Instead of H-1B indentured servitude, gilded as it may be, we should fast track such people for citizenship. Any country that can make America's marginal tax rates look good or otherwise sufficiently pisses off their people DESERVES to lose their best and brightest. America has traditionally been the common meeting place of the world's best and brightest and I'd hate to see that change.
But the big corporations that give $megabucks to the Democratic and Republican parties, slightly more to whichever is dominant at the time, really like the H-1B system so I don't expect much to change. The fast-track citizenship idea is from National Review.
Hey Comcast: I switched over to AT&T U-verse for Internet because they were less slow than Comcast and certainly cheaper. I would have switched over to them for TV too but their HDTV image quality is hideous (too bad, they're way cheaper, SDTV works nicely though). C'mon Comcast, if you can't outperform AT&T you just aren't trying. DOCSIS 3 should fix this, though you might want to go ahead and replace your rotting coax with FTTH in case AT&T recovers from their rectal-cranial inversion and quits trying to shove U-verse through their antiquated copper lines (27Mbps for HDTV and Internet for the entire house, WTF?)...
If I lived in Verizon FiOS territory I wouldn't bother prodding you. You're just screwed there.
To say that we can't monitor phone #'s found in a captured jihadi's notebook because one person on the line is in America or merely that their communications pass through America without the approval of unelected judges who appear to give terrorists more privacy rights than YouTube viewers is insane.
What's so onerous about taking the notebook to a secret court and having a judge sign off on the wiretaps? While you may object to the fact that unelected judges can tell other parts of the government that they are breaking the law, our entire legal system is built on the idea that unelected judges interpret the law. Its worth noting that law enforcement and intelligence personnel are not elected either.
What makes civilian judges qualified to rule on military matters? Moreover, they aren't held accountable when America's enemies succeed, the elected branches are. If you think that the law enforcement and intelligence personnel under the President's command are abusing their authority and aren't being held accountable, vote for a different President or even ask your Congressmen to impeach him but understand that not everyone is going to agree with you and many of us will interpret your actions as undermining the Commander-in-Chief in wartime. We tried using the civilian courts to prosecute terrorists and the man who led the prosecution of the 1993 WTC bombers says it's the wrong approach.
Civilian criminal lawyers and judges are tasked with prosecuting crimes after the fact. Intelligence gathering is designed to intercept enemies before they act, before they've broken the law and/or committed acts of war. Civilian courts are the wrong tool for the task at hand, unless you think that losing a few city blocks now and then to terrorism qualifies as acceptable losses. What scares me is that I've talked with people who believe that it is. I'm not looking forward to the Iranian theocracy acquiring nukes.
The Constitution is not a suicide pact. Thomas Jefferson said: "[a] strict observance of the written law is doubtless one of the high duties of a good citizen, but it is not the highest. The laws of necessity, of self-preservation, of saving our country when in danger, are of higher obligation. To lose our country by a scrupulous adherence to the written law, would be to lose the law itself, with life, liberty, property and all those who are enjoying them with us; thus absurdly sacrificing the ends to the means."
Wonder how long it'll take this post to be modded down like my last one. But we all know that the left doesn't censor...
The criminal justice system is woefully inadequate for dealing with military issues, much less with illegal enemy combatants (no uniforms, clear chain of command, prefers to attack civilian targets, etc). To say that we can't monitor phone #'s found in a captured jihadi's notebook because one person on the line is in America or merely that their communications pass through America without the approval of unelected judges who appear to give terrorists more privacy rights than YouTube viewers is insane. The executive branch sets and is held accountable for military policy. If the voters disagree, they can elect a different executive promising a new policy which, sadly in my view, means we'll be swearing in President Obama this January. No such recourse exists for when our unelected robed masters go on a power grab. We're headed for judicial dictatorship if the ACLU has their way.
After vetoing their pay raise, perhaps Jindal thought that fighting a 94-3 vote was a distraction he didn't need? Especially when it's unlikely that teachers are going to cooperate anyhow. Save your anger for the legislators and remember how decentralized government limits the damage any one group of nitwits can cause.
I am sick and tired of the excuses and outright lies from AT&T for their kludgy FTTN U-verse network when Verizon has already proven that you can profitably build a FTTH network in America. But no, AT&T would rather milk their balky copper plant and put off the one-time expense of running fiber like they'll eventually have to do anyhow.
Every time I ask an AT&T droid about that they make wild claims of Verizon having so much trouble building their network, charging $hundreds to rewire your home, etc, etc. All I know is that my grandmother, in the middle of nowhere, can get FiOS and I, in a major university town, am stuck with U-verse.
Yes, Verizon's stock took a hit when they announced FiOS. I used the opportunity to buy shares for my IRA on the cheap. That's worked out well so far.
the insane complexity of the corporate tax system. The Michigan FairTax plan collapses six taxes into the existing sales tax system, raising the sales tax rate from 6% to 9.75%. There's a "prebate" that pays people the equivalent of the tax on basic living expenses so the poor are protected. Right now the tax compliance costs for small businesses are often higher than the taxes themselves. Big businesses are merely annoyed by the complexity since they benefit from the suppression of smaller competitors. Unfortunately Comrade Granholm is more interested in hiking taxes than simplifying anything, which is why so many smart people are fleeing the state.
I still favor the Flat Income Tax at the federal level. At the very least it's too dangerous to switch to a Fair Tax system while the income tax amendment remains on the books.
Worker training is corporate welfare at best. If businesses know that the can fire people who don't work out without getting sued they'll take more risks with hiring, especially as the labor market tightens.
Are you fucking serious? They NSGWP was in no way socialist. They used the term to gain supporters. Was too. Read Liberal Fascism. Just because the socialists who run the history departments don't like the association doesn't mean it isn't true.
U-verse is transcoding from 20Mbps MPEG2 to 6Mbps MPEG4 (give or take), with predictably horrific results. To add insult to injury you can only tune 1 HDTV channel at a time for your entire house! AT&T went with a cheapskate FTTN (Fiber To The Node) network, which uses some variant of DSL to provide a 27Mbps copper pipe from the fiber node down the block to your home that's shared between TV, Internet and VoIP. The Motorola IPTV settop boxes run WinCE.
U-verse Internet is less bad than Comcast (10M/1.5M for $55/mo), though with higher latency due to the ~20ms hit caused by their DSL scheme. I kept that and dropped U-verse TV.
What a brilliant Republican contingency plan! In the (likely) event that the Democrats retake the White House, the trial lawyers who fund the Democratic Party will demand the (military?) enforcement of the patents that the Iranian theocracy is breaking! Absolute genius!
local governments that will allow new companies to run FTTH and to not grant legal monopolies to anyone. You'd have to deal with the feds for wireless communications but not landline.
Yes, AT&T and Comcast have scary amounts of money, but AT&T in particular is run by morons. Could a new competitor with their own FTTH network prosper? I think so. With state and local governments fast-track the paperwork and not demand bribes ("free" access for this and that, "franchise fees", etc)? Well...
Utah has taken a workable approach with their UTopia network. Verizon is building out their FiOS network, fighting various local bureaucrats along the way. FTTH can be done in America. Let's not get distracted by the irrelevant feds.
I liked his answer to question #9. Most of the time the feds should butt out and let states follow the will of their citizens. I can only hope that this philosophy also extends to the federal education department, housing, attempts at federally run universal health care, agriculture, and almost everything else not specifically listed as a federal responsibility in the Constitution.
On Iraq, I can only hope that he reads some of the reports from people over there such as Michael Yon, Michael J. Totten, etc.
Well said. Anyone who tries to challenge the pork barrel tendencies gets run out of town eventually. Gingrich did. Jeff Flake (R-AZ), who takes fighting earmark abuse seriously, got snubbed for an open seat on the House Appropriations Committee by the Republican leadership despite tremendous grassroots support.
Another problem with overcentralized government: it makes expanding the nation difficult. Annexing Mexico would be a neat way of solving much of America's illegal immigration problem (about 1/3rd of Mexico's workforce is already here and there's a substantial American expat community down there), if majorities on both sides of the border voted for it, but it'd be a nightmare to integrate all those people into our top-heavy federal system. Plus inflicting the 1040 and the rest of the federal tax code on 100M+ more people may qualify as cruel and unusual punishment.
Of course, customer owned fiber networks aren't the only way. Having a neutral third party own and manage the dark fiber between colocation points and end-users (and likely the fiber uplinks too) would work. It'd be a nice bit of business for the power companies, for example. Let competing service providers plug their electronics into the fiber. Customer wants to switch providers? No problem, make the change at the colo and plug in a different box at his home.
Some cities, including the People's Republic of Ann Arbor, have upgraded their traffic light networks to fiber optics and put down extra conduit while they were at it. So, building a proper FTTH network wouldn't require (too much) tearing up of streets.
Fighting over last century's copper is a waste of time. Let's focus on making sure the fiber nets are set up correctly, and SOON!
Use a notebook with a real GPU, anything modern from ATI or NVIDIA, and the GPU will take care of much of the decoding more efficiently than the CPU alone can. The new AMD Puma platform (2Q2008) ought to be particularly good about this.
1) Knock down their own share price by announcing ridiculous hostile takeovers of companies that will never agree to it. 2) Buy back Microsoft stock on the (relatively) cheap 3) Profit!
Well, OK, the math isn't all that impressive, but slowly taking the company private through stock buybacks is considerably more sane than most other suggestions of what to do with their cash horde. If you ignore the huge chunks of stock controlled by Gates and a few other early owners it looks more plausible. Effectively going private over time by getting rid of the public stockholders would give Microsoft the ability to take more risks. Paying dividends to employee-owners is a much better model than handing out stock options now that the dot bomb insanity has wound down. (It's late, hopefully that's coherent...)
SP1 was waiting for me this morning. The installation took quite a while but it appears to have worked OK. This is for Vista Home Premium x64 (I needed 4GB+ RAM support). Maybe it'll be a little less unstable now. Vista had me seriously considering giving up video games so I could run Linux on my workstation instead (yes, I know about Cedega/Wine). Come on Epic, where's your UT3 Linux client...
Anyhow, either I just missed the cutoff or Microsoft hasn't really suspended SP1 distribution. I didn't RTFA.
Without public campaign financing, candidates rely on "donations" (read: bribes), tell you they are interested in alternative energy, yet provide oil companies with record profits and state-sponsored corporate welfare.
Or we could cut taxes, close down numerous government departments, replace the lobbyist-designed federal tax code with the Flat Tax, and otherwise reduce the amount of loot for "special interests" to fight over. It'd make life easier for small businesses who don't have K Street lobbyists on retainer to protect them from the federal government too.
Let 'em take all the campaign donations they want, just have full and immediate disclosure on the Internet.
The idea behind tax cuts is that the closer you get to the Laffer curve, the closer you get to maximizing tax revenue while minimizing economic damage. If that means temporarily running deficits, OK. Think about it: who gets a higher return on capital, the small business owners who make up the bulk of the top bracket taxpayers in America, or Congress? Getting tax rates below the curve is assumed to be too unlikely to think about right now. From a moral perspective it would be desirable but I think most of us on the Right would settle for practicality.
The problem is that Congress takes the new tax revenue, spends it, and then spends some more. The President can try to slow it down. Unfortunately this President has shown little to no spending restraint, with the mess caused by a bunch of Saudi trust fund brats who thought they could pick up where the Battle of Vienna left off just adding insult to injury. We had a brief reprieve when Gingrich was Speaker of the House but it's been downhill ever since. I doubt a President McCain or President Hillary combined with a Democrat-dominated Congress is going to make any improvement.
Governments can build dark fiber networks to the home, but let competing service providers plug into those networks. The fiber itself should last for decades and you have to work with governments for right-of-way and other construction issues anyhow. Having one dark fiber network eliminates wasteful duplication. The electronics that plug into those networks evolve rapidly though, so leaving everything else to private industry makes sense. With the fiber in place even a local ISP can get up and running quickly. Here in Ann Arbor the city has all the traffic lights connected with fiber optics and they put in extra conduit while they were at it. That's a good chunk of the work right there.
There's no need for federal involvement though. States and even city governments can do this. Utah has UTOPIA. I'd just assume keep the feds out of the picture.
If you live in Verizon territory where FiOS is available or will be... lucky you. We poor souls in AT&T land need a little help.
Well, if today's trustafarians are stupid enough to do what the Kent State protesters did, it's only a matter of time:
The dispersal process began late in the morning with a police official, riding in a Guard Jeep, approaching the students to read them an order to disperse or face arrest. The protesters pelted the Jeep with rocks, forcing it to retreat. One Guardsman was injured in the attack.
Just before noon, the Guard returned and again ordered the crowd to disperse. When they refused, the Guard used tear gas. Because of wind, the tear gas had little effect in dispersing the crowd, and some began a second rock attack with chants of "Pigs off campus!" The students threw the tear gas canisters back at the National Guardsmen. The only protection the soldiers had were their steel helmets. They had no body armor or face shields, although they had put on gas masks upon first using tear gas.
So says Wikipedia. Pelting armed men with rocks (let alone police, guardsmen, law enforcement in general) is begging for a Darwin Award. The only shame is that some of the students who were hit by the guards return fire were innocent bystanders.
I think that the digestive trouble that correlates with autism spectrum disorders combined with the modern Western diet (American in particular) is helping to amplify autism symptoms. In short: the inside of the intestines is considered to be outside of the body. If intestinal permeability is increased (leaky gut), larger molecules start entering the bloodstream. How bad that is depends on what is being consumed and the genetics of the person in question. The petrochemicals that make up most artificial coloring, flavoring and preservatives do Bad Things and are the likely cause of the rise in ADHD (Lancet published a study about that). Large proteins like gluten and casein (wheat and dairy protein) that are unlikely to fully digest entering the bloodstream will trigger all sorts of immune responses. A high refined sugar (or simply high carb) diet feeds yeasts that will puncture intestinal walls, and broad spectrum antibiotics will kill off competitors to those yeasts. Carbonated beverages are intestinal irritants by definition and are usually loaded with synthetic chemicals as well (says the recovering Diet Coke addict).
Anyhow, a whole foods (versus processed foods) diet free of synthetics often goes a long ways towards reducing autism (and other) symptoms, and it's something we all should be doing anyhow. It takes time but it doesn't cost much, if anything. GFCF (Gluten Free Casein Free) is well worth trying for combating autism and maybe for people with poor digestion in general.
Epigenetics looks like a very interesting topic to study.
One more thing: anyone with an autism spectrum disorder should get their ammonia level checked. It's often high. Calcium butyrate combined with a proper diet will fix this. The medical textbooks still say that hyperammonemia is acute and fatal and never persistent. If you're just fuzzy-headed all the time and can't figure out what's going on it's worth getting the simple blood test, if only to rule it out.
What about those people who just don't want to live in a city?
Then their fuel bills go up, like they've been doing. Which is fine if you have the money. Just don't expect me to sympathize too much.
What bugs me is all the preachy "green" types who whine about any attempt to build housing with more than a few stories. David Owen covered the topic very well here:
Slashdot Mirror
Instead of H-1B indentured servitude, gilded as it may be, we should fast track such people for citizenship. Any country that can make America's marginal tax rates look good or otherwise sufficiently pisses off their people DESERVES to lose their best and brightest. America has traditionally been the common meeting place of the world's best and brightest and I'd hate to see that change.
But the big corporations that give $megabucks to the Democratic and Republican parties, slightly more to whichever is dominant at the time, really like the H-1B system so I don't expect much to change. The fast-track citizenship idea is from National Review.
Hey Comcast: I switched over to AT&T U-verse for Internet because they were less slow than Comcast and certainly cheaper. I would have switched over to them for TV too but their HDTV image quality is hideous (too bad, they're way cheaper, SDTV works nicely though). C'mon Comcast, if you can't outperform AT&T you just aren't trying. DOCSIS 3 should fix this, though you might want to go ahead and replace your rotting coax with FTTH in case AT&T recovers from their rectal-cranial inversion and quits trying to shove U-verse through their antiquated copper lines (27Mbps for HDTV and Internet for the entire house, WTF?)...
If I lived in Verizon FiOS territory I wouldn't bother prodding you. You're just screwed there.
To say that we can't monitor phone #'s found in a captured jihadi's notebook because one person on the line is in America or merely that their communications pass through America without the approval of unelected judges who appear to give terrorists more privacy rights than YouTube viewers is insane.
What's so onerous about taking the notebook to a secret court and having a judge sign off on the wiretaps? While you may object to the fact that unelected judges can tell other parts of the government that they are breaking the law, our entire legal system is built on the idea that unelected judges interpret the law. Its worth noting that law enforcement and intelligence personnel are not elected either.
What makes civilian judges qualified to rule on military matters? Moreover, they aren't held accountable when America's enemies succeed, the elected branches are. If you think that the law enforcement and intelligence personnel under the President's command are abusing their authority and aren't being held accountable, vote for a different President or even ask your Congressmen to impeach him but understand that not everyone is going to agree with you and many of us will interpret your actions as undermining the Commander-in-Chief in wartime. We tried using the civilian courts to prosecute terrorists and the man who led the prosecution of the 1993 WTC bombers says it's the wrong approach.
Civilian criminal lawyers and judges are tasked with prosecuting crimes after the fact. Intelligence gathering is designed to intercept enemies before they act, before they've broken the law and/or committed acts of war. Civilian courts are the wrong tool for the task at hand, unless you think that losing a few city blocks now and then to terrorism qualifies as acceptable losses. What scares me is that I've talked with people who believe that it is. I'm not looking forward to the Iranian theocracy acquiring nukes.
The Constitution is not a suicide pact. Thomas Jefferson said: "[a] strict observance of the written law is doubtless one of the high duties of a good citizen, but it is not the highest. The laws of necessity, of self-preservation, of saving our country when in danger, are of higher obligation. To lose our country by a scrupulous adherence to the written law, would be to lose the law itself, with life, liberty, property and all those who are enjoying them with us; thus absurdly sacrificing the ends to the means."
Wonder how long it'll take this post to be modded down like my last one. But we all know that the left doesn't censor...
being prosecuted after the fact.
The criminal justice system is woefully inadequate for dealing with military issues, much less with illegal enemy combatants (no uniforms, clear chain of command, prefers to attack civilian targets, etc). To say that we can't monitor phone #'s found in a captured jihadi's notebook because one person on the line is in America or merely that their communications pass through America without the approval of unelected judges who appear to give terrorists more privacy rights than YouTube viewers is insane. The executive branch sets and is held accountable for military policy. If the voters disagree, they can elect a different executive promising a new policy which, sadly in my view, means we'll be swearing in President Obama this January. No such recourse exists for when our unelected robed masters go on a power grab. We're headed for judicial dictatorship if the ACLU has their way.
I'm starting to see how Constantinople fell.
After vetoing their pay raise, perhaps Jindal thought that fighting a 94-3 vote was a distraction he didn't need? Especially when it's unlikely that teachers are going to cooperate anyhow. Save your anger for the legislators and remember how decentralized government limits the damage any one group of nitwits can cause.
Pick your battles: rule #1 of politics.
I am sick and tired of the excuses and outright lies from AT&T for their kludgy FTTN U-verse network when Verizon has already proven that you can profitably build a FTTH network in America. But no, AT&T would rather milk their balky copper plant and put off the one-time expense of running fiber like they'll eventually have to do anyhow.
Every time I ask an AT&T droid about that they make wild claims of Verizon having so much trouble building their network, charging $hundreds to rewire your home, etc, etc. All I know is that my grandmother, in the middle of nowhere, can get FiOS and I, in a major university town, am stuck with U-verse.
Yes, Verizon's stock took a hit when they announced FiOS. I used the opportunity to buy shares for my IRA on the cheap. That's worked out well so far.
the insane complexity of the corporate tax system. The Michigan FairTax plan collapses six taxes into the existing sales tax system, raising the sales tax rate from 6% to 9.75%. There's a "prebate" that pays people the equivalent of the tax on basic living expenses so the poor are protected. Right now the tax compliance costs for small businesses are often higher than the taxes themselves. Big businesses are merely annoyed by the complexity since they benefit from the suppression of smaller competitors. Unfortunately Comrade Granholm is more interested in hiking taxes than simplifying anything, which is why so many smart people are fleeing the state.
I still favor the Flat Income Tax at the federal level. At the very least it's too dangerous to switch to a Fair Tax system while the income tax amendment remains on the books.
Worker training is corporate welfare at best. If businesses know that the can fire people who don't work out without getting sued they'll take more risks with hiring, especially as the labor market tightens.
U-verse is transcoding from 20Mbps MPEG2 to 6Mbps MPEG4 (give or take), with predictably horrific results. To add insult to injury you can only tune 1 HDTV channel at a time for your entire house! AT&T went with a cheapskate FTTN (Fiber To The Node) network, which uses some variant of DSL to provide a 27Mbps copper pipe from the fiber node down the block to your home that's shared between TV, Internet and VoIP. The Motorola IPTV settop boxes run WinCE.
Uverse HD Quality
U-verse Internet is less bad than Comcast (10M/1.5M for $55/mo), though with higher latency due to the ~20ms hit caused by their DSL scheme. I kept that and dropped U-verse TV.
What a brilliant Republican contingency plan! In the (likely) event that the Democrats retake the White House, the trial lawyers who fund the Democratic Party will demand the (military?) enforcement of the patents that the Iranian theocracy is breaking! Absolute genius!
(j/k, I think...)
Technically, fiber optic cable is a series of tubes, and getting government permission to build a FTTH network requires a great deal of optimism...
local governments that will allow new companies to run FTTH and to not grant legal monopolies to anyone. You'd have to deal with the feds for wireless communications but not landline.
Yes, AT&T and Comcast have scary amounts of money, but AT&T in particular is run by morons. Could a new competitor with their own FTTH network prosper? I think so. With state and local governments fast-track the paperwork and not demand bribes ("free" access for this and that, "franchise fees", etc)? Well...
Utah has taken a workable approach with their UTopia network. Verizon is building out their FiOS network, fighting various local bureaucrats along the way. FTTH can be done in America. Let's not get distracted by the irrelevant feds.
I liked his answer to question #9. Most of the time the feds should butt out and let states follow the will of their citizens. I can only hope that this philosophy also extends to the federal education department, housing, attempts at federally run universal health care, agriculture, and almost everything else not specifically listed as a federal responsibility in the Constitution.
On Iraq, I can only hope that he reads some of the reports from people over there such as Michael Yon, Michael J. Totten, etc.
Well said. Anyone who tries to challenge the pork barrel tendencies gets run out of town eventually. Gingrich did. Jeff Flake (R-AZ), who takes fighting earmark abuse seriously, got snubbed for an open seat on the House Appropriations Committee by the Republican leadership despite tremendous grassroots support.
Another problem with overcentralized government: it makes expanding the nation difficult. Annexing Mexico would be a neat way of solving much of America's illegal immigration problem (about 1/3rd of Mexico's workforce is already here and there's a substantial American expat community down there), if majorities on both sides of the border voted for it, but it'd be a nightmare to integrate all those people into our top-heavy federal system. Plus inflicting the 1040 and the rest of the federal tax code on 100M+ more people may qualify as cruel and unusual punishment.
CANARIE
Of course, customer owned fiber networks aren't the only way. Having a neutral third party own and manage the dark fiber between colocation points and end-users (and likely the fiber uplinks too) would work. It'd be a nice bit of business for the power companies, for example. Let competing service providers plug their electronics into the fiber. Customer wants to switch providers? No problem, make the change at the colo and plug in a different box at his home.
Some cities, including the People's Republic of Ann Arbor, have upgraded their traffic light networks to fiber optics and put down extra conduit while they were at it. So, building a proper FTTH network wouldn't require (too much) tearing up of streets.
Fighting over last century's copper is a waste of time. Let's focus on making sure the fiber nets are set up correctly, and SOON!
Use a notebook with a real GPU, anything modern from ATI or NVIDIA, and the GPU will take care of much of the decoding more efficiently than the CPU alone can. The new AMD Puma platform (2Q2008) ought to be particularly good about this.
1) Knock down their own share price by announcing ridiculous hostile takeovers of companies that will never agree to it.
2) Buy back Microsoft stock on the (relatively) cheap
3) Profit!
Well, OK, the math isn't all that impressive, but slowly taking the company private through stock buybacks is considerably more sane than most other suggestions of what to do with their cash horde. If you ignore the huge chunks of stock controlled by Gates and a few other early owners it looks more plausible. Effectively going private over time by getting rid of the public stockholders would give Microsoft the ability to take more risks. Paying dividends to employee-owners is a much better model than handing out stock options now that the dot bomb insanity has wound down. (It's late, hopefully that's coherent...)
SP1 was waiting for me this morning. The installation took quite a while but it appears to have worked OK. This is for Vista Home Premium x64 (I needed 4GB+ RAM support). Maybe it'll be a little less unstable now. Vista had me seriously considering giving up video games so I could run Linux on my workstation instead (yes, I know about Cedega/Wine). Come on Epic, where's your UT3 Linux client...
Anyhow, either I just missed the cutoff or Microsoft hasn't really suspended SP1 distribution. I didn't RTFA.
Without public campaign financing, candidates rely on "donations" (read: bribes), tell you they are interested in alternative energy, yet provide oil companies with record profits and state-sponsored corporate welfare.
Or we could cut taxes, close down numerous government departments, replace the lobbyist-designed federal tax code with the Flat Tax, and otherwise reduce the amount of loot for "special interests" to fight over. It'd make life easier for small businesses who don't have K Street lobbyists on retainer to protect them from the federal government too.
Let 'em take all the campaign donations they want, just have full and immediate disclosure on the Internet.
The idea behind tax cuts is that the closer you get to the Laffer curve, the closer you get to maximizing tax revenue while minimizing economic damage. If that means temporarily running deficits, OK. Think about it: who gets a higher return on capital, the small business owners who make up the bulk of the top bracket taxpayers in America, or Congress? Getting tax rates below the curve is assumed to be too unlikely to think about right now. From a moral perspective it would be desirable but I think most of us on the Right would settle for practicality.
The problem is that Congress takes the new tax revenue, spends it, and then spends some more. The President can try to slow it down. Unfortunately this President has shown little to no spending restraint, with the mess caused by a bunch of Saudi trust fund brats who thought they could pick up where the Battle of Vienna left off just adding insult to injury. We had a brief reprieve when Gingrich was Speaker of the House but it's been downhill ever since. I doubt a President McCain or President Hillary combined with a Democrat-dominated Congress is going to make any improvement.
Governments can build dark fiber networks to the home, but let competing service providers plug into those networks. The fiber itself should last for decades and you have to work with governments for right-of-way and other construction issues anyhow. Having one dark fiber network eliminates wasteful duplication. The electronics that plug into those networks evolve rapidly though, so leaving everything else to private industry makes sense. With the fiber in place even a local ISP can get up and running quickly. Here in Ann Arbor the city has all the traffic lights connected with fiber optics and they put in extra conduit while they were at it. That's a good chunk of the work right there.
There's no need for federal involvement though. States and even city governments can do this. Utah has UTOPIA. I'd just assume keep the feds out of the picture.
If you live in Verizon territory where FiOS is available or will be... lucky you. We poor souls in AT&T land need a little help.
Well, if today's trustafarians are stupid enough to do what the Kent State protesters did, it's only a matter of time:
The dispersal process began late in the morning with a police official, riding in a Guard Jeep, approaching the students to read them an order to disperse or face arrest. The protesters pelted the Jeep with rocks, forcing it to retreat. One Guardsman was injured in the attack.
Just before noon, the Guard returned and again ordered the crowd to disperse. When they refused, the Guard used tear gas. Because of wind, the tear gas had little effect in dispersing the crowd, and some began a second rock attack with chants of "Pigs off campus!" The students threw the tear gas canisters back at the National Guardsmen. The only protection the soldiers had were their steel helmets. They had no body armor or face shields, although they had put on gas masks upon first using tear gas.
So says Wikipedia. Pelting armed men with rocks (let alone police, guardsmen, law enforcement in general) is begging for a Darwin Award. The only shame is that some of the students who were hit by the guards return fire were innocent bystanders.
I think that the digestive trouble that correlates with autism spectrum disorders combined with the modern Western diet (American in particular) is helping to amplify autism symptoms. In short: the inside of the intestines is considered to be outside of the body. If intestinal permeability is increased (leaky gut), larger molecules start entering the bloodstream. How bad that is depends on what is being consumed and the genetics of the person in question. The petrochemicals that make up most artificial coloring, flavoring and preservatives do Bad Things and are the likely cause of the rise in ADHD (Lancet published a study about that). Large proteins like gluten and casein (wheat and dairy protein) that are unlikely to fully digest entering the bloodstream will trigger all sorts of immune responses. A high refined sugar (or simply high carb) diet feeds yeasts that will puncture intestinal walls, and broad spectrum antibiotics will kill off competitors to those yeasts. Carbonated beverages are intestinal irritants by definition and are usually loaded with synthetic chemicals as well (says the recovering Diet Coke addict).
Anyhow, a whole foods (versus processed foods) diet free of synthetics often goes a long ways towards reducing autism (and other) symptoms, and it's something we all should be doing anyhow. It takes time but it doesn't cost much, if anything. GFCF (Gluten Free Casein Free) is well worth trying for combating autism and maybe for people with poor digestion in general.
Epigenetics looks like a very interesting topic to study.
One more thing: anyone with an autism spectrum disorder should get their ammonia level checked. It's often high. Calcium butyrate combined with a proper diet will fix this. The medical textbooks still say that hyperammonemia is acute and fatal and never persistent. If you're just fuzzy-headed all the time and can't figure out what's going on it's worth getting the simple blood test, if only to rule it out.
What about those people who just don't want to live in a city?
Then their fuel bills go up, like they've been doing. Which is fine if you have the money. Just don't expect me to sympathize too much.
What bugs me is all the preachy "green" types who whine about any attempt to build housing with more than a few stories. David Owen covered the topic very well here:
NYC is the Greenest City in America
I should have said the grade school use of unprescribed cognitive enhancers. Bad enough that the kiddies get them under doctor supervision.