The bargain bin is you taking advantage of an inventory error made by a business. The business has already tried to sell the item and failed and is looking to unload it for something better than zero, hopefully with a meager profit or at least not a loss, instead of keeping it around as taxable inventory. A business renting access to streamed media delivered over the Internet has very low fixed costs per user so losing a rental sale to you because you don't like the price is only fractions of a penny loss to them. They'd rather gamble that you will cave and pay $3-5 dollars for the stream rental, netting them a 50,000 percent profit in the process.
Any such attempt would be so expensive as to be practically impossible. However, even if it were done there would be no buyers. The Apollo artifacts left on the moon remain the property of NASA and by extension the US Government and no reputable collector, or at least none with the bankroll necessary to pay what the items would be worth if they were legitimately sold into private hands, deals in stolen property.
They were lies spoken by a politician. What is new? They were lies then, they are lies now.
I disagree. The Soviets decided to put Kennedy to the test with the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962 and they backed down, in exchange for a "private assurance" from Kennedy that he would remove the Jupiter missiles from Turkey within six months, because the Russians were convinced that Kennedy would actually have ordered the attack on Cuba on Monday morning October 29th 1962 had they not agreed. We'll never know for sure because an agreement was reached to deescalate the situation in time, but I think that Kennedy would have gone through with the invasion, with disastrous consequences as we now know that Cuba had tactical nuclear rockets available for use against invasion forces by local commanders, had there been no agreement.
That is if you want to be taken seriously in the world and seen as a driving force for good.
The Obama Administration has already answered that question, loud and clear, to all of our enemies through inaction and failure to honor promises or enforce "red lines".
Nuclear weapons do not prevent aggression unless one has large numbers of them and the means to deliver them against any potential adversary in a credible first or second strike. It's generally accepted that such deterrence requires what strategists call the Nuclear Triad. To date only two nations, The United States and Russia, have demonstrated all three necessary components on a continuous basis. Even then they only prevent full scale total war and not more limited engagements. Indeed, having a small number of nuclear weapons is arguably worse than having none at all since they make an attack by a great power more and not less likely. Some nations, notably South Africa and Libya, wisely recognized that having even one bomb was not actually in their political, military or economic best interests and so dismantled and abandoned their nuclear programs. The current Iranian regime, possessing neither wisdom nor good sense, continues theirs without meaningful pause. Time will tell where all of this leads, but history doesn't offer much to inspire confidence in a peaceful solution.
Unless I've missed my guess the Root CA of the "trusted" certificate of an external site, "Amazon.com" for example, would not be VeriSign in this case but instead the "trusted" Root CA on the appliance doing the MITM. So, wouldn't it be obvious to any moderately sophisticated user that you were intercepting the public certificate and replacing it with a fake one signed by the CA on the appliance, trusted or not? It only takes one smart employee to figure this out before word gets around the office that this is being done. Sounds like a good way to piss off your best employees.
So here we have this commode that uses solar power to burn turds and they want people in developing nations to install and use them while the wealthy in the developed world continue flushing their porcelain thrones with gallons of fresh potable water? Perfect.
Show me one wealthy person who has argued for higher taxes and then hasn't turned around and found ways to not pay them. Hollywood does this all the time and so does Silicon Valley, but they get passes because they tend to support Democrats and tax hypocrisy is accepted among wealthy Democrats. It's classic limousine liberalism: do as I say and not as I do.
Bill Gates is hardly unique in this regard. Many young techies with a leftist bent aspire to "change the world" through various disruptions to and meddling in the lives of others. The difference between them and Bill is merely one of scope and budget. I find it amusing how these people curse the Koch brothers and others who use these methods to stand in the way of "progress" while at the same time cheering those, like Bill Gates, who use the same or similar methods to achieve more ideologically aligned goals.
Fairly common for students that don't have the mental skills to master CS. I have known lots of such people.
It's arguably worse when you have someone with that mastery but little or no work experience to back it up. They're too smart to realize that they know nothing and too proud to ask for help. I know because I was that kid once and only now, looking back, do I fully appreciate how green I really was. If I could go back and give my younger self one piece of advice it would be this: do not be so proud that you overlook the experience of another, even one whom you consider less capable than yourself, because a career in this business is far too short to learn everything by repeating the mistakes of those who went before you, many of whom were no doubt smarter than you.
You mean like your mail and social media accounts? I think that sort of defies the entire part of the smartphone.
Anything you'd rather not be compromised, yes. The smart phone is useful enough as a data storage, transfer and communication device that can run arbitrary programs for utilitarian reasons or perhaps entertainment. As for social media, will the world end if you don't access Facebook on your phone? I realize that it might be difficult for some people to understand, but not everyone cares or cares equally about social media.
It is scary how much important private stuff we keep on these portable smartphones, tablets, etc these days, and how screwed we could be if that falls into the wrong hands.
Maybe you shouldn't be putting your important private stuff on your phone?
Entitlements are a big part of the problem in this country. Even if you taxed everyone earning more than 100K at 100 percent you still wouldn't have enough to pay for all that has been promised to everyone currently living. Any discussion which fails to acknowledge the central role of entitlements in the budget and tax problems of the nation is doomed to produce no useful insights into what is needed to solve these problems. The problem with the fixation on a "fair share", as decided by the progressives of course, is that it's a big part of what got us into the present mess. The rich people that you so despise are much better able to hire lobbyists to construct complex schemes in the tax laws, tax attorneys to parse the codes and exploit them and wealth management advisors to help them structure their affairs so as to minimize the taxes that they do pay. All of this is tremendously wasteful to our economy with billions of dollars spent and tens of thousand of bright young minds engaged not in scientific research or improving business efficiency in the productive parts of the economy, but helping those who are best able to game the hopelessly complex tax system. How much waste will you tolerate in your quest to hunt down the white whale of "fair shares" cut from the hides of the rich? Instead, how about this tax system: Income is income, regardless of source, of which everyone pays 20% with an exemption for every taxpayer of 100% up to the federal poverty level for their household. No other deductions, credits or exemptions allowed. So for example if the federal poverty level for a family of 4 is say 30K then the first 30K of every taxpayer's income, regardless of how high or low it is, would be exempt from tax but after that it would be 20% on everything after that. Of course we would want to combine this program with entitlement cuts and many other cuts to our bloated federal budget, but this new simplified tax system would be a good start.
Can you honestly say that you're satisfied with how taxes are collected and spent in this country? While I acknowledge that some taxes are necessary to fund basic and necessary functions of government, what we have now is a complete disaster; both wasteful and inefficient. Even after taxes have been collected we have a government that tries to do too much, does most of it poorly and spends way too much doing it. In my opinion we receive very poor value for those monies and yeah it makes me angry. If you're not dissatisfied with this state of affairs then you're either not paying attention or your standards are very low. Given your coarse language and snarky remarks, it's probably a mixture of both, hmmm?
It doesn't take a sharp mind or a keen understanding of anything to know that if society is not maintained then it crumbles.
Private property is maintained. The commons is not. If you dislike crumbling things then privatize them and you will see how well maintained they can be when a private owner is there to look after them.
Basic grammar not withstanding, I think that it has something to do with the fact that the right answers in economics are often subtle and counter intuitive while the easy and obvious answers, which are the sort frequently offered by the left, are both seductive and wrong in ways that are subtle and not immediately obvious until the failure becomes painful in the extreme, as it has for example in Venezuela today. So to answer your question, it takes a sharp mind and a keen understanding of both economics and history to make a proper defense of free enterprise and individual liberty against the progressive polemics offered by the left in defense of dependency and redistribution as the path to prosperity. Clearly, not everyone who takes up that mantle is equal to the task.
I know it's fashionable to blame Detroit's problems on the Evil Tax And Spend Democrats
It's fashionable because it's largely true. Detroit followed the advice of left wing Democrats and progressives religiously for decades, even as other areas which were also affected by NAFTA and globalization adapted and reinvented themselves into new industries while diversifying their economic bases. Detroit stubbornly refused to do either of these things, instead proudly asserting their God given liberal right to a standard of living which they could no longer afford and expecting somebody else to pay for it. Well, now the crows have come home to roost in Detroit and I don't feel sorry for them one bit. Detroit will be an abject lesson in what it means to live within your means and the folly of expecting others to pay for your stubbornness and extravagance.
It was probably for the best. Just curious though, did the Democratic party actually give you any support or was it one of those non-competitive districts where a Democrat hasn't won in decades? There are plenty of districts like that all over the United States where either the Democratic or Republican party is happy to let local candidates who are halfway presentable run on the off chance that one of them might actually win, but they rarely put any serious resources into those races other than offering advice on how to respond to questions along party lines and moral support.
China is not only going through an industrial revolution, but also a technocratic and political revolution.
China is already industrialized and the Communist Party remains firmly in control. I wouldn't call that a revolution. If anything it's a challenge to the United States and the Washington Consensus of how economies grow and prosper. It says to the rest of the developing world that you can have economic growth and prosperity without the chaos and inefficiency of democracy. That's the real danger of China, not their budding military or industrial might. They make good arguments for results based growth that Obama and others in the west have been slow to respond to with mostly unsatisfying answers. Obama meanwhile seams content to preside over the decline of American power, ruining by his disastrous policies many of our foreign policy achievements since the end of WWII. I've liked few enough Presidents in my time thus far, but Obama is the first one in my opinion to deliberately seek to undermine the nation that he swore to protect and lead.
You misunderstand. I don't feel sorry for the Chinese. On the contrary, they made their beds and they can sleep in them. I was responding to the parent, of my original post, so that he would understand the absurdity of using the environmental argument with China. There are many people out there who live for today and don't give a damn about tomorrow because they figure we're all dead in the long run anyway and they don't care. The Chinese seem to be of this mindset, as indicated by their own choices and actions. Trying to frame a debate as "either or" when your antagonist responds with "neither" or "don't care" doesn't get you anywhere, it's futile.
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The bargain bin is you taking advantage of an inventory error made by a business. The business has already tried to sell the item and failed and is looking to unload it for something better than zero, hopefully with a meager profit or at least not a loss, instead of keeping it around as taxable inventory. A business renting access to streamed media delivered over the Internet has very low fixed costs per user so losing a rental sale to you because you don't like the price is only fractions of a penny loss to them. They'd rather gamble that you will cave and pay $3-5 dollars for the stream rental, netting them a 50,000 percent profit in the process.
Any such attempt would be so expensive as to be practically impossible. However, even if it were done there would be no buyers. The Apollo artifacts left on the moon remain the property of NASA and by extension the US Government and no reputable collector, or at least none with the bankroll necessary to pay what the items would be worth if they were legitimately sold into private hands, deals in stolen property.
They were lies spoken by a politician. What is new? They were lies then, they are lies now.
I disagree. The Soviets decided to put Kennedy to the test with the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962 and they backed down, in exchange for a "private assurance" from Kennedy that he would remove the Jupiter missiles from Turkey within six months, because the Russians were convinced that Kennedy would actually have ordered the attack on Cuba on Monday morning October 29th 1962 had they not agreed. We'll never know for sure because an agreement was reached to deescalate the situation in time, but I think that Kennedy would have gone through with the invasion, with disastrous consequences as we now know that Cuba had tactical nuclear rockets available for use against invasion forces by local commanders, had there been no agreement.
That is if you want to be taken seriously in the world and seen as a driving force for good.
The Obama Administration has already answered that question, loud and clear, to all of our enemies through inaction and failure to honor promises or enforce "red lines".
Nuclear weapons do not prevent aggression unless one has large numbers of them and the means to deliver them against any potential adversary in a credible first or second strike. It's generally accepted that such deterrence requires what strategists call the Nuclear Triad. To date only two nations, The United States and Russia, have demonstrated all three necessary components on a continuous basis. Even then they only prevent full scale total war and not more limited engagements. Indeed, having a small number of nuclear weapons is arguably worse than having none at all since they make an attack by a great power more and not less likely. Some nations, notably South Africa and Libya, wisely recognized that having even one bomb was not actually in their political, military or economic best interests and so dismantled and abandoned their nuclear programs. The current Iranian regime, possessing neither wisdom nor good sense, continues theirs without meaningful pause. Time will tell where all of this leads, but history doesn't offer much to inspire confidence in a peaceful solution.
Can we please not stumble into World War III over the goddamned Ukraine!?
Ahh, but Ukraine is weak, it's feeble. It's a road apple Newman, I think it's time to put the hurt on Ukraine
-Krammer from "The Label Maker", season 6 episode 12 of Seinfeld
Unless I've missed my guess the Root CA of the "trusted" certificate of an external site, "Amazon.com" for example, would not be VeriSign in this case but instead the "trusted" Root CA on the appliance doing the MITM. So, wouldn't it be obvious to any moderately sophisticated user that you were intercepting the public certificate and replacing it with a fake one signed by the CA on the appliance, trusted or not? It only takes one smart employee to figure this out before word gets around the office that this is being done. Sounds like a good way to piss off your best employees.
This is why harassment continues. You're damned if you speak out, and damned if you don't.
Exactly, only the lawyers ever seem to win. It's like they're working both sides against the middle when it comes to employment law.
So here we have this commode that uses solar power to burn turds and they want people in developing nations to install and use them while the wealthy in the developed world continue flushing their porcelain thrones with gallons of fresh potable water? Perfect.
Show me one wealthy person who has argued for higher taxes and then hasn't turned around and found ways to not pay them. Hollywood does this all the time and so does Silicon Valley, but they get passes because they tend to support Democrats and tax hypocrisy is accepted among wealthy Democrats. It's classic limousine liberalism: do as I say and not as I do.
Bill Gates is hardly unique in this regard. Many young techies with a leftist bent aspire to "change the world" through various disruptions to and meddling in the lives of others. The difference between them and Bill is merely one of scope and budget. I find it amusing how these people curse the Koch brothers and others who use these methods to stand in the way of "progress" while at the same time cheering those, like Bill Gates, who use the same or similar methods to achieve more ideologically aligned goals.
Fairly common for students that don't have the mental skills to master CS. I have known lots of such people.
It's arguably worse when you have someone with that mastery but little or no work experience to back it up. They're too smart to realize that they know nothing and too proud to ask for help. I know because I was that kid once and only now, looking back, do I fully appreciate how green I really was. If I could go back and give my younger self one piece of advice it would be this: do not be so proud that you overlook the experience of another, even one whom you consider less capable than yourself, because a career in this business is far too short to learn everything by repeating the mistakes of those who went before you, many of whom were no doubt smarter than you.
You mean like your mail and social media accounts? I think that sort of defies the entire part of the smartphone.
Anything you'd rather not be compromised, yes. The smart phone is useful enough as a data storage, transfer and communication device that can run arbitrary programs for utilitarian reasons or perhaps entertainment. As for social media, will the world end if you don't access Facebook on your phone? I realize that it might be difficult for some people to understand, but not everyone cares or cares equally about social media.
It is scary how much important private stuff we keep on these portable smartphones, tablets, etc these days, and how screwed we could be if that falls into the wrong hands.
Maybe you shouldn't be putting your important private stuff on your phone?
Entitlements are a big part of the problem in this country. Even if you taxed everyone earning more than 100K at 100 percent you still wouldn't have enough to pay for all that has been promised to everyone currently living. Any discussion which fails to acknowledge the central role of entitlements in the budget and tax problems of the nation is doomed to produce no useful insights into what is needed to solve these problems. The problem with the fixation on a "fair share", as decided by the progressives of course, is that it's a big part of what got us into the present mess. The rich people that you so despise are much better able to hire lobbyists to construct complex schemes in the tax laws, tax attorneys to parse the codes and exploit them and wealth management advisors to help them structure their affairs so as to minimize the taxes that they do pay. All of this is tremendously wasteful to our economy with billions of dollars spent and tens of thousand of bright young minds engaged not in scientific research or improving business efficiency in the productive parts of the economy, but helping those who are best able to game the hopelessly complex tax system. How much waste will you tolerate in your quest to hunt down the white whale of "fair shares" cut from the hides of the rich? Instead, how about this tax system: Income is income, regardless of source, of which everyone pays 20% with an exemption for every taxpayer of 100% up to the federal poverty level for their household. No other deductions, credits or exemptions allowed. So for example if the federal poverty level for a family of 4 is say 30K then the first 30K of every taxpayer's income, regardless of how high or low it is, would be exempt from tax but after that it would be 20% on everything after that. Of course we would want to combine this program with entitlement cuts and many other cuts to our bloated federal budget, but this new simplified tax system would be a good start.
Can you honestly say that you're satisfied with how taxes are collected and spent in this country? While I acknowledge that some taxes are necessary to fund basic and necessary functions of government, what we have now is a complete disaster; both wasteful and inefficient. Even after taxes have been collected we have a government that tries to do too much, does most of it poorly and spends way too much doing it. In my opinion we receive very poor value for those monies and yeah it makes me angry. If you're not dissatisfied with this state of affairs then you're either not paying attention or your standards are very low. Given your coarse language and snarky remarks, it's probably a mixture of both, hmmm?
It doesn't take a sharp mind or a keen understanding of anything to know that if society is not maintained then it crumbles.
Private property is maintained. The commons is not. If you dislike crumbling things then privatize them and you will see how well maintained they can be when a private owner is there to look after them.
Maybe you're just a selfish fuck.
Says the progressive handing me their invoice for no services rendered.
Basic grammar not withstanding, I think that it has something to do with the fact that the right answers in economics are often subtle and counter intuitive while the easy and obvious answers, which are the sort frequently offered by the left, are both seductive and wrong in ways that are subtle and not immediately obvious until the failure becomes painful in the extreme, as it has for example in Venezuela today. So to answer your question, it takes a sharp mind and a keen understanding of both economics and history to make a proper defense of free enterprise and individual liberty against the progressive polemics offered by the left in defense of dependency and redistribution as the path to prosperity. Clearly, not everyone who takes up that mantle is equal to the task.
I know it's fashionable to blame Detroit's problems on the Evil Tax And Spend Democrats
It's fashionable because it's largely true. Detroit followed the advice of left wing Democrats and progressives religiously for decades, even as other areas which were also affected by NAFTA and globalization adapted and reinvented themselves into new industries while diversifying their economic bases. Detroit stubbornly refused to do either of these things, instead proudly asserting their God given liberal right to a standard of living which they could no longer afford and expecting somebody else to pay for it. Well, now the crows have come home to roost in Detroit and I don't feel sorry for them one bit. Detroit will be an abject lesson in what it means to live within your means and the folly of expecting others to pay for your stubbornness and extravagance.
Well, that's the price of a stable and progressive civilization.
Why is it that whenever progressives talk about the price of something I'm the one who gets handed the bill for their profligate ways?
It was probably for the best. Just curious though, did the Democratic party actually give you any support or was it one of those non-competitive districts where a Democrat hasn't won in decades? There are plenty of districts like that all over the United States where either the Democratic or Republican party is happy to let local candidates who are halfway presentable run on the off chance that one of them might actually win, but they rarely put any serious resources into those races other than offering advice on how to respond to questions along party lines and moral support.
I never want to be stuck in a job where my supervisor is an opinionated moron again.
Short of being self employed, there's no guarantee of that. Hell, even if you are self employed there's no guarantee of that.
China is not only going through an industrial revolution, but also a technocratic and political revolution.
China is already industrialized and the Communist Party remains firmly in control. I wouldn't call that a revolution. If anything it's a challenge to the United States and the Washington Consensus of how economies grow and prosper. It says to the rest of the developing world that you can have economic growth and prosperity without the chaos and inefficiency of democracy. That's the real danger of China, not their budding military or industrial might. They make good arguments for results based growth that Obama and others in the west have been slow to respond to with mostly unsatisfying answers. Obama meanwhile seams content to preside over the decline of American power, ruining by his disastrous policies many of our foreign policy achievements since the end of WWII. I've liked few enough Presidents in my time thus far, but Obama is the first one in my opinion to deliberately seek to undermine the nation that he swore to protect and lead.
You misunderstand. I don't feel sorry for the Chinese. On the contrary, they made their beds and they can sleep in them. I was responding to the parent, of my original post, so that he would understand the absurdity of using the environmental argument with China. There are many people out there who live for today and don't give a damn about tomorrow because they figure we're all dead in the long run anyway and they don't care. The Chinese seem to be of this mindset, as indicated by their own choices and actions. Trying to frame a debate as "either or" when your antagonist responds with "neither" or "don't care" doesn't get you anywhere, it's futile.