The U.S. surely has some areas that are free from natural disasters like tornadoes, flooding, hurricanes, earthquakes, etc.
No place on the planet is entirely free from natural disasters. Also, most of the reactors currently operating for commercial power here in the United States are of the boiling water variety which means that some sort of external liquid (usually water) heat sink is required. Perhaps you've noticed that commercial reactors are often built nearby bodies of relatively cooler water (rivers or the oceans). This way, cooler water can be taken in and exchange heat with the water in the closed cooling loop before being discharged back into the source water, albeit somewhat hotter than when it came in. Places out in the middle of nowhere are like that for a reason: they're hot and dry with very little water. Unless you're going to build a liquid metal reactor that can exchange heat with the air via a giant radiator system, which would probably be impractical anyway, those locations are unsuitable for building a nuclear generator plant.
Being stubborn and saying "We'll rebuild" when your area is constantly damaged by natural disasters isn't brave - it's moronic.
Politics very often doesn't make any sense or at least not any rational kind of sense. Here in the US it just so happens that some very disaster prone states, Florida is a prime example, are "battleground" or "swing" states which have swung back and forth in just about every recent Presidential election. I don't like federal flood and hurricane insurance either, It's my tax dollars subsidizing people who want to build in foolish places, but what can you do? Life's rarely fair, especially these days and the squeaky wheels always get the grease.
The anti-drug establishment is huge. Not only does it employ tons of people in law enforcement, but it allows a lot of otherwise law-abiding people to be incarcerated, which supports the penal system, which is a huge industry and has a lot of influence on our legislature.
This isn't often mentioned, but there's definitely truth in it. Here in California for example, the majority of law enforcement, both state and local, and the prison guards invariably oppose any measure which might serve to legalize or reduce penalties for possession of marijuana. All of them understand that their continued employment depends upon having a ready supply of people to run through the system and marijuana prohibition provides an almost irresistibly easy means to accomplish this, it makes their jobs easier albeit by wasting the taxpayer's money. No doubt, the situation is similar in other states. They know that they have a good thing going for themselves with this "war on drugs" and they realize that once prohibition is lifted it will never again be reimposed. Having said that, there are a very few law enforcement people, mostly retired now, who support ending the war on drugs, but unfortunately they seem to represent a mostly minority voice withing the law enforcement community which means that policy makers can and do ignore them, just like they ignore the rest of us.
most (if not all) Computer Science academics are not effective teachers.
The lower division undergraduate CS courses are generally taught by lecturers and not tenured research professors at most universities. The lecturers ought to be good at teaching the basics, including programming, and at my school they were actually quite good. The basic truth is that not everyone is cut out for programming and without programming one cannot fully explore and experiment, both essential activities in any study of CS. That is why intro to programming is generally the very first or among the very first CS courses taken by incoming freshman undergraduates. It separates the wheat from the chaff and in so doing does everyone a service. Those who are unable to program discover that CS isn't the right thing for them and move on to pursue something else while those who are willing and able get a taste of what lies ahead in their studies so that they too can decide whether or not they want to continue with the major and make progress towards a degree.
Most Computer Science departments feel the need to make sure those students get weeded out early, that's already how they see themselves as, not just as teachers, but as gatekeepers that make sure that the new influx of modern lazy kids are weeded out early.
Perhaps this isn't such a bad thing? Does everyone with even just a passing interest in computers, programming and the like have to study CS in college? What's wrong with limiting the major to serious students only? They do the same sorts of things in other engineering and science majors. Serious majors always feature weeder courses to separate the interested and the serious from the dabblers. The dabblers can spend their time studying the liberal arts, humanities, social science or the classics. The scientists and engineers don't have as much patience for those sorts of students (you know the type, starry eyed idealists looking to "find themselves" in college).
Write your own encryption and scramble everything you share with your mates.
It's not necessary to write your own encryption. In fact, doing so is dangerous because without specialized knowledge and very careful programming, bugs or other weaknesses are all too easily introduced. No, there are already many fine open source implementations of various ciphers which are known to be secure. The problem in real world situations is always the key management. Indeed, most known breaches of modern ciphers have mainly come not from brilliant cryptanalysis, but rather attacks on the key management procedures. These can range from insecure operator procedures, bugged input devices and key logging programs to the ever ready rubber hoses when the authorities lack the sophistication and resources required by the former methods. In any case, it's probably easier for you and your mates to simply share in private without going over public networks. Have a LAN party and do your sharing there instead.
but in a *lot* of cases the loan agent (who is supposed to be working *for* them) would take advantage of them...It's not fair to just kick everyone out of their homes
People want to be treated as adults, but when the going gets tough some of them don't want to shoulder the responsibility that comes with that status. It's true that RL can be a harsh mistress, but how much have these people really lost? They got to live in their homes for a couple of years with low payments that were almost 100% interest so that they could write them off their taxes. They weren't really "homeowners", as the term has previously been understood, but rather glorified renters. Well, now it's time for them to take a trip through bankruptcy and find a cheap place to rent. There is nothing more expensive than ignorance and now it's time for them to settle that debt. Perhaps in the future they will spend less time updating their Facebook status and more time reading. They can start with Dave Ramsey's books, sometimes crude but very effective, and work their way up from there.
Obviously, you're frugal and would *never* make a financial mistake, or get laid off in the worst economic crisis in 70 years
Actually, I've been laid off twice and rehired twice since this whole mess began in 2007 and thanks in no small part to my fiscal prudence I was able to use some of what I had so carefully saved to get myself and my family through the rough patches. Of course, when you ask young people today what savings are they look at you like you're some relic left over from the Great Depression. Maybe now they can finally understand what their grandparents were talking about when they said debt was to be used sparingly, if at all, and savings was something that only fools did without.
I would say that so long as the system is both opt-in and voluntary, it shouldn't be a problem. As long as the censorship system isn't mandated by government AND people are free to choose filtered or unfiltered access, where's the harm?
Which just goes to show that if you want to be taken seriously by the people with the power to make decisions, you need to at least look the part. The suit and tie for gentlemen or pantsuit for the ladies, clean and pressed, are de rigueur for being taken seriously by businessmen, senators, congressmen, MPs and the like. A large pocket book doesn't hurt either. Imagine if all of the occupy people scraped together a couple of dollars apiece, founded their own lobbying organization, hired well dressed and articulate people to speak for them and then allowed them to do so. The people in charge might actually listen then. Suppose that all 200+ million of the "99 percenters" in the United States alone did this. That could begin to counter some, although probably not all, of the corporate money and the influence that it buys. They could make up for their underdog position by being creative. Aren't these young lefty types supposed to be creative after all?
So you're saying that people who are staying in their homes "for free" aren't getting such an awesome deal after all?
Provided that they're unable to remain there without paying any longer than is necessary to properly foreclose, yes. However, I remain skeptical that the government will do the right thing here and allow the courts and the banks to work things out and foreclose so that that home once again enters the marketplace; they did bail out the banks after all and we've all seen the results of that.
Republican moderates should be supporting Occupy Wall Street.
If you were a Republican would you go down there and announce that publicly? You'd instantly have twenty scary smelly people shouting at you and spitting in your face. Who needs it? It's hard for mainstream America to take you seriously if you dress in rags, have long unkempt hair and reek of patchouli. The message of OWS would be much more effective if these people got haircuts, took showers and wore decent clothes.
If not, break the contract and hope the bank destroyed your mortgage documents and can't present them in court.
IANAL, but I wouldn't advise that. The courts, at least here in the United States, take a rather dim view of shirkers who don't pay their debts and so do most juries. Doing as you suggest is almost certainly a recipe for even more legal troubles.
but encourage investment on their own if they want.
How will they do that after individual retirement investors are "out of the market"? Shall we allow individual investors as long as they can prove that they aren't saving for their retirement? How is that a good idea? That's crazy.
Let companies breathe for a couple of quarters so they can actually plow money back into things that will produce results further down the road.
There are plenty of companies out there right now that do just that. You just don't hear much about their stocks in the business press because nobody wants to cover a boring company steadily plodding along while producing necessary goods and services and earning steady but modest profits. Not every company is run for just the next quarter's profits. For example, take a look at the businesses owned by Berkshire Hathaway Corporation (Warren Buffet's company). They are all steady, well defined and long term businesses that earn steady profits. The Berkshire companies are frequently outperformed for a quarter or even a year or two by hot shot companies that subsequently crash and burn, but slow and steady wins the race or at least it did in Buffet's case. My point is that different people approach investing in different ways and that's alright. The market needs all different sorts of risk tolerances and styles to make sure that just about everything worth funding gets funding from somewhere eventually.
I'm not arguing for the system used by the banks. All I'm saying is that it's not just for people who don't repay debts, which they willingly incurred, to continue living indefinitely in homes pledged as collateral on those debts. Two wrongs don't make a right and I'm very tired of being punished for my financial prudence. Borrowing large amounts of money to purchase a home, which is what these people did, increases the total supply of money and reduces the value of the dollars that were already in my pocket before they took out the loans. Borrowing money to buy a home is a privilege, not a right, and privileges can be taken away if they are abused, as they were in this case. Profligate "homeowners" who borrow more than they can pay back hurt all of us. If such people are allowed to remain in their homes, then shouldn't the government give me a free home too? That's the problem with letting this slide completely. I agree that things have to be done legally and properly with regard to foreclosures, but they must eventually be done.
Because the planet can no longer support the rampant consumerism that was a defining feature of the American middle class during the later quarter of the twentieth century?
Perhaps it's time that we re-thought our entire monetary system? Indeed, What has Government Done to Our Money? Many of our problems stem from public misunderstandings of the proper role of money in our society and those who benefit from and seek to perpetuate those collective misunderstandings. The Occupy Wall Street people need to do more than simply expose what happened and who was responsible, they need to learn why it was even possible in the first place. Without that understanding, no meaningful changes, however well intentioned, can prevent the same things from happening again.
One place there was law breaking by the banks was robosigning and other foreclosure abuses
Alright, but should people who don't pay their mortgages continue to live in their homes rent free while the rest of us continue to pay mortgage or rent? How is that fair or moral? They received all of the enjoyments of home ownership that resulted from receiving credit from the rest of us. Their borrowing increased the money supply and forced the rest of us to run a bit faster to avoid falling off the back of the inflation and cost of living treadmill. I agree that the banks were sloppy and didn't handle themselves very well in this whole affair, but what about the rest of us who were prudent? We didn't take out loans that we couldn't afford and instead saved our money and lived frugally. Is it not a slap in our collective faces to reward the profligate and punish the prudent amongst us for the monetary sins of others?
When there are multiple university graduates competing for a part-time job at the local supermarket, something is horribly wrong.
I think that part of the problem lies with how higher education has been "sold" to the middle classes, beginning in the decades following the end of WWII and continuing until the present day. People were told that a university education was their golden ticket to a better life filled with a spacious flat in the city, a house in the country, multiple luxury vehicles, regular European holidays and a generally affluent existence. Of course, anyone who took the time to look at these promises with a more critical eye would have seen that increasing the supply of educated people, beyond which their skills and education was demanded by the marketplace, could never result in a substantial segment of the population living out the promised dreams of affluence. Perhaps it's time for all of us to relearn some of the wisdom of our grandparents and great grandparents: "If you cant afford it and don't want to save up for it then don't go into debt to get it, either make do or do without."
It seems as if there will be soon enough, if there isn't already, a market for specialized Android phones which encrypt storage and the contents of the working memory at all times, analogous to full disk encryption. With the appropriate settings, it would be nearly impossible for any unauthorized search of the device to occur without the owner's consent. Indeed, it would even be possible to render the "secret" OS hidden and its existence plausibly deniable, as TrueCrypt does today. Moreover, it would be perfectly legal, at least here in the US, to develop and market a device. In fact, it's likely that some enterprising android users have already found ways to make this work using TrueCrypt or other similar open source tools.
In California, the rules are such that there are basically no contested seats in any legislative district or statewide office. In fact, it's getting so bad that even local elections for county seats and city councils, which are supposed to be non-partisan, are becoming increasingly radicalized and partisan. It also doesn't help that California is chocked full of people and groups who are basically living off the dole and wouldn't make it here without continuous state assistance. This leads even more people, who really can't afford to live here, to sunny California. Is it any wonder that the state is broke? I look forward to the day when the bond holders finally bring California back to reality kicking and screaming. The expressions on millions of Liberal faces that day will almost make it all worthwhile.
How many will also buy the official line about why they did it, which likely includes 'public safety or protecting the children'
It's hard to argue that public safety is enhanced when you're releasing tens of thousands of prisoners because the state is broke. If you live in California and haven't yet invested in an alarm system and a firearm, now might be a good time.
You're welcome to produce evidence of any heads being made to roll.
Don't worry, they will. No multimillion dollar failure ever goes unpunished by investors. However, since Solyndra was not a publicly traded company, any punishments are likely to remain behind private doors. After all, few investors like to admit publicly that they lost money in a scandal ridden flop like Solyndra.
Yeah, half a billion is a lot to you and me, to the government? It's the price of doing business. This is true of any business or investor, they make sure not to put all their eggs in one basket.
The private equity investors, those with net worth in excess of 10 million, aren't like most ordinary investors like your or me. These private investors who lost in Solyndra probably lost a few million apiece. These are powerful people who are used to winning and getting their own way. They hate losing, whether the loss was a dollar or a million dollars, and will ruthlessly punish those whose incompetence, in their judgment, lost it. If you could see these people in action behind closed doors then you would understand what I mean. They are vicious adversaries who can sense weakness just as surely as sharks can detect a few drops of blood in the water. These are not people who are easily crossed. Most of them didn't make or keep their fortunes by being nice guys. At least in that sense, Warren Buffet is the exception rather than the rule.
At least you're honest and showing that your bias is down to how you're banking your retirement.
Suppose that I didn't do what's best for my individual interests and I died cold, hungry and alone. Would you or anyone else besides my family care? So you see, I have to look out for my own best interests and those who depend upon me as provider because if I don't nobody else will. Family first, come hell or high water, everything else is secondary.
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The U.S. surely has some areas that are free from natural disasters like tornadoes, flooding, hurricanes, earthquakes, etc.
No place on the planet is entirely free from natural disasters. Also, most of the reactors currently operating for commercial power here in the United States are of the boiling water variety which means that some sort of external liquid (usually water) heat sink is required. Perhaps you've noticed that commercial reactors are often built nearby bodies of relatively cooler water (rivers or the oceans). This way, cooler water can be taken in and exchange heat with the water in the closed cooling loop before being discharged back into the source water, albeit somewhat hotter than when it came in. Places out in the middle of nowhere are like that for a reason: they're hot and dry with very little water. Unless you're going to build a liquid metal reactor that can exchange heat with the air via a giant radiator system, which would probably be impractical anyway, those locations are unsuitable for building a nuclear generator plant.
Being stubborn and saying "We'll rebuild" when your area is constantly damaged by natural disasters isn't brave - it's moronic.
Politics very often doesn't make any sense or at least not any rational kind of sense. Here in the US it just so happens that some very disaster prone states, Florida is a prime example, are "battleground" or "swing" states which have swung back and forth in just about every recent Presidential election. I don't like federal flood and hurricane insurance either, It's my tax dollars subsidizing people who want to build in foolish places, but what can you do? Life's rarely fair, especially these days and the squeaky wheels always get the grease.
The anti-drug establishment is huge. Not only does it employ tons of people in law enforcement, but it allows a lot of otherwise law-abiding people to be incarcerated, which supports the penal system, which is a huge industry and has a lot of influence on our legislature.
This isn't often mentioned, but there's definitely truth in it. Here in California for example, the majority of law enforcement, both state and local, and the prison guards invariably oppose any measure which might serve to legalize or reduce penalties for possession of marijuana. All of them understand that their continued employment depends upon having a ready supply of people to run through the system and marijuana prohibition provides an almost irresistibly easy means to accomplish this, it makes their jobs easier albeit by wasting the taxpayer's money. No doubt, the situation is similar in other states. They know that they have a good thing going for themselves with this "war on drugs" and they realize that once prohibition is lifted it will never again be reimposed. Having said that, there are a very few law enforcement people, mostly retired now, who support ending the war on drugs, but unfortunately they seem to represent a mostly minority voice withing the law enforcement community which means that policy makers can and do ignore them, just like they ignore the rest of us.
most (if not all) Computer Science academics are not effective teachers.
The lower division undergraduate CS courses are generally taught by lecturers and not tenured research professors at most universities. The lecturers ought to be good at teaching the basics, including programming, and at my school they were actually quite good. The basic truth is that not everyone is cut out for programming and without programming one cannot fully explore and experiment, both essential activities in any study of CS. That is why intro to programming is generally the very first or among the very first CS courses taken by incoming freshman undergraduates. It separates the wheat from the chaff and in so doing does everyone a service. Those who are unable to program discover that CS isn't the right thing for them and move on to pursue something else while those who are willing and able get a taste of what lies ahead in their studies so that they too can decide whether or not they want to continue with the major and make progress towards a degree.
Most Computer Science departments feel the need to make sure those students get weeded out early, that's already how they see themselves as, not just as teachers, but as gatekeepers that make sure that the new influx of modern lazy kids are weeded out early.
Perhaps this isn't such a bad thing? Does everyone with even just a passing interest in computers, programming and the like have to study CS in college? What's wrong with limiting the major to serious students only? They do the same sorts of things in other engineering and science majors. Serious majors always feature weeder courses to separate the interested and the serious from the dabblers. The dabblers can spend their time studying the liberal arts, humanities, social science or the classics. The scientists and engineers don't have as much patience for those sorts of students (you know the type, starry eyed idealists looking to "find themselves" in college).
Programming seems easy to you and me, but you would be surprised at how many people just cannot do it no matter how much training you give them.
Please mod parent up. This is exactly right. All of my experience, both in school and now working as a software developer, confirms this.
Write your own encryption and scramble everything you share with your mates.
It's not necessary to write your own encryption. In fact, doing so is dangerous because without specialized knowledge and very careful programming, bugs or other weaknesses are all too easily introduced. No, there are already many fine open source implementations of various ciphers which are known to be secure. The problem in real world situations is always the key management. Indeed, most known breaches of modern ciphers have mainly come not from brilliant cryptanalysis, but rather attacks on the key management procedures. These can range from insecure operator procedures, bugged input devices and key logging programs to the ever ready rubber hoses when the authorities lack the sophistication and resources required by the former methods. In any case, it's probably easier for you and your mates to simply share in private without going over public networks. Have a LAN party and do your sharing there instead.
but in a *lot* of cases the loan agent (who is supposed to be working *for* them) would take advantage of them...It's not fair to just kick everyone out of their homes
People want to be treated as adults, but when the going gets tough some of them don't want to shoulder the responsibility that comes with that status. It's true that RL can be a harsh mistress, but how much have these people really lost? They got to live in their homes for a couple of years with low payments that were almost 100% interest so that they could write them off their taxes. They weren't really "homeowners", as the term has previously been understood, but rather glorified renters. Well, now it's time for them to take a trip through bankruptcy and find a cheap place to rent. There is nothing more expensive than ignorance and now it's time for them to settle that debt. Perhaps in the future they will spend less time updating their Facebook status and more time reading. They can start with Dave Ramsey's books, sometimes crude but very effective, and work their way up from there.
Obviously, you're frugal and would *never* make a financial mistake, or get laid off in the worst economic crisis in 70 years
Actually, I've been laid off twice and rehired twice since this whole mess began in 2007 and thanks in no small part to my fiscal prudence I was able to use some of what I had so carefully saved to get myself and my family through the rough patches. Of course, when you ask young people today what savings are they look at you like you're some relic left over from the Great Depression. Maybe now they can finally understand what their grandparents were talking about when they said debt was to be used sparingly, if at all, and savings was something that only fools did without.
I would say that so long as the system is both opt-in and voluntary, it shouldn't be a problem. As long as the censorship system isn't mandated by government AND people are free to choose filtered or unfiltered access, where's the harm?
Which just goes to show that if you want to be taken seriously by the people with the power to make decisions, you need to at least look the part. The suit and tie for gentlemen or pantsuit for the ladies, clean and pressed, are de rigueur for being taken seriously by businessmen, senators, congressmen, MPs and the like. A large pocket book doesn't hurt either. Imagine if all of the occupy people scraped together a couple of dollars apiece, founded their own lobbying organization, hired well dressed and articulate people to speak for them and then allowed them to do so. The people in charge might actually listen then. Suppose that all 200+ million of the "99 percenters" in the United States alone did this. That could begin to counter some, although probably not all, of the corporate money and the influence that it buys. They could make up for their underdog position by being creative. Aren't these young lefty types supposed to be creative after all?
So you're saying that people who are staying in their homes "for free" aren't getting such an awesome deal after all?
Provided that they're unable to remain there without paying any longer than is necessary to properly foreclose, yes. However, I remain skeptical that the government will do the right thing here and allow the courts and the banks to work things out and foreclose so that that home once again enters the marketplace; they did bail out the banks after all and we've all seen the results of that.
Republican moderates should be supporting Occupy Wall Street.
If you were a Republican would you go down there and announce that publicly? You'd instantly have twenty scary smelly people shouting at you and spitting in your face. Who needs it? It's hard for mainstream America to take you seriously if you dress in rags, have long unkempt hair and reek of patchouli. The message of OWS would be much more effective if these people got haircuts, took showers and wore decent clothes.
If not, break the contract and hope the bank destroyed your mortgage documents and can't present them in court.
IANAL, but I wouldn't advise that. The courts, at least here in the United States, take a rather dim view of shirkers who don't pay their debts and so do most juries. Doing as you suggest is almost certainly a recipe for even more legal troubles.
but encourage investment on their own if they want.
How will they do that after individual retirement investors are "out of the market"? Shall we allow individual investors as long as they can prove that they aren't saving for their retirement? How is that a good idea? That's crazy.
Let companies breathe for a couple of quarters so they can actually plow money back into things that will produce results further down the road.
There are plenty of companies out there right now that do just that. You just don't hear much about their stocks in the business press because nobody wants to cover a boring company steadily plodding along while producing necessary goods and services and earning steady but modest profits. Not every company is run for just the next quarter's profits. For example, take a look at the businesses owned by Berkshire Hathaway Corporation (Warren Buffet's company). They are all steady, well defined and long term businesses that earn steady profits. The Berkshire companies are frequently outperformed for a quarter or even a year or two by hot shot companies that subsequently crash and burn, but slow and steady wins the race or at least it did in Buffet's case. My point is that different people approach investing in different ways and that's alright. The market needs all different sorts of risk tolerances and styles to make sure that just about everything worth funding gets funding from somewhere eventually.
I'm not arguing for the system used by the banks. All I'm saying is that it's not just for people who don't repay debts, which they willingly incurred, to continue living indefinitely in homes pledged as collateral on those debts. Two wrongs don't make a right and I'm very tired of being punished for my financial prudence. Borrowing large amounts of money to purchase a home, which is what these people did, increases the total supply of money and reduces the value of the dollars that were already in my pocket before they took out the loans. Borrowing money to buy a home is a privilege, not a right, and privileges can be taken away if they are abused, as they were in this case. Profligate "homeowners" who borrow more than they can pay back hurt all of us. If such people are allowed to remain in their homes, then shouldn't the government give me a free home too? That's the problem with letting this slide completely. I agree that things have to be done legally and properly with regard to foreclosures, but they must eventually be done.
Why not simply return that?
Because the planet can no longer support the rampant consumerism that was a defining feature of the American middle class during the later quarter of the twentieth century?
Perhaps it's time that we re-thought our entire monetary system? Indeed, What has Government Done to Our Money? Many of our problems stem from public misunderstandings of the proper role of money in our society and those who benefit from and seek to perpetuate those collective misunderstandings. The Occupy Wall Street people need to do more than simply expose what happened and who was responsible, they need to learn why it was even possible in the first place. Without that understanding, no meaningful changes, however well intentioned, can prevent the same things from happening again.
One place there was law breaking by the banks was robosigning and other foreclosure abuses
Alright, but should people who don't pay their mortgages continue to live in their homes rent free while the rest of us continue to pay mortgage or rent? How is that fair or moral? They received all of the enjoyments of home ownership that resulted from receiving credit from the rest of us. Their borrowing increased the money supply and forced the rest of us to run a bit faster to avoid falling off the back of the inflation and cost of living treadmill. I agree that the banks were sloppy and didn't handle themselves very well in this whole affair, but what about the rest of us who were prudent? We didn't take out loans that we couldn't afford and instead saved our money and lived frugally. Is it not a slap in our collective faces to reward the profligate and punish the prudent amongst us for the monetary sins of others?
When there are multiple university graduates competing for a part-time job at the local supermarket, something is horribly wrong.
I think that part of the problem lies with how higher education has been "sold" to the middle classes, beginning in the decades following the end of WWII and continuing until the present day. People were told that a university education was their golden ticket to a better life filled with a spacious flat in the city, a house in the country, multiple luxury vehicles, regular European holidays and a generally affluent existence. Of course, anyone who took the time to look at these promises with a more critical eye would have seen that increasing the supply of educated people, beyond which their skills and education was demanded by the marketplace, could never result in a substantial segment of the population living out the promised dreams of affluence. Perhaps it's time for all of us to relearn some of the wisdom of our grandparents and great grandparents: "If you cant afford it and don't want to save up for it then don't go into debt to get it, either make do or do without."
It seems as if there will be soon enough, if there isn't already, a market for specialized Android phones which encrypt storage and the contents of the working memory at all times, analogous to full disk encryption. With the appropriate settings, it would be nearly impossible for any unauthorized search of the device to occur without the owner's consent. Indeed, it would even be possible to render the "secret" OS hidden and its existence plausibly deniable, as TrueCrypt does today. Moreover, it would be perfectly legal, at least here in the US, to develop and market a device. In fact, it's likely that some enterprising android users have already found ways to make this work using TrueCrypt or other similar open source tools.
is probably the alternative within a generation.
It may happen sooner than you think, stay tuned.
In California, the rules are such that there are basically no contested seats in any legislative district or statewide office. In fact, it's getting so bad that even local elections for county seats and city councils, which are supposed to be non-partisan, are becoming increasingly radicalized and partisan. It also doesn't help that California is chocked full of people and groups who are basically living off the dole and wouldn't make it here without continuous state assistance. This leads even more people, who really can't afford to live here, to sunny California. Is it any wonder that the state is broke? I look forward to the day when the bond holders finally bring California back to reality kicking and screaming. The expressions on millions of Liberal faces that day will almost make it all worthwhile.
How many will also buy the official line about why they did it, which likely includes 'public safety or protecting the children'
It's hard to argue that public safety is enhanced when you're releasing tens of thousands of prisoners because the state is broke. If you live in California and haven't yet invested in an alarm system and a firearm, now might be a good time.
I don't like myself when I lose control and get angry
I must confess that I don't much care for it either.
it doesn't win any converts either.
Certainly true in this case.
this conversation cannot possibly bear any further fruit.
I suppose then that we'll have to agree to disagree and leave it at that; there's really nothing more to be said.
You're welcome to produce evidence of any heads being made to roll.
Don't worry, they will. No multimillion dollar failure ever goes unpunished by investors. However, since Solyndra was not a publicly traded company, any punishments are likely to remain behind private doors. After all, few investors like to admit publicly that they lost money in a scandal ridden flop like Solyndra.
Yeah, half a billion is a lot to you and me, to the government? It's the price of doing business. This is true of any business or investor, they make sure not to put all their eggs in one basket.
The private equity investors, those with net worth in excess of 10 million, aren't like most ordinary investors like your or me. These private investors who lost in Solyndra probably lost a few million apiece. These are powerful people who are used to winning and getting their own way. They hate losing, whether the loss was a dollar or a million dollars, and will ruthlessly punish those whose incompetence, in their judgment, lost it. If you could see these people in action behind closed doors then you would understand what I mean. They are vicious adversaries who can sense weakness just as surely as sharks can detect a few drops of blood in the water. These are not people who are easily crossed. Most of them didn't make or keep their fortunes by being nice guys. At least in that sense, Warren Buffet is the exception rather than the rule.
At least you're honest and showing that your bias is down to how you're banking your retirement.
Suppose that I didn't do what's best for my individual interests and I died cold, hungry and alone. Would you or anyone else besides my family care? So you see, I have to look out for my own best interests and those who depend upon me as provider because if I don't nobody else will. Family first, come hell or high water, everything else is secondary.