This is yet another reason to use encryption to ensure that one has some measure of control over privacy and disclosure. For instance, if they want to actually read the data then they will have to inform you so that you can decrypt the data for them which means that you would at least be aware of the request and probably have an opportunity to present your side to the judge and negotiate the terms and conditions of the disclosure. This is better than the judge meeting privately with the government agents and deciding what is and what is not a valid scope without any input or reply from you.
As time goes on, will we learn to be more circumspect, or will society change to accept that people are not perfect?
It will be the former and NOT the latter, I assure you. In fact, we are already well on our collective way towards the end of forgiveness in our society. Personally, I find this to be quite ironic considering that a fundamental teaching of the belief system that many Americans profess to follow is: "let him who is without sin cast the first stone."
I find it interesting that they chose iPhone when something like 70%+ of business users, according to a recent CNBC report choose BlackBerry (which is well known for its Exchange support). The iPhone is mostly the choice of the consumer market (with a much smaller 20% share of the enterprise market) and BlackBerry still rules the roost in most businesses.
For those who are interested, the Electronic Frontier Foundation has put together a Surveillance Defense Project manual which discusses the basics of government search and seizure powers in the United States (among other things). There are other sources available on the same and related topics (the searches are left as an exercise to the reader), but basically the only way to completely preserve one's rights when dealing with the authorities is to refuse any cooperation, other than name and id, from the very start and continue that refusal until one's attorney is present and one is acting under advice from that attorney. Of course, our individual rights are being constantly diminished in this country so your mileage may vary, but at least in theory if you want to protect your 5th amendment right against self incrimination you must never cooperate, not even partially, until you are acting under the advice of your attorney, even if you have not yet been arrested or detained (i.e. this applies to any interactions with the authorities under any circumstances).
Instead, we got a ridiculous government-funded prescription drugs entitlement in Medicare Part D---the exact opposite of any attempt at cost reduction.
Which the party base widely loathed. Let me say that again: the prescription drug benefit was a boondoggle that was not widely liked within the party (compare with Clinton and NAFTA on the Democratic side). Bush did it as part of an ill considered move to pander to lower income seniors who largely vote Democratic anyway. Besides, prescription drugs really aren't all that expensive as long as you don't demand the latest patented drugs (which are rarely without acceptable substitutes) and if people do want those $20 per pill name brand lifestyle drugs then they can damn well pay for it themselves.
you need to find an issue on which there is some viable alternative party that has a better position on that issue.
The party in power is NOT immune from criticism simply because their peers aren't much better.
I do think that tort reform should be a part of any comprehensive medical reform, but I think that we have to be careful.
Which will never happen as long as the Democrats are in power. The attorneys, through their firms and state bar associations, are collectively among the largest donors to the Democratic National Committee, Democrat elected officials (i.e. Congressmen and Senators) and Democratic presidential candidates (like our current President Obama). There are two groups that you can bet the farm that Democrats won't cross: lawyers and unions (in that order). No attorney that I know of has ever supported laws which limit their ability to go to court and sue for lots of money (its like freedom of speech to them). The attorneys will fight tort reform tooth and nail and I would be shocked if Obama signs any bill, or at least any bill that actually has teeth, which puts a national cap on damages awarded at lawyerpoint.
IMHO, among the best post-cyberpunk style science fiction series to explore this, among other concepts, in recent years has been the Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex series. The "cyber brain" conversations combined with "external memory" (think of it like an off site storage, backup and messaging server for your mind) really takes man machine integration to its final logical conclusion: making or receiving voice and video communications remotely is as easy as initiating thoughts to do so. Although, I do think that the series is a bit too optimistic on how soon all of this will actually come about (i.e. by 2030).
The linked article said that there are potentially 130,000+ potential matches when the Micronesian SSNs are padded out with zeros to form 9-digit US SSNs. It probably won't be too long before some enterprising lawyer realizes that these 130,000 people form a class and files class action lawsuits against credit bureaus, reporting agencies, and any other firms which (a) have a few bucks and (b) attempt to collect from the wrong people.
Does it strike anyone else as ironic that a government which supports development of technologies to circumvent the technical controls of information put in place by other governments would at the same time breach the privacy of a blogger? If the United States can so easily unmask a blogger then how do they expect to prevent countries like China and Iran from doing the same thing? If the technologies to enable anonymous speech become commonplace then they will be like many other tools, useful for doing both good and evil. The problem is that some people here in the United States want to believe that only the "good guys" can and should benefit from such technologies and that the "bad guys" must always get their due. Unfortunately, the real world is rarely so accommodating. Personally, I would prefer that privacy enhancing technologies such as onion-routing, strong cryptography, and public wireless be widely available, even if it means that the "bad guys" can use these technologies too. If that is the price of living in a free society then so be it.
how organized labor was instrumental in creating a prosperous middle class in America who could count out safe working conditions and reasonable working hours.
Organized labor has historically claimed credit for these achievements, but they did not come about primarily or even mostly because of unions. The decline of hours worked, increases in productivity, and improvements in standards of living were all the results of sustained economic growth and would have occurred even in the absence of unions. Sustained economic growth explains why the average American today is hundreds of times wealthier, on average, than similar people living in third world countries; not unions. For a more in depth explanation, I would refer you to the following video.
You can also bet that the people who are most decidedly opposed to organized labor really would rather the middle and working classes be a little less prosperous.
The wealthy, like most of the rest of us, are concerned with doing the best that they can for themselves; not actively attempting to make less wealthy people worse off. Do you get up each morning and ask yourself, "What can I do today to make sure that poor people living in the inner cities are even poorer tomorrow"? Certainly not, so unless you believe that everybody pursuing their own self interests makes all of us worse off, despite massive evidence to the contrary (i.e. the dynamic power of the American economy), then that statement makes no sense whatsoever.
Also, one cannot simply focus on wages, as union supporters like to do, in the absence of other considerations such as the purchasing power of those wages; which has almost certainly increased since the Reagan administration thanks in part to cheap imports from China and elsewhere, big box retailers like Costco and Walmart and even more to sustained economic growth during that period which really only ended recently with the recent "Great Recession". Moreover, this most recent recession is less an indictment of Capitalism (although the left likes to portray it as such) than it is an indictment of our monetary system; which has at its heart the Federal Government.
Finally, remember that money, as it exists today (i.e. government fiat paper money), has no real use other than as a proxy for the exchange of other goods and services. If one group "wins" higher wages than would otherwise be allotted in a competitive economy then prices will rise to match and cancel out the higher wages (see wage price spiral). Simply printing or otherwise causing more money to be produced, in order to pay higher wages, does not make anyone "wealthier" in terms of the share of goods and services that can be purchased with those wages. The living standard only truly rises with increases in technology and productivity (the two are often linked) which increase economic production per capita.
One can infer roughly how Comcast really views their customers by observing their ads (i.e. the customer IS the turtle: slow, ignorant, stupid and docile).
That will change as soon as the Unions get their new "card check" rules through the Congress. You may find yourself in a union as a condition of your employment, whether you like it or not.
I believe they are the number one or two US defense contractor
Yes, but remember that in this case they are basically second out of only two manufacturers of US military aircraft (i.e. they are in last place). The other being, of course, the Lockheed Martin corporation which has also won most of the recent military contracts including the F-22 raptor, F-35 joint-strike fighter, and even the Orion space vehicle for NASAs next generation manned space exploration program. The military aviation division of Boeing has been striking out a lot lately and if not for the semi-successful civil aviation division Boeing would be in huge trouble right now.
Is she the same type of person who plugs one hundred things into an electric outlet and then wonders why the power just went off and what a fuse is? Maybe she should cut back on her plugin use or at least get rid off those which have overlapping features? I don't see how the fact that some people are ignorant in any way discredits the plug in concept. Is there a huge under served market out there for people who use multiple social networks yet are too ignorant to manage plugins in their browser? I doubt it, but RockMelt seems intent to find out.
Another thing to consider is this: If a browser can aggregate or otherwise integrate content from social networks then why would you actually need to go to the website of the social network (i.e. Facebook or Twitter)? It seems to me that it is not in the best interests of companies like Facebook to allow third party aggregators to automate and "rebrand" or hijack their services. Why would Facebook want others to become the "gatekeepers" to their content and services as middle men? An instructive lesson from the earlier days of the Internet are the aggregator IM clients which allowed users of different IM networks to communicate; in effect they bypassed the clients of those respective networks and became a sort of "over-network". What resulted was a war in which AOL, Yahoo, and others constantly tweaked their protocols to break the aggregator programs who then patched their programs in an ever escalating technical arms race until everyone basically moved on and the business interests figured out that IM was never going to get "monetized" and pulled or scaled back their commitments.
which brings me back to my initial point: How are social network aggregators, who are actively opposed by the social networks themselves, ever going to monetize this? The users of these networks hate ads and are notoriously fickle; expecting to get everything for free and switching to the "next cool thing" at the drop of hat. I stand by my original opinion that RockMelt is drilling a dry well with a "me too" web browser that integrates social networking (especially since Facebook and others will fight tooth and nail to prevent third party aggregators). Perhaps they intend to lose money on each sale, but make it up on volume? Right.
The sharks always eat the minnows. I doubt that he will lose any of his own money if...when...the venture goes under. It wouldn't be the first time that a small boutique IT firm was setup for little apparent reason other than to extract the initial equity put in by less savvy junior partners or investors.
Who are the people proposing this and do they not understand the "plug-in" concept as demonstrated in most browsers, but especially well in Firefox? Firefox offers such extensive addon customization that one wonders what more could possibly be done with a new browser rather than simply writing an addon? Why should strong social network integration be "built in" to the browser anyway? That is what addons are for. This sounds like the sort of idea that a business person, who had little or no knowledge of software engineering, would propose. What is surprising is that someone like Marc would fall for it. As for the investors in this startup, well, "the fools and their money will soon be parted company"; perhaps that is what Marc intends to do from the start, separate foolish investors from their money.
How many times must Battlestar Galactica be rebooted before the powers that be figure out that the money would be better spent on new efforts in the science fiction genera? Personally I have very high hopes for the Ridley Scott rendition of Forever War; which if done right could be a really useful commentary on current world events while at the same time presenting an interesting, intelligent, and entertaining piece of science fiction. I also wouldn't mind seeing another Dune series of films except remade with a budget worthy of the Dune series (The SciFi series gets an 'A' for effort, but the lack of sufficient budget showed and it hurt the quality of the final result). Perhaps, Peter Jackson will consider that for his next project when he is done with the Hobbit. Personally, I prefer a more gritty and realistic science fiction experience with more grit and less glamor (think Firefly not Wall-e). Unfortunately, the people with the money are more interested in producing "wholesome family entertainment" than realistic science fiction so the best stuff will probably remain mostly relegated to books instead. Perhaps that is a better fate than seeing another classic of science fiction butchered by Hollywood for the McMasses.
Microsoft would be miffed to have their B2B cost revealed to be a tiny tiny fraction of what they gut consumers for.
Except that almost nobody purchases Windows separately at full retail box price; They get it bundled with their new computer purchase instead. If the laptop was purchased at a retail outlet and not directly from the manufacturer then the consumer may never see an itemized list of components and their respective prices. So does it really matter if consumers find out how much Lenovo pays Microsoft for Windows? Perhaps it would if they offered the same laptops with a Linux variant installed, but does Lenovo even offer that from the factory? I think the answer must be "no" or else why wouldn't our intrepid dutchman have simply bought the Linux version instead?
Give me a break. What conclusion would you draw from reading the article if you were a company hiring manager? Hmmm, lets think about this; you could hire a foreign student who graduated from the same university except he costs less (because of taxes) OR you could hire the more expensive American. If you were the company hiring manager which candidate would you chose, all other things being equal (remember that they graduated from the same university)? An article doesn't have to come right out and say, "don't hire Americans, they're expensive" in order for that to be the take away message for readers.
It is only going to get worse for the American worker as the Dems grasp the tax throttle and accelerate our economy into a new world of pain for the ordinary working American. If the Dems would re-read the chapter in their undergraduate econ textbooks on taxes than they would realize that the incidence of many taxes falls heavily upon the middle class in the form of lower wages, higher prices, and greater difficulty in finding and keeping stable jobs. Margaret Thatcher put it best when she said, "Eventually, you run out of other people's money". What we are seeing today in America is the final death of personal responsibility; its Nanny State 2.0 except that we have already seen this film and I for one didn't care for the ending.
Why not just move the planet itself? It might be possible given enough artificially engineered orbital encounters with large enough asteroids over thousands of years to gradually shift the orbit of the earth outwards to stay within the expanding habitable zone.
Slashdot Mirror
This is yet another reason to use encryption to ensure that one has some measure of control over privacy and disclosure. For instance, if they want to actually read the data then they will have to inform you so that you can decrypt the data for them which means that you would at least be aware of the request and probably have an opportunity to present your side to the judge and negotiate the terms and conditions of the disclosure. This is better than the judge meeting privately with the government agents and deciding what is and what is not a valid scope without any input or reply from you.
As time goes on, will we learn to be more circumspect, or will society change to accept that people are not perfect?
It will be the former and NOT the latter, I assure you. In fact, we are already well on our collective way towards the end of forgiveness in our society. Personally, I find this to be quite ironic considering that a fundamental teaching of the belief system that many Americans profess to follow is: "let him who is without sin cast the first stone."
I find it interesting that they chose iPhone when something like 70%+ of business users, according to a recent CNBC report choose BlackBerry (which is well known for its Exchange support). The iPhone is mostly the choice of the consumer market (with a much smaller 20% share of the enterprise market) and BlackBerry still rules the roost in most businesses.
For those who are interested, the Electronic Frontier Foundation has put together a Surveillance Defense Project manual which discusses the basics of government search and seizure powers in the United States (among other things). There are other sources available on the same and related topics (the searches are left as an exercise to the reader), but basically the only way to completely preserve one's rights when dealing with the authorities is to refuse any cooperation, other than name and id, from the very start and continue that refusal until one's attorney is present and one is acting under advice from that attorney. Of course, our individual rights are being constantly diminished in this country so your mileage may vary, but at least in theory if you want to protect your 5th amendment right against self incrimination you must never cooperate, not even partially, until you are acting under the advice of your attorney, even if you have not yet been arrested or detained (i.e. this applies to any interactions with the authorities under any circumstances).
Instead, we got a ridiculous government-funded prescription drugs entitlement in Medicare Part D---the exact opposite of any attempt at cost reduction.
Which the party base widely loathed. Let me say that again: the prescription drug benefit was a boondoggle that was not widely liked within the party (compare with Clinton and NAFTA on the Democratic side). Bush did it as part of an ill considered move to pander to lower income seniors who largely vote Democratic anyway. Besides, prescription drugs really aren't all that expensive as long as you don't demand the latest patented drugs (which are rarely without acceptable substitutes) and if people do want those $20 per pill name brand lifestyle drugs then they can damn well pay for it themselves.
you need to find an issue on which there is some viable alternative party that has a better position on that issue.
The party in power is NOT immune from criticism simply because their peers aren't much better.
I do think that tort reform should be a part of any comprehensive medical reform, but I think that we have to be careful.
Which will never happen as long as the Democrats are in power. The attorneys, through their firms and state bar associations, are collectively among the largest donors to the Democratic National Committee, Democrat elected officials (i.e. Congressmen and Senators) and Democratic presidential candidates (like our current President Obama). There are two groups that you can bet the farm that Democrats won't cross: lawyers and unions (in that order). No attorney that I know of has ever supported laws which limit their ability to go to court and sue for lots of money (its like freedom of speech to them). The attorneys will fight tort reform tooth and nail and I would be shocked if Obama signs any bill, or at least any bill that actually has teeth, which puts a national cap on damages awarded at lawyerpoint.
IMHO, among the best post-cyberpunk style science fiction series to explore this, among other concepts, in recent years has been the Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex series. The "cyber brain" conversations combined with "external memory" (think of it like an off site storage, backup and messaging server for your mind) really takes man machine integration to its final logical conclusion: making or receiving voice and video communications remotely is as easy as initiating thoughts to do so. Although, I do think that the series is a bit too optimistic on how soon all of this will actually come about (i.e. by 2030).
Have they tried reversing the polarity of the main deflector array?
That only works if one first applies an ionized tachyon pulse to clear the emitters.
The linked article said that there are potentially 130,000+ potential matches when the Micronesian SSNs are padded out with zeros to form 9-digit US SSNs. It probably won't be too long before some enterprising lawyer realizes that these 130,000 people form a class and files class action lawsuits against credit bureaus, reporting agencies, and any other firms which (a) have a few bucks and (b) attempt to collect from the wrong people.
Does it strike anyone else as ironic that a government which supports development of technologies to circumvent the technical controls of information put in place by other governments would at the same time breach the privacy of a blogger? If the United States can so easily unmask a blogger then how do they expect to prevent countries like China and Iran from doing the same thing? If the technologies to enable anonymous speech become commonplace then they will be like many other tools, useful for doing both good and evil. The problem is that some people here in the United States want to believe that only the "good guys" can and should benefit from such technologies and that the "bad guys" must always get their due. Unfortunately, the real world is rarely so accommodating. Personally, I would prefer that privacy enhancing technologies such as onion-routing, strong cryptography, and public wireless be widely available, even if it means that the "bad guys" can use these technologies too. If that is the price of living in a free society then so be it.
how organized labor was instrumental in creating a prosperous middle class in America who could count out safe working conditions and reasonable working hours.
Organized labor has historically claimed credit for these achievements, but they did not come about primarily or even mostly because of unions. The decline of hours worked, increases in productivity, and improvements in standards of living were all the results of sustained economic growth and would have occurred even in the absence of unions. Sustained economic growth explains why the average American today is hundreds of times wealthier, on average, than similar people living in third world countries; not unions. For a more in depth explanation, I would refer you to the following video.
You can also bet that the people who are most decidedly opposed to organized labor really would rather the middle and working classes be a little less prosperous.
The wealthy, like most of the rest of us, are concerned with doing the best that they can for themselves; not actively attempting to make less wealthy people worse off. Do you get up each morning and ask yourself, "What can I do today to make sure that poor people living in the inner cities are even poorer tomorrow"? Certainly not, so unless you believe that everybody pursuing their own self interests makes all of us worse off, despite massive evidence to the contrary (i.e. the dynamic power of the American economy), then that statement makes no sense whatsoever.
Also, one cannot simply focus on wages, as union supporters like to do, in the absence of other considerations such as the purchasing power of those wages; which has almost certainly increased since the Reagan administration thanks in part to cheap imports from China and elsewhere, big box retailers like Costco and Walmart and even more to sustained economic growth during that period which really only ended recently with the recent "Great Recession". Moreover, this most recent recession is less an indictment of Capitalism (although the left likes to portray it as such) than it is an indictment of our monetary system; which has at its heart the Federal Government.
Finally, remember that money, as it exists today (i.e. government fiat paper money), has no real use other than as a proxy for the exchange of other goods and services. If one group "wins" higher wages than would otherwise be allotted in a competitive economy then prices will rise to match and cancel out the higher wages (see wage price spiral). Simply printing or otherwise causing more money to be produced, in order to pay higher wages, does not make anyone "wealthier" in terms of the share of goods and services that can be purchased with those wages. The living standard only truly rises with increases in technology and productivity (the two are often linked) which increase economic production per capita.
One can infer roughly how Comcast really views their customers by observing their ads (i.e. the customer IS the turtle: slow, ignorant, stupid and docile).
That will change as soon as the Unions get their new "card check" rules through the Congress. You may find yourself in a union as a condition of your employment, whether you like it or not.
Obama's smarter than you. He gets taxpayers to foot the bill.
And the bully "taxes" your lunch money. Does that mean that he is smarter than you too?
I believe they are the number one or two US defense contractor
Yes, but remember that in this case they are basically second out of only two manufacturers of US military aircraft (i.e. they are in last place). The other being, of course, the Lockheed Martin corporation which has also won most of the recent military contracts including the F-22 raptor, F-35 joint-strike fighter, and even the Orion space vehicle for NASAs next generation manned space exploration program. The military aviation division of Boeing has been striking out a lot lately and if not for the semi-successful civil aviation division Boeing would be in huge trouble right now.
Is she the same type of person who plugs one hundred things into an electric outlet and then wonders why the power just went off and what a fuse is? Maybe she should cut back on her plugin use or at least get rid off those which have overlapping features? I don't see how the fact that some people are ignorant in any way discredits the plug in concept. Is there a huge under served market out there for people who use multiple social networks yet are too ignorant to manage plugins in their browser? I doubt it, but RockMelt seems intent to find out.
Another thing to consider is this: If a browser can aggregate or otherwise integrate content from social networks then why would you actually need to go to the website of the social network (i.e. Facebook or Twitter)? It seems to me that it is not in the best interests of companies like Facebook to allow third party aggregators to automate and "rebrand" or hijack their services. Why would Facebook want others to become the "gatekeepers" to their content and services as middle men? An instructive lesson from the earlier days of the Internet are the aggregator IM clients which allowed users of different IM networks to communicate; in effect they bypassed the clients of those respective networks and became a sort of "over-network". What resulted was a war in which AOL, Yahoo, and others constantly tweaked their protocols to break the aggregator programs who then patched their programs in an ever escalating technical arms race until everyone basically moved on and the business interests figured out that IM was never going to get "monetized" and pulled or scaled back their commitments.
which brings me back to my initial point: How are social network aggregators, who are actively opposed by the social networks themselves, ever going to monetize this? The users of these networks hate ads and are notoriously fickle; expecting to get everything for free and switching to the "next cool thing" at the drop of hat. I stand by my original opinion that RockMelt is drilling a dry well with a "me too" web browser that integrates social networking (especially since Facebook and others will fight tooth and nail to prevent third party aggregators). Perhaps they intend to lose money on each sale, but make it up on volume? Right.
The sharks always eat the minnows. I doubt that he will lose any of his own money if...when...the venture goes under. It wouldn't be the first time that a small boutique IT firm was setup for little apparent reason other than to extract the initial equity put in by less savvy junior partners or investors.
Who are the people proposing this and do they not understand the "plug-in" concept as demonstrated in most browsers, but especially well in Firefox? Firefox offers such extensive addon customization that one wonders what more could possibly be done with a new browser rather than simply writing an addon? Why should strong social network integration be "built in" to the browser anyway? That is what addons are for. This sounds like the sort of idea that a business person, who had little or no knowledge of software engineering, would propose. What is surprising is that someone like Marc would fall for it. As for the investors in this startup, well, "the fools and their money will soon be parted company"; perhaps that is what Marc intends to do from the start, separate foolish investors from their money.
How many times must Battlestar Galactica be rebooted before the powers that be figure out that the money would be better spent on new efforts in the science fiction genera? Personally I have very high hopes for the Ridley Scott rendition of Forever War ; which if done right could be a really useful commentary on current world events while at the same time presenting an interesting, intelligent, and entertaining piece of science fiction. I also wouldn't mind seeing another Dune series of films except remade with a budget worthy of the Dune series (The SciFi series gets an 'A' for effort, but the lack of sufficient budget showed and it hurt the quality of the final result). Perhaps, Peter Jackson will consider that for his next project when he is done with the Hobbit. Personally, I prefer a more gritty and realistic science fiction experience with more grit and less glamor (think Firefly not Wall-e). Unfortunately, the people with the money are more interested in producing "wholesome family entertainment" than realistic science fiction so the best stuff will probably remain mostly relegated to books instead. Perhaps that is a better fate than seeing another classic of science fiction butchered by Hollywood for the McMasses.
Of course, I imagine most cust serv reps just tell you what you want to hear while you are on the phone with them.
Just smile and say "yes", its better that way.
I heard their parliament is so afraid of ninjas they banned samurai swords in an effort to prevent a ninja-takeover of London.
Hmmm, ninjas running things instead of parliament eh? Might actually be an improvement.
Microsoft would be miffed to have their B2B cost revealed to be a tiny tiny fraction of what they gut consumers for.
Except that almost nobody purchases Windows separately at full retail box price; They get it bundled with their new computer purchase instead. If the laptop was purchased at a retail outlet and not directly from the manufacturer then the consumer may never see an itemized list of components and their respective prices. So does it really matter if consumers find out how much Lenovo pays Microsoft for Windows? Perhaps it would if they offered the same laptops with a Linux variant installed, but does Lenovo even offer that from the factory? I think the answer must be "no" or else why wouldn't our intrepid dutchman have simply bought the Linux version instead?
Give me a break. What conclusion would you draw from reading the article if you were a company hiring manager? Hmmm, lets think about this; you could hire a foreign student who graduated from the same university except he costs less (because of taxes) OR you could hire the more expensive American. If you were the company hiring manager which candidate would you chose, all other things being equal (remember that they graduated from the same university)? An article doesn't have to come right out and say, "don't hire Americans, they're expensive" in order for that to be the take away message for readers.
the morons in congress who make it the way it is?
It is only going to get worse for the American worker as the Dems grasp the tax throttle and accelerate our economy into a new world of pain for the ordinary working American. If the Dems would re-read the chapter in their undergraduate econ textbooks on taxes than they would realize that the incidence of many taxes falls heavily upon the middle class in the form of lower wages, higher prices, and greater difficulty in finding and keeping stable jobs. Margaret Thatcher put it best when she said, "Eventually, you run out of other people's money". What we are seeing today in America is the final death of personal responsibility; its Nanny State 2.0 except that we have already seen this film and I for one didn't care for the ending.
Why not just move the planet itself? It might be possible given enough artificially engineered orbital encounters with large enough asteroids over thousands of years to gradually shift the orbit of the earth outwards to stay within the expanding habitable zone.