis since the Great Depression and a president who doesn't know his asshole from his elbow when it comes to economics. You'd be hard pressed to find less common sense or street smarts anywhere else than in the average Harvard class.
The first amendment to the US Constitution specifically mentions the right of speech in redress of grievances and our courts have a long history of allowing pro se representation in cases heard before them as part of that right. The record for pro se defendants, especially in criminal matters, is not as bad as generally believed. For example, only 26 percent of the pro se defendants in one study ended up with felony convictions, while 63 percent of their represented counterparts were convicted of felonies (see TFA). A college educated adult probably stands as good a chance as most public defenders when arguing their own case and may even have certain tactical advantages over the prosecutor, especially in a jury trial where careful and well reasoned arguments may serve to elicit additional sympathy from the jury for the "honest citizen" representing himself.
Slashdot Mirror
This should happen when Mark quits being stupid.
You may be in for a long wait.
Seems your placement when it comes to education is a bold faced lie
Students First, which was founded by Michele Rhee (if you don't know who she is then you haven't been paying attention to education) in 2010 to advocate for measured performance based improvements in American public schools, grades California an 'F' for 2013 along with 10 other states placing us in the bottom quintile of US public schools. Exactly how bad it is depends upon whom you ask but by any objective measure California public schools compare poorly with those in most other US states. California taxpayers are definitely not receiving good value for their money when it comes to education. As for the 50% requirement, California Proposition 98 (1988) amended the state constitution to mandate it.
I don't understand how you can call government services a waste of money on essential things
I'm not against spending money on essential things and I believe that education is one of those things. However, that doesn't mean that I will accept failure on the part of the schools to achieve results with that money. The left argues that we should throw more money at the problem indiscriminately, but how will that improve performance? That will only reward failure on the part of teachers and school administrators to do the jobs that we've already paid them to do. I submit that if they cannot meet our standards that we must fire them and get people who can. I don't mind paying for performance, but I refuse to pay for failure. I don't stand for it when companies that I invest in fail to perform to my expectations so why should I accept it when government wastes my tax money?
Things like medical care that would cover more people and cost less is a taboo here because too many rich people would have to wait more than 5 minutes to see their doctor,
If you want healthcare, pay for it out of your own damn pocket or purchase insurance. Healthcare is expensive in the United States primarily because it lacks an effective mechanism to communicate prices to consumers in a competitive market. Try asking your doctor how much something might cost and they cannot even tell you because they have no idea. What other good or service is there where you cannot get the price upfront? We would never put up with this elsewhere in the economy so why do we continue to pay for our health care in this manner? There's a long and complex history to that, and I won't profess to give a whole answer here, but suffice it to say that government policies, and especially tax incentives, have encouraged Americans to purchase their healthcare in the most opaque and inefficient way possible. If your interested, you can read more here.
Fucking sociopath libertarians.
Am I to understand that the intellectually superior and enlightened left, when failing to carry the argument, resorts to name calling? If that's what four years of Harvard or Yale got you then I suggest you ask them for a refund.
Lots of Americans seem to equate paying taxes with flushing money in the toilet
From where many of us are standing, there isn't much difference to us personally.
Libertarian utopia where you never paid taxes you'd wish the current system was back.
Libertarians are not anarchists. We acknowledge that some government is necessary and proper and that government requires taxes to pay for it. That being said, we most definitely prefer a smaller government that does fewer things and therefore costs less money, but whether the government is large or small every American ought to be angry when taxes are wasted.
Know those roads you drive in that hopefully don't have giant potholes in them? Your taxes paid for that.
Out here in California the roads are chock full of potholes because the Democrats who run this state have diverted the gas tax money to everything but repair and maintenance of the roads. Potholes my ass.
Got kids? Well, if you use public schools, your money went to help educate your kids and your neighbor's kids.
Out here in California the public schools are ranked between 48-50th in the nation. They suck despite receiving over 50% of the state budget every year. Yes, that's right. California is a large state that takes in vast amounts of tax revenue every year, at least 50% of which goes to schools, and yet our public K-12 education system is among the worst in the nation. Yes indeed, we sure are getting a good value for our tax money here. I'd rather have the money in my pocket and send my kids to private school, thanks.
You should not be so swift to dismiss them. Although it's true that some of them aren't very articulate when it comes to making the case against waste, fraud and abuse, it would be a mistake to dismiss those concerns merely because you don't like some of the messengers. The waste of our tax money by government is a serious and well documented issue that's worthy of discussion and investigation. The taxes that the government receives represent the blood, sweat and tears of hard working Americans and it's galling to us that they spend it with such frivolity and a clear lack of respect for the people who entrusted it to them in the first place. Government workers and elected officials have a duty to the people to spend tax money carefully, wisely and frugally, but from what we can see they spend it with reckless abandon on stupid programs and worthless projects or just plain waste it on state employees who spend their days doing absolutely nothing productive. Don't you understand that government is extraordinarily wasteful or have you fallen so far under Obama's spell that you're willing to overlook the truth even when its staring you in the face?
Do you have any idea how much money is wasted in local and state bureaucracy, abuse, graft and plain old inefficiency?
oh_my_080980980 has no clue because he's most likely a taker and not a maker. It's always the people who don't pay taxes and have zero understanding of economics who lash out with personal attacks against people like you and I who present reasoned arguments against paying more taxes or have the nerve to demand better accountability for how our taxes are being spent. You're absolutely right, the government bureaucrats and their political masters have zero respect for the average working American who pays taxes. In fact, they hold us in contempt. We are right to call them out on wasteful spending of our tax money and lack of respect for what hard working Americans have sacrificed to earn it.
Somalia my ass.
Indeed. The Somolia strawman is a perennial favorite of the left and adds exactly nothing to the discussion. It does nothing to refute the many excellent arguments against larger government, more spending and higher taxes.
But its almost gone
It's not yet half gone. There's still plenty of petroleum remaining and probably enough to last well into the 21st century or even the early 22nd with unconventional sources.
For the price of a Tesla S, you could have a BMW instead. Who in their right mind would take the Tesla S over the BMW?
It's extra work. End of story. Nobody wants to do extra work for nothing.
Isn't that what graduate students are for, to provide cheap labor on the niggling details of research projects or papers?
You would think programmers would be more comfortable with computers.
Did you take CS classes or study for a degree in that discipline? It's actually much more theoretical and mathematical than most outsiders think, even at the upper division undergraduate and especially at the graduate levels of study. They're more interested in complexity theory, automata theory and the like. This is almost the complete opposite of software engineering, which focuses heavily upon the application of programming and organizational techniques to solve problems of an immediate and practical nature. In fact, some schools are now splitting these tracts into separate areas of study to better reflect these differences, as in in other sciences, between the theoretical science on the one hand and the practical engineering application on the other.
10-54 billion (depending on how you count) subsidies we give to fossil fuel companies
You have to be careful when your hear people with an agenda talk about raising or cutting taxes or who gets subsidized and by how much. For example, is it a "subsidy" when energy companies avail themselves of the same tax breaks available to any other business? Perhaps, but singling out the energy companies receiving this "subsidy", without mentioning that many of the same breaks are available to all businesses, is disingenuous at best. While it's true that the fossil fuel companies have benefited from political largesse over the years, including special perks, they're hardly unique in that regard. It seems to me that most people who complain about subsidies to fossil fuel companies, especially those who don't complain about similar subsidies to industries which they favor, have an axe to grind and ought to be taken with a huge grain of salt.
They always ask for what your current salary is.
So cross that out and instead write in that you will negotiate when they make an offer. Don't take shit from HR department flunkies. Grow a pair and stand up for yourself. The people in management respect those who respect themselves and if they don't do you really want to work there anyway?
Have you seen the proxy statements of any of the major Fortune 500 US public companies? There's always a list of shareholder resolutions at the end of the business to be voted on during or before the annual meeting and executive compensation resolutions are yearly favorites. In practice it makes little difference because most shareholders don't actually vote their shares which means that management gets to vote those shares on their behalf in a manner that reflects their "best interests". I'm sure you can guess how the board votes those shares on resolutions concerning their pay.
Everything that can be invented has been invented.
Does that mean that we can close the US Patent Office now? The fewer bullshit software and business method patents that get approved going forward the better.
If you just downloaded it -- you almost certainly leak flash, DNS, and java.
Which is why it's best to use a TOR bundle, with leaky plugins absent and a portable browser settings preset to proper defaults, instead of trying to retrofit an existing browser installation.
Even without admitting the practical malicious nature of node operators, it's less secure because you're bouncing plaintext over more nodes with more opportunities to intercept and read or edit.
But only at the exit nodes, unless the intermediate "hop" nodes on the circuit are also in cahoots (possible, but unlikely). It was my understanding that the plaintext was only visible at the exit nodes, the TOR circuit itself remains encrypted so that intermediate nodes cannot decrypt the contents of the traffic intended for downstream destinations. That is after all the entire point of TOR.
Tor without encryption just tells MORE people what you are doing.
It's more precise to say that it tells MORE people what SOMEONE is doing, although precisely who is very difficult to determine provided that certain precautions are observed (not logging into your POP3 mail server using an unencrypted channel routed through TOR, as the Iranian diplomats did, comes to mind). The point after all is to disguise the origin, content and return destination of unencrypted traffic while it's traversing the TOR circuit , not what was actually sent to or requested from a destination on the public Internet. Exit nodes can and probably do sniff or log traffic exiting onto the public Internet and going back over the TOR circuit. However, the origin or final destination of that traffic remains obscure to the Exit node itself provided that traffic itself doesn't inherently suggest it's own destination, as in the aforementioned unencrypted POP3 login example. Although it's true that there have been some published attacks on the TOR network, none to my knowledge have been shown to be either practical or complete and all of them were easily thwarted by more nodes, more users and more traffic which increases the number of possible end to end paths and imposes prohibitive costs on those trying to corner the market in available intermediate nodes. Of course, many things are possible given enough time, money and effort so it's still best to avoid pissing off first world nations using the TOR network, as Mr. Assange is now acutely aware.
but Steve or Tim decided it's a "Hacking tool"
That's ironic considering that Steve himself offered for sale a blue box device, produced by Wozniak, for no other purpose than "to make money". Those who benefited from the hacking culture and heritage ought not to be so quick to pull the ladder up after themselves or slam shut behind them the doors through which they themselves passed.
How about we look at what caused the statiscs to be that way in the first place?
Ask yourself who is best served by pointing fingers at results and inferring racism and you will have your answer.
How is that any different from a new hire or, in some cases, an entrenched employee?
Internships are by definition temporary or at least seasonal so most interns are by definition new hires, albeit with nearly zero experience, hence the intern designation. The entrenched employee or bad new hire do occur, but general lack of experience makes poor code more likely amongst interns. That being said, it's also more tolerable in most cases because interns are expected to still be learning the basics and aren't usually given mission critical assignments in any case.
Bad code happens and it can happen from anybody.
We all have our bad days, that's for sure. However, the older and wiser developers amongst us recognize when we need to put something down for a while and come back to it later or at least how to stub out critical components for a better future implementation. Despite what the Silicon Valley hack-a-thon culture would have you believe, your best code is almost certainly not written after a 12 hour non-stop binge combined with too much caffeine, junk food snacks and little or no sleep.
What evidence you have to support that?
Nothing scientific, just my own personal experience.
Considering their strict recruiting process, I'm pretty sure they'd be able to check that.
This isn't usually immediately ascertainable. In fact, it often requires months of work and code reviews, hence the industry standard probationary period, to separate those who are learning but improving from those who just aren't going to work out. That's partly why companies will pay to retain good software developers because finding and recruiting them, to say nothing of replacing them, is both difficult and expensive.
It's not like if everyone was making 200k/y+ in IT.
Indeed they aren't, but people often lie when discussing relative salaries because few want to admit publicly that they aren't one of the ones making six figures.
Except that the code they write is often of poor quality or doesn't follow company guidelines or isn't the best approach to the problem at hand. Some of this is to be expected, they're interns after all and many of them have little or no real project experience. However, to say that the average intern is better than your senior employees strains credulity. Just because somebody works "all of the time" to "get things done" doesn't mean that the work is of good quality. It's more likely that these interns produce work that's of the same quality that one might expect of an apprentice still learning the skills and tools of the trade. I remember getting paid about half that much when I was an intern, but that was over a decade ago now (makes one wonder about the value of a dollar anymore).
Alright, then how about this. If support costs for iphones are an issue then offer the SIM card with service to anyone who wants to pay the standard rates, without the dataplan, but charge for each support call. If users don't want to pay for each support call, they can buy the data plan with the support calls thrown in gratis. What really pisses off geeks and other expert users is having to pay $30 per month for something that we don't use or use only rarely because we're always in range of WiFi. If that doesn't work then how about offering prepay on data for those times when we do want to use it, as the toll roads do. For example, toll roads may offer a monthly "subscription" to regular users, like the data plan, but they don't refuse service to non-subscribers and offer a regular toll rate for a single pay as you go use of the road. If AT&T, Verizon, Sprint and the rest won't offer these pricing options then maybe its time to get the FCC and the regulators involved again hmm?
There's very little a California city won't do for money.
The authorities out here on the left coast love to find new ways to take your money whether it be through taxes, fees, fines or just generally running up the cost of living with all their bullshit. The weather's nice, but even mostly sunny skies only goes so far once the government gets grabby enough with your money.
Harvard, Yale, etc. are the source of our leaders -- our elites
And what has it gotten us? The worst financial crisis since the Great Depression and a president who doesn't know his asshole from his elbow when it comes to economics. You'd be hard pressed to find less common sense or street smarts anywhere else than in the average Harvard class.
The first amendment to the US Constitution specifically mentions the right of speech in redress of grievances and our courts have a long history of allowing pro se representation in cases heard before them as part of that right. The record for pro se defendants, especially in criminal matters, is not as bad as generally believed. For example, only 26 percent of the pro se defendants in one study ended up with felony convictions, while 63 percent of their represented counterparts were convicted of felonies (see TFA). A college educated adult probably stands as good a chance as most public defenders when arguing their own case and may even have certain tactical advantages over the prosecutor, especially in a jury trial where careful and well reasoned arguments may serve to elicit additional sympathy from the jury for the "honest citizen" representing himself.