"Such a view demonstrates Mr. Paul's ignorance of the way our government works."
Really? I'd say he is putting down his initial demands, and he may negotiate back from them (and in fact, it might not even be him negotiating at the end, but other Republicans saying "cutting the whole department is stupid, but I'm suggesting we just cut 50% of it").
For one thing, many of these are publicly traded companies.
More importantly, what can corporations really control?
Could Microsoft "control" you into buying Zune?
Was it Apple's "control" of the global capitalist infrastructure that made the iPhone popular, or did they just meet the needs of their customers?
At the end of the day, customers control these companies more than anything else.
Certainly organized special interest groups of all kinds (AARP, NRA, AFL-CIO, etc.) do exert an influence on government, and I'd argue that most attempts to "regulate" industry are captured by incumbents to make it easier for them by making it harder for new entrants in the markets. This also applies to campaign finance "reform".
But at the end of the day, if you don't have a product or service that customers want to buy, your company is dead, regardless of how much of the global capitalist infrastructure it controls.
"student loan debt is nondischargeable in bankruptcy unless the debtor can meet a very high burden of proving hardship."
Which is stupid - why should student loan debt be different than any other debt in bankruptcy?
I suspect the reason this is true is to allow for affordable government-backed student loans for art history majors - i.e. people likely to not make much after graduating, and trying to get out of their loans.
If student debt was a typical unsecured debt in bankruptcy, and the government did not back the loan, lenders would be more careful about which students they lend to. Are they capable of making it through college? Will their major allow them to make enough money to pay off the loan?
"Longer living people probably won't increase demand for teachers."
What do you mean? If you live longer and work, you will need to learn new skills. There might be a static demand for teachers of the young, but educators/retrainers of the old (think CCIE, etc.) will be required.
"I had a high school physics teacher who simply could not properly explain modern physics to us because he became a teacher before these topics were widespread."
And without the teacher's union contract, he'd be fired if I were the principal!
Ron Paul says: "And why should we have this Department of Agriculture, just to subsidize farmers? You take money from the taxpayers; you subsidize farmers; then, the taxpayers pay for higher prices in the grocery store."
"I suspect that there will be a HUGE spread of inequality between the old and the young."
There already is. Those with 30 years of work experience earn more than three times what those with 10 years of work experience do.
This doesn't count the massive subsidization of old by young through government pensions (Social Security Retirement in the US) and old age medical care (Medicare in the US).
"Young people will be stuck waiting for their turn to be a teacher or urban planner or whatever."
This is crazy talk. If people continue to live productive lives, they will continue to consume, providing demand for additional jobs to service that consumption which would otherwise be lost if they died.
This assumes low levels of labor regulation however. The high levels labor regulation in the EU causes massive youth unemployment (even of college educated youth), and the minimum wage causes high youth unemployment of the lesser educated in the US as well.
Some of them may have had their income taken by the government (which they democratically elected), who then provided TARP bailouts to banks.
TARP paybacks are pretty much done for the largest banks, and only a few small ones have not paid back. Because of the structure of the deal, the Federal government has made a $10 billion profit on TARP to date, and will likely make more.
Much of the direct losses due to bad mortgages were paid by the equity holders of the banks and funds that invested in MBS.
I'll admit that a lot of questionable mortgages were purchased by Fannie/Freddie, and it is unclear what the responsibility of the Federal government will be.
For US homeowners who mistakenly took out too high a mortgage, through HAMP and other programs, more than 11.5 million homeowners have refinanced their mortgages since April 2009, costing the mortgage holders over $20 billion per year.
I was watching an interview with a sociology major last night who was at Occupy LA.
I feel very sorry for her. Her college lead her down the primrose path of "major in whatever feels right for you", and on top of whatever savings her parents had, she likely had government-guaranteed loans for a major that will unlikely allow her to ever pay them off!
Tell your friend that the financial system suffers from a detestable lack of transparency about the risks to investors, and exactly how much the people in the industry take for themselves.
But who lets financial companies take these rewards? The people who are paying them for their services.
For example, Apple paid Morgan Stanley to underwrite their IPO. No doubt it was a lot of money. No one forced Apple to pay them, but obviously Apple benefitted greatly from their IPO and wanted someone who could stand behind it. Apple could have issued shares themselves, but they felt they did not have the expertise, investor relationship, and SEC regulatory experience to do it, plus the underwriter guarantees a minimum return on the IPO (some IPOs flop in the secondary market).
I suspect with the Apple IPO, the SEC regulatory experience was probably key. There are so many hundreds of thousands of pages of regulatory laws you have to jump through for a public company, it is impossible for anybody but a specialist to navigate it.
I hate the expression "we're all one big family [at this company]". It is a lie. The company is just another marketplace.
One of my best bosses told me "keep your resume on the street. You should know how much you are worth. If someone offers you a lot more money, please give me a chance to match it."
We exist in a market environment. Companies will lay you off at any point without thinking about your situation. Creative destruction is going on all around us.
Two weeks notice is a reasonable thing, but even that is not a hard and fast rule depending on the situation. No one owns you, you own you.
The networks that support the iPhone can barely deal with the IP traffic bandwidth of 3G radio access. They will need more cells and more IP networking connectivity on the ground before they can deal with 4G radio access.
There are 150,000 2G cell sites in the US that only have T1 ground backhaul (1.5 Mbps). To actually accommodate 3G, they need to be brought up 10 Mbps to 50 Mbps (frac or whole DS3). 4G cells need 40-80 Mbps backhaul (multiple DS3s or other technology).
While Internet access is cheap, local loop is still expensive, and cell sites often need very long local loops.
Whenever you have a monitoring or backup solution, it must be regularly tested to ensure a responsive psychology (as well as proper device operation).
They should have had 1 or 2 fake funny trades per month, and if the people who got the alert messages didn't respond, they should have been punished or fired.
"Anyone who falls off their bike hard enough to make their helmet use worthwhile will probably become injured in some other way as well, as their whole body is getting thrown onto the pavement. They might get a broken bone or two"
I fell off my bike, broke my arm, and my helmet had a huge dent in the front - that would have been a huge dent in my skull without the helmet.
"But the representative's claim that not raising the minimum wage is favored by science or the facts is nonsense. It's wishful thinking that keeping wages down results in more jobs."
If you bothered to read wikipedia you would find out that "A 2000 survey by Dan Fuller and Doris Geide-Stevenson reports that of a sample of 308 American Economic Association economists, 45.6% fully agreed with the statement, "a minimum wage increases unemployment among young and unskilled workers", 27.9% agreed with provisos, and 26.5% disagreed."
US Federal minimum wage was $5.15 in 2006, and went up to $7.25 today. You tell me why my Jack-in-the-Box has replaced a worker or two per shift with an ATM-like ordering machine.
We have lots of things driving unemployment in the US, but I feel for young, low-skilled workers, the minimum wage is keeping many of them out of the workplace where they could be learning real-world jobs skills.
"OMG! A totalitarian bill going through the Senate...Folks, there are tradeoffs."
Totalitarian governments kill millions of people (USSR, China, Germany, etc.)
Terrorists so far only seem to be able to kill a few thousand at a pop...
Put me down for prefers missing the occasional terrorist over totalitarian government.
Now if the government was more open and actually publicized the fact that terrorists were planning on hijacking planes as missiles (which we knew years before), it is possible 9/11 may have only lead to a few hundred deaths, if that. Instead, we got security through obscurity...
My recommendation is to save your image data in uncompressed or JPEG-2000 format and audio data in uncompressed PCM format on LTO-5 data tape in a controlled temperature environment (that is what we are doing in Hollywood).
Archivists generally agree that magnetic tape, in a well-controlled environment, is good for 20-40 years storage if not more.
But recognize that good digital archiving involves eventual migration from old media to new media.
"In some alternate reality were NAFTA was never passed, offshoring doesn't exist,"
Oh yeah, like NAFTA replaces a college educated computer science major with some guy in Mexico who can't speak English and only has a 6th grade education.
I'll agree that if you laze around and only get a HS degree or less, you're screwed because there are two billion people in Asia finally freed from communism or democratic socialism who are going to eat up your lazy butt...and that doesn't even count the robots who can do your job but never get tired and don't need health benefits.
"and the CEO of Wal-Mart doesn't make more in a month than the average Wal-Mart employee does in her entire lifetime?"
The lesson there is to get an MBA and become a CEO. That is the market sending you a message.
"A majority of the protesters are college educated but can't find the mythical good paying jobs you speak of."
Are a majority of the protesters graduates with degrees in computer science, electrical engineering, biomedical engineering, law, medicine, etc.?
Or are they english majors, political science majors, art history majors, women studies majors?
A college degree will not get you a job any more. Only the right college degree. I would 100% support them protesting against their university for letting them blow their money on useless degrees...
They'd be a heck of a lot better off at home working on a CCIE or PMP than blowing their time protesting though.
and a goal of getting Obama to acknowledge the wealth gap and appointing a commission to recommend actions for dealing with it.
How about this way of dealing with the wealth gap: study hard, get good grades in school, don't join a gang or commit crime, graduate, go to college for a major that makes money (like engineering), graduate from that, then go get a good paying job.
Dropping out of high school, cutting class, taking too many drugs/alcohol, or spending your time protesting when you should be getting a real education or a job won't help you "deal with the wealth gap"...
"the middle east and spain and other areas of the world are full of highly educated, highly trained youth with no jobs and no money. they are trying to immigrate, alot of them cant. they just sit there. no work experience, no opportunity, no nothing."
Indeed, labor market regulations in those countries make it challenging for employers to hire young skilled workers. If they hire you on, they are pretty much stuck with you (and your huge social welfare tax contributions) since you are now pretty much unable to be fired. So employers try to hold on to known good older workers, and when they do hire young people, they hire people they know well (kids of friends, etc.) which often turn out to be people in the same socio-economic-racial-religious class.
In the US, our main labor regulations are the inability of employers to hire immigrant labor (legally), and the minimum wage. This is mainly a problem for unskilled young citizen workers, as most skilled young workers earn a market wage way above the local minimum wage. Illegal immigrants to the US are already in the informal sector, so many of them (about half) earn under the minimum wage in inefficient, informal work.
Most US minimum wage workers begin earning more than the minimum wage after a few years of working after getting "real world job" skills and proving themselves. Those whose market wage would be below the minimum wage stay unemployed, and never get the chance to rise above the minimum wage.
"Meanwhile the Chinese are building new coal plants.."
And China is building 24 new nuclear power plants to raise its nuclear power output from 10.8 GWe to 40 GWe by 2015 and then may go as high as 80 GWe nuclear by 2020.
Slashdot Mirror
"Such a view demonstrates Mr. Paul's ignorance of the way our government works."
Really? I'd say he is putting down his initial demands, and he may negotiate back from them (and in fact, it might not even be him negotiating at the end, but other Republicans saying "cutting the whole department is stupid, but I'm suggesting we just cut 50% of it").
For one thing, many of these are publicly traded companies.
More importantly, what can corporations really control?
Could Microsoft "control" you into buying Zune?
Was it Apple's "control" of the global capitalist infrastructure that made the iPhone popular, or did they just meet the needs of their customers?
At the end of the day, customers control these companies more than anything else.
Certainly organized special interest groups of all kinds (AARP, NRA, AFL-CIO, etc.) do exert an influence on government, and I'd argue that most attempts to "regulate" industry are captured by incumbents to make it easier for them by making it harder for new entrants in the markets. This also applies to campaign finance "reform".
But at the end of the day, if you don't have a product or service that customers want to buy, your company is dead, regardless of how much of the global capitalist infrastructure it controls.
"student loan debt is nondischargeable in bankruptcy unless the debtor can meet a very high burden of proving hardship."
Which is stupid - why should student loan debt be different than any other debt in bankruptcy?
I suspect the reason this is true is to allow for affordable government-backed student loans for art history majors - i.e. people likely to not make much after graduating, and trying to get out of their loans.
If student debt was a typical unsecured debt in bankruptcy, and the government did not back the loan, lenders would be more careful about which students they lend to. Are they capable of making it through college? Will their major allow them to make enough money to pay off the loan?
"Longer living people probably won't increase demand for teachers."
What do you mean? If you live longer and work, you will need to learn new skills. There might be a static demand for teachers of the young, but educators/retrainers of the old (think CCIE, etc.) will be required.
"I had a high school physics teacher who simply could not properly explain modern physics to us because he became a teacher before these topics were widespread."
And without the teacher's union contract, he'd be fired if I were the principal!
Ron Paul says: "And why should we have this Department of Agriculture, just to subsidize farmers? You take money from the taxpayers; you subsidize farmers; then, the taxpayers pay for higher prices in the grocery store."
"I suspect that there will be a HUGE spread of inequality between the old and the young."
There already is. Those with 30 years of work experience earn more than three times what those with 10 years of work experience do.
This doesn't count the massive subsidization of old by young through government pensions (Social Security Retirement in the US) and old age medical care (Medicare in the US).
"Young people will be stuck waiting for their turn to be a teacher or urban planner or whatever."
This is crazy talk. If people continue to live productive lives, they will continue to consume, providing demand for additional jobs to service that consumption which would otherwise be lost if they died.
This assumes low levels of labor regulation however. The high levels labor regulation in the EU causes massive youth unemployment (even of college educated youth), and the minimum wage causes high youth unemployment of the lesser educated in the US as well.
These protestors want their money back.
Um, the protestors gave money? To whom?
Some of them may have had their income taken by the government (which they democratically elected), who then provided TARP bailouts to banks.
TARP paybacks are pretty much done for the largest banks, and only a few small ones have not paid back. Because of the structure of the deal, the Federal government has made a $10 billion profit on TARP to date, and will likely make more.
Much of the direct losses due to bad mortgages were paid by the equity holders of the banks and funds that invested in MBS.
I'll admit that a lot of questionable mortgages were purchased by Fannie/Freddie, and it is unclear what the responsibility of the Federal government will be.
For US homeowners who mistakenly took out too high a mortgage, through HAMP and other programs, more than 11.5 million homeowners have refinanced their mortgages since April 2009, costing the mortgage holders over $20 billion per year.
I was watching an interview with a sociology major last night who was at Occupy LA.
I feel very sorry for her. Her college lead her down the primrose path of "major in whatever feels right for you", and on top of whatever savings her parents had, she likely had government-guaranteed loans for a major that will unlikely allow her to ever pay them off!
Tell your friend that the financial system suffers from a detestable lack of transparency about the risks to investors, and exactly how much the people in the industry take for themselves.
But who lets financial companies take these rewards? The people who are paying them for their services.
For example, Apple paid Morgan Stanley to underwrite their IPO. No doubt it was a lot of money. No one forced Apple to pay them, but obviously Apple benefitted greatly from their IPO and wanted someone who could stand behind it. Apple could have issued shares themselves, but they felt they did not have the expertise, investor relationship, and SEC regulatory experience to do it, plus the underwriter guarantees a minimum return on the IPO (some IPOs flop in the secondary market).
I suspect with the Apple IPO, the SEC regulatory experience was probably key. There are so many hundreds of thousands of pages of regulatory laws you have to jump through for a public company, it is impossible for anybody but a specialist to navigate it.
I hate the expression "we're all one big family [at this company]". It is a lie. The company is just another marketplace.
One of my best bosses told me "keep your resume on the street. You should know how much you are worth. If someone offers you a lot more money, please give me a chance to match it."
We exist in a market environment. Companies will lay you off at any point without thinking about your situation. Creative destruction is going on all around us.
Two weeks notice is a reasonable thing, but even that is not a hard and fast rule depending on the situation. No one owns you, you own you.
The networks that support the iPhone can barely deal with the IP traffic bandwidth of 3G radio access. They will need more cells and more IP networking connectivity on the ground before they can deal with 4G radio access.
There are 150,000 2G cell sites in the US that only have T1 ground backhaul (1.5 Mbps). To actually accommodate 3G, they need to be brought up 10 Mbps to 50 Mbps (frac or whole DS3). 4G cells need 40-80 Mbps backhaul (multiple DS3s or other technology).
While Internet access is cheap, local loop is still expensive, and cell sites often need very long local loops.
Trenching and the regulatory / zoning hurdles involved with such are a major cost for US broadband deployments.
Whenever you have a monitoring or backup solution, it must be regularly tested to ensure a responsive psychology (as well as proper device operation).
They should have had 1 or 2 fake funny trades per month, and if the people who got the alert messages didn't respond, they should have been punished or fired.
"Anyone who falls off their bike hard enough to make their helmet use worthwhile will probably become injured in some other way as well, as their whole body is getting thrown onto the pavement. They might get a broken bone or two"
I fell off my bike, broke my arm, and my helmet had a huge dent in the front - that would have been a huge dent in my skull without the helmet.
"But the representative's claim that not raising the minimum wage is favored by science or the facts is nonsense. It's wishful thinking that keeping wages down results in more jobs."
If you bothered to read wikipedia you would find out that "A 2000 survey by Dan Fuller and Doris Geide-Stevenson reports that of a sample of 308 American Economic Association economists, 45.6% fully agreed with the statement, "a minimum wage increases unemployment among young and unskilled workers", 27.9% agreed with provisos, and 26.5% disagreed."
US Federal minimum wage was $5.15 in 2006, and went up to $7.25 today. You tell me why my Jack-in-the-Box has replaced a worker or two per shift with an ATM-like ordering machine.
We have lots of things driving unemployment in the US, but I feel for young, low-skilled workers, the minimum wage is keeping many of them out of the workplace where they could be learning real-world jobs skills.
"OMG! A totalitarian bill going through the Senate...Folks, there are tradeoffs."
Totalitarian governments kill millions of people (USSR, China, Germany, etc.)
Terrorists so far only seem to be able to kill a few thousand at a pop...
Put me down for prefers missing the occasional terrorist over totalitarian government.
Now if the government was more open and actually publicized the fact that terrorists were planning on hijacking planes as missiles (which we knew years before), it is possible 9/11 may have only lead to a few hundred deaths, if that. Instead, we got security through obscurity...
My recommendation is to save your image data in uncompressed or JPEG-2000 format and audio data in uncompressed PCM format on LTO-5 data tape in a controlled temperature environment (that is what we are doing in Hollywood).
Archivists generally agree that magnetic tape, in a well-controlled environment, is good for 20-40 years storage if not more.
But recognize that good digital archiving involves eventual migration from old media to new media.
So can the Kindle Fire do full-res video at H.264 Main Profile?
"In some alternate reality were NAFTA was never passed, offshoring doesn't exist,"
Oh yeah, like NAFTA replaces a college educated computer science major with some guy in Mexico who can't speak English and only has a 6th grade education.
I'll agree that if you laze around and only get a HS degree or less, you're screwed because there are two billion people in Asia finally freed from communism or democratic socialism who are going to eat up your lazy butt...and that doesn't even count the robots who can do your job but never get tired and don't need health benefits.
"and the CEO of Wal-Mart doesn't make more in a month than the average Wal-Mart employee does in her entire lifetime?"
The lesson there is to get an MBA and become a CEO. That is the market sending you a message.
"A majority of the protesters are college educated but can't find the mythical good paying jobs you speak of."
Are a majority of the protesters graduates with degrees in computer science, electrical engineering, biomedical engineering, law, medicine, etc.?
Or are they english majors, political science majors, art history majors, women studies majors?
A college degree will not get you a job any more. Only the right college degree. I would 100% support them protesting against their university for letting them blow their money on useless degrees...
They'd be a heck of a lot better off at home working on a CCIE or PMP than blowing their time protesting though.
"Freedom of speech must be correlated to freedom of press and privacy."
Privacy is inversely related to press freedom. There are many countries where privacy and slander laws are used as weapons against the press.
"All around the country, police forces are being cut."
Total local, state, and federal spending on policing per year has risen from $50 billion in 1990 to over $300 billion today (source).
Do we really need over 1 million full-time police in the US?
and a goal of getting Obama to acknowledge the wealth gap and appointing a commission to recommend actions for dealing with it.
How about this way of dealing with the wealth gap: study hard, get good grades in school, don't join a gang or commit crime, graduate, go to college for a major that makes money (like engineering), graduate from that, then go get a good paying job.
Dropping out of high school, cutting class, taking too many drugs/alcohol, or spending your time protesting when you should be getting a real education or a job won't help you "deal with the wealth gap"...
"the middle east and spain and other areas of the world are full of highly educated, highly trained youth with no jobs and no money. they are trying to immigrate, alot of them cant. they just sit there. no work experience, no opportunity, no nothing."
Indeed, labor market regulations in those countries make it challenging for employers to hire young skilled workers. If they hire you on, they are pretty much stuck with you (and your huge social welfare tax contributions) since you are now pretty much unable to be fired. So employers try to hold on to known good older workers, and when they do hire young people, they hire people they know well (kids of friends, etc.) which often turn out to be people in the same socio-economic-racial-religious class.
In the US, our main labor regulations are the inability of employers to hire immigrant labor (legally), and the minimum wage. This is mainly a problem for unskilled young citizen workers, as most skilled young workers earn a market wage way above the local minimum wage. Illegal immigrants to the US are already in the informal sector, so many of them (about half) earn under the minimum wage in inefficient, informal work.
Most US minimum wage workers begin earning more than the minimum wage after a few years of working after getting "real world job" skills and proving themselves. Those whose market wage would be below the minimum wage stay unemployed, and never get the chance to rise above the minimum wage.
"Meanwhile the Chinese are building new coal plants.."
And China is building 24 new nuclear power plants to raise its nuclear power output from 10.8 GWe to 40 GWe by 2015 and then may go as high as 80 GWe nuclear by 2020.