First, votes don't matter at all. You can just buy the votes with a few lies and television advertising. So there is no difference between the candidates, not at this level anyways.
Second, welfare entitlements must increase as our society grows more efficient. If people have no money, they cannot spend anything, and the economy stops.
Third, social security entitlements must increase as our society grows older.
Fourth, the remaining money isn't necessarily being spend on "delivering" the entitlements.
Example : Healthcare has grown massively cheaper to deliver, massively. Healthcare has increased in price because of the rents extracted from in by insurance companies and hospital billing.
The problem is that rent extraction by financial institutions, lobbyists, contractors, etc. has grown more efficient as well.
I've never understood how conservatives can be so stupid to buy this "people voting themselves blah" bullshit when people are so trivially manipulated and people in other countries get so vastly much more.
Any good spending would come back soon enough after real cuts because actually you would notice if anything important got cut. If the military gets cut, you won't notice anything though.
Science needs government money. We scientists are however perfectly capable of taking jobs outside academia though, well most PhDs do that anyways. If you slash it all, I'll just find other work being paid twice as much in the private sector, heck I'll need to do that eventually anyways just to be able to afford a house and live in the same city as a partner I like. All the professors will keep their jobs and keep training new graduate students of course. So the young scientist supply will remain alive. I suppose quality will suffer if PhDs spend more time teaching and less doing lab work, but that's okay for a few years. We'd squeeze more money from corporate grants too obviously.
Worst case senario : All the good research and PhDs are done at Ivies and abroad, mostly Europe. We'd notice that fast. We could fix that quickly by spending state, federal, or corporate money, whoever cared most about all the smart people starting their careers abroad.
Summery : Academia cannot suffer any lasting damage here because our actual product is highly educated people, i.e. PhDs. So (1) most PhDs must quit academia anyways and (2) someone will eventually be willing to pay for training them. Sequestration is a threat to the lobbyists though because an across the board cut means they cannot shield all the useless chap payments to their clients. And if real crap gets cut it might not come back ever.
Yes, almost. There are two "wars on brown people" going on, first the wars in the middle east, and second the war on drugs.
There are many white and black people suffering in the war on drugs too, but fundamentally the people suffering the most are Mexicans, making it really a war on the mexican people. The DEA are evil fucks, but they haven't just rounded up either whites or blacks randomly, executed them, and told congress they killed a bunch of drug dealers. Mexican police do exactly that to Mexicans because we pay them to.
I have not claimed the "war on brown people" is currently being prosecuted for racist reasons because frankly these wars carry on merely as corruption and graft. Really racism would be at least a reason, hey everyone is a little bit racist, but no we cannot blame the racist wingnuts. It's simply the military and police contractors hiring lobbyists to rob us blind.
As a historical note, one should recall that marijuana was initially outlawed done for anti-mexican racist reasons, but that's just history and not my reasoning.
Just fyi, the scientist whose budgets are being cut agree with you. We cannot adequately fund science, education, and social services while gratuitously financing gratuitous military spending and asinine wars on drugs, brown people, etc.
We should first cut it all by 10% per year for a few years, make all those federal contractors show declining profits despite their lobbyists efforts. We should then evaluate which government financed industries tightened their belts but still did the work and which just pocketed the same amount while cutting real work. Any industries in the second category should continue getting cut.
These aren't real scientists asking that government money stick around, but lobbyists for companies that feed upon science funding. Scientists love more government money of course, but many scientists understand that far must be cut, especially in military spending.
Sequestration merely provides an opportunity to re-evaluate what is important. Our question should be : Do we decide "important" by consulting lobbyists or by looking at the work that gets done.
According to the DOJ’s testimony, if you express political views that the government doesn’t like, at any point in your life, that political speech act can and will be used to justify making “an example” out of you once the government thinks it can pin you with a crime.
According to the DOJâ(TM)s testimony, if you express political views that the government doesnâ(TM)t like, at any point in your life, that political speech act can and will be used to justify making âoean exampleâ out of you once the government thinks it can pin you with a crime.
Americans believe whatever they're told to believe because there is no "validation" process for good ideas that interacts with either the real world or the intelligentsia. In essence, America's two party political systems means that industry groups can prevent important positions from gaining any traction.
In Germany, the proportional system means that small parties can form around important ideas and elect at least a few people. These seats represent lost jobs for major political parties, who then must consider whether they should compromise their corporatist position with the small party. If they decide no, people still notice the small party and take the ideas more seriously, leading to larger loses.
Proportional representation works well for common sense stuff like the environment, but harder problems like reforming the corrupt financial industry seemingly elude it, ala Goldman Sacks robbing Europe blind over Greece.
Isn't #3 trivial? Just route all open wifi connections through Tor, thus routing all liability elsewhere.
Isn't #2 technically impossible? Although traffic shaping and Tor help enormously.
Imho #1 looks like your biggest problem because the solution, while easy, requires hardware. It's lovely sharing resources which you must over purchase, like bandwidth. It's less wonderful spending $40 on a second router.
In fact, I'll one-up you : Obama cannot fire Heymann because his appointment isn't political. He's just an ordinary federal employee. Ortiz petition scored 40k partially because Kos clarified that Obama can fire her.
We aren't really trying to get him fired though, not really. We want to ruin his political ambitions, which incidentally were why he pursued Aaron and James until they both committed suicide.
I've heard that Switzerland has great immigration laws : Hire anyone for anything you want, so long as you're paying them more than the Swiss average for that job. Very easy criteria, so long as you actually want the person more than anyone else you interviewed.
It's a poorly written petition. And nobody who sees only the petition understands that Heymann also drove another probably innocent young hacker to his death, way back when Heymann wanted to be the first ro prosecute a juvenile under the CFAA.
Agreed, I stopped spamming people with that one after it reached the 25k, which Heymann's petition hasn't reached yet.
After her bullshit self applause today however I'm all in favor of pushing her petition over 100k before they respond.
"I feel comfortable and I support the process that was done here..." - Carmen Ortiz, commenting on the aftermath to the Swartz case.
"Ortizâ(TM)s statement is a template for all that is awful in what we as a political culture have become. And it pushes me â" me, the most conventional, wanting-to-believe-in-all-things-patriotic, former teenage Republican from the home of Little League baseball â" to a place far more radical than I ever want to be." - Lessig
I'd agree we should repeal the CFAA entirely, ditto PATRIOT Act, etc.
Ideally, one should halt plea bargains entirely as well though, civilized countries forbid that barbaric practice. It's plea bargains that create the need for these insane laws with which prosecutors beat defendants into guilty pleas.
I doubt we'll correct these systemic problems though because the prison-industrial-prosecutorial complex has far too effective a lobby.
I suspect me must demonstrate the capacity to derail the profesional lives of overzealous prosecutors and law enforcement before they'll back off enough for us to fix the underlying laws.
You should sign the petition to fire both Stephen Heymann and Carmen Ortiz of course, especially the one for Heymann who previously drove another accused hacker to suicide.
We must take this well beyond simply firing these two abusive prosecutors though. We should obviously prevent them from ever winning any primary elections or being appointed for other political posts, especially judgeships.
If they lose their jobs, we should then target any private sector law firms that hire them for corporate law. You should not harass said law firms directly of course, but attempting to raise a stink with their clients might work.
If these two powerful prosecutors wind up as lowly defense attorneys, even highly paid ones, then we'll basically have sent a clear message that abusing the CFAA isn't necessarily such an effective way to make a political career for yourself.
There are numerous other people deserving of the same treatment as well, but at present we've no method of organizing it.
Yes, I'd consider this a fairly good resume for managerial positions : Efficient, check. Benefitted employer, check. Dishonest, check. etc. He should simply continue with his contracting company providing developer services for clients. In fact, it's almost pathological that he chose to sit in an office all day while doing this.
Free doesn't block ads served by the hosting site, only cross site ads. I believe many big newspapers host their own ads, right? Le Monde's ads are likely viewable for that reason.
Any idea if Free is blocking the user tracking sites used by Le Monde? I'm counting 4-5 trackers on lemonde.fr, way less than the NYT's 12-15, but still some revenue.
Slashdot Mirror
No that's not the problem.
First, votes don't matter at all. You can just buy the votes with a few lies and television advertising. So there is no difference between the candidates, not at this level anyways.
Second, welfare entitlements must increase as our society grows more efficient. If people have no money, they cannot spend anything, and the economy stops.
Third, social security entitlements must increase as our society grows older.
Fourth, the remaining money isn't necessarily being spend on "delivering" the entitlements.
Example : Healthcare has grown massively cheaper to deliver, massively. Healthcare has increased in price because of the rents extracted from in by insurance companies and hospital billing.
The problem is that rent extraction by financial institutions, lobbyists, contractors, etc. has grown more efficient as well.
I've never understood how conservatives can be so stupid to buy this "people voting themselves blah" bullshit when people are so trivially manipulated and people in other countries get so vastly much more.
Any good spending would come back soon enough after real cuts because actually you would notice if anything important got cut. If the military gets cut, you won't notice anything though.
Science needs government money. We scientists are however perfectly capable of taking jobs outside academia though, well most PhDs do that anyways. If you slash it all, I'll just find other work being paid twice as much in the private sector, heck I'll need to do that eventually anyways just to be able to afford a house and live in the same city as a partner I like. All the professors will keep their jobs and keep training new graduate students of course. So the young scientist supply will remain alive. I suppose quality will suffer if PhDs spend more time teaching and less doing lab work, but that's okay for a few years. We'd squeeze more money from corporate grants too obviously.
Worst case senario : All the good research and PhDs are done at Ivies and abroad, mostly Europe. We'd notice that fast. We could fix that quickly by spending state, federal, or corporate money, whoever cared most about all the smart people starting their careers abroad.
Summery : Academia cannot suffer any lasting damage here because our actual product is highly educated people, i.e. PhDs. So (1) most PhDs must quit academia anyways and (2) someone will eventually be willing to pay for training them. Sequestration is a threat to the lobbyists though because an across the board cut means they cannot shield all the useless chap payments to their clients. And if real crap gets cut it might not come back ever.
Yes, almost. There are two "wars on brown people" going on, first the wars in the middle east, and second the war on drugs.
There are many white and black people suffering in the war on drugs too, but fundamentally the people suffering the most are Mexicans, making it really a war on the mexican people. The DEA are evil fucks, but they haven't just rounded up either whites or blacks randomly, executed them, and told congress they killed a bunch of drug dealers. Mexican police do exactly that to Mexicans because we pay them to.
I have not claimed the "war on brown people" is currently being prosecuted for racist reasons because frankly these wars carry on merely as corruption and graft. Really racism would be at least a reason, hey everyone is a little bit racist, but no we cannot blame the racist wingnuts. It's simply the military and police contractors hiring lobbyists to rob us blind.
As a historical note, one should recall that marijuana was initially outlawed done for anti-mexican racist reasons, but that's just history and not my reasoning.
Just fyi, the scientist whose budgets are being cut agree with you. We cannot adequately fund science, education, and social services while gratuitously financing gratuitous military spending and asinine wars on drugs, brown people, etc.
We should first cut it all by 10% per year for a few years, make all those federal contractors show declining profits despite their lobbyists efforts. We should then evaluate which government financed industries tightened their belts but still did the work and which just pocketed the same amount while cutting real work. Any industries in the second category should continue getting cut.
Colin Macilwain. Science should be ready to jump off ‘the cliff’. Nature 491, 639 (29 November 2012) doi:10.1038/491639a
These aren't real scientists asking that government money stick around, but lobbyists for companies that feed upon science funding. Scientists love more government money of course, but many scientists understand that far must be cut, especially in military spending.
Sequestration merely provides an opportunity to re-evaluate what is important. Our question should be : Do we decide "important" by consulting lobbyists or by looking at the work that gets done.
It's MIT so they've brains. They probably just called the building to check out the caller's story, realized it was false, and kept him talking.
According to the DOJ’s testimony, if you express political views that the government doesn’t like, at any point in your life, that political speech act can and will be used to justify making “an example” out of you once the government thinks it can pin you with a crime.
According to the DOJâ(TM)s testimony, if you express political views that the government doesnâ(TM)t like, at any point in your life, that political speech act can and will be used to justify making âoean exampleâ out of you once the government thinks it can pin you with a crime.
Americans believe whatever they're told to believe because there is no "validation" process for good ideas that interacts with either the real world or the intelligentsia. In essence, America's two party political systems means that industry groups can prevent important positions from gaining any traction.
In Germany, the proportional system means that small parties can form around important ideas and elect at least a few people. These seats represent lost jobs for major political parties, who then must consider whether they should compromise their corporatist position with the small party. If they decide no, people still notice the small party and take the ideas more seriously, leading to larger loses.
Proportional representation works well for common sense stuff like the environment, but harder problems like reforming the corrupt financial industry seemingly elude it, ala Goldman Sacks robbing Europe blind over Greece.
Isn't #3 trivial? Just route all open wifi connections through Tor, thus routing all liability elsewhere.
Isn't #2 technically impossible? Although traffic shaping and Tor help enormously.
Imho #1 looks like your biggest problem because the solution, while easy, requires hardware. It's lovely sharing resources which you must over purchase, like bandwidth. It's less wonderful spending $40 on a second router.
Are you saving any money by not taking their subsidy though?
Is Airvoice currently the cheapest phone provider in the U.S. loike this suggests?
http://www.prepaidgsm.net/en/usa.php
In fact, I'll one-up you : Obama cannot fire Heymann because his appointment isn't political. He's just an ordinary federal employee. Ortiz petition scored 40k partially because Kos clarified that Obama can fire her.
We aren't really trying to get him fired though, not really. We want to ruin his political ambitions, which incidentally were why he pursued Aaron and James until they both committed suicide.
Interesting that got modded flamebait. I guess people really don't like open wifis! Or maybe someone here knows Stephan Heymann? hmm
MIT has an intentionally open wifi setup, like everyone should.
We're having trouble with the fire Stephen Heymann petition, only like 10k signature out of the needed 25k.
What do people think we should do? Start a second more well written and informative petition perhaps?
"Worldwide, 81 percent of all requests for user data originated in the United States, Twitter said."
Police state much?
Android security software is largely organized by guardianproject.info.
I've heard that Switzerland has great immigration laws : Hire anyone for anything you want, so long as you're paying them more than the Swiss average for that job. Very easy criteria, so long as you actually want the person more than anyone else you interviewed.
I did worse.
Apologies for reposting this, but we really need the 25k signatures on the fire Stephen Heymann petition :
https://petitions.whitehouse.gov/petition/fire-assistant-us-attorney-steve-heymann/RJKSY2nb
Please spam your friends! :P
It's a poorly written petition. And nobody who sees only the petition understands that Heymann also drove another probably innocent young hacker to his death, way back when Heymann wanted to be the first ro prosecute a juvenile under the CFAA.
Anyway this prosecutor seems particularly evil.
Agreed, I stopped spamming people with that one after it reached the 25k, which Heymann's petition hasn't reached yet.
After her bullshit self applause today however I'm all in favor of pushing her petition over 100k before they respond.
"I feel comfortable and I support the process that was done here..." - Carmen Ortiz, commenting on the aftermath to the Swartz case.
"Ortizâ(TM)s statement is a template for all that is awful in what we as a political culture have become. And it pushes me â" me, the most conventional, wanting-to-believe-in-all-things-patriotic, former teenage Republican from the home of Little League baseball â" to a place far more radical than I ever want to be." - Lessig
http://lessig.tumblr.com/post/40845525507/a-time-for-silence
I trust you've all signed the petition to Fire Assistant U.S. Attorney Steve Heymann
I'd agree we should repeal the CFAA entirely, ditto PATRIOT Act, etc.
Ideally, one should halt plea bargains entirely as well though, civilized countries forbid that barbaric practice. It's plea bargains that create the need for these insane laws with which prosecutors beat defendants into guilty pleas.
I doubt we'll correct these systemic problems though because the prison-industrial-prosecutorial complex has far too effective a lobby.
I suspect me must demonstrate the capacity to derail the profesional lives of overzealous prosecutors and law enforcement before they'll back off enough for us to fix the underlying laws.
You should sign the petition to fire both Stephen Heymann and Carmen Ortiz of course, especially the one for Heymann who previously drove another accused hacker to suicide.
We must take this well beyond simply firing these two abusive prosecutors though. We should obviously prevent them from ever winning any primary elections or being appointed for other political posts, especially judgeships.
If they lose their jobs, we should then target any private sector law firms that hire them for corporate law. You should not harass said law firms directly of course, but attempting to raise a stink with their clients might work.
If these two powerful prosecutors wind up as lowly defense attorneys, even highly paid ones, then we'll basically have sent a clear message that abusing the CFAA isn't necessarily such an effective way to make a political career for yourself.
There are numerous other people deserving of the same treatment as well, but at present we've no method of organizing it.
Yes, I'd consider this a fairly good resume for managerial positions : Efficient, check. Benefitted employer, check. Dishonest, check. etc. He should simply continue with his contracting company providing developer services for clients. In fact, it's almost pathological that he chose to sit in an office all day while doing this.
There is good coverage at metafilter.com :
http://www.metafilter.com/123777/Open-access-open-internet-closed-book [metafilter.com]
But seriously, fuck JSTOR.
Ahh, I haven't fully permitted lemonde.fr to load itself, probably some are done through live.lemonde.fr, which I never allowed.
Free doesn't block ads served by the hosting site, only cross site ads. I believe many big newspapers host their own ads, right? Le Monde's ads are likely viewable for that reason.
Any idea if Free is blocking the user tracking sites used by Le Monde? I'm counting 4-5 trackers on lemonde.fr, way less than the NYT's 12-15, but still some revenue.