Ban all political advertisement. Set up a publicly-funded internet forum where candidates can clearly spell out their stances on the issues. Run a series of debates (broadcast on public TV, free to be simulcast/rebroadcast by anyone else) where the moderator actually forces the participants to answer questions. Give nobody preferential treatment. Have a little paperwork and possibly a nominal fee to get access to the forum and the debates to keep out anyone who isn't serious about it, possibly require some petition with a number of signatures to qualify as well.
You can't claim that any one person is being silenced, because they have a free forum at their disposal. They can say whatever they want there. We don't need the airwaves dominated by rich, powerful organizations that run scary sound-bite attack ads to have an effective democracy. We need good information. Advertisements are almost, by definition, the opposite of good information.
Try going down and talking to people AND NOT INSULTING THEM and see if maybe they treat you a little better. I'll bet you'd be surprised that when you're not an asshole to others, they aren't an asshole to you.
Sounds like some of the projects I work on. In the private sector.
Maybe this is just something in human nature that has to be overcome to get stuff done in any avenue of life, and not just an example of "oh god look how bad government is."
It's a bad idea. A currency should represent and serve a single culture/nation/society. When you implement a single currency across a range of disparate economies you end up with the "Euro crisis" presently unfolding before us.
This is a really stupid statement, equal to saying that the United States should get rid of the dollar because it's a bad idea because of all of the disparate economies of the states.
A bunch of patchoulli-stinking young adults polluting a sidewalk in front of some financial buildings is going to accomplish nothing, particularly when their gross hypocrisy is so evident (campaigning against greedy corporations? Organize that on your iPhone did you? Or maybe on Facebook?). They're nothing more than the bachelor lions yowling in the night because THEY don't get a comfortable place to sleep and nobody to breed with.
Nice strawman there, with a side of poisoning the well.
Your proposal does not truly eliminate the debt, it just changes who gets stolen from. Saying "You don't owe this anymore" may relieve your particular debt problem, but it damages people who fronted the money in the first place and who have put things at risk that may not be recognized by the word "debt."
Ok, so here's the deal. We passed TARP, which basically gave banks the money they had lost on these bad loans. But they also got to keep the mortgages for the houses. So they made idiotic decisions to lend more money than a home was worth to people who couldn't afford the loan, and not only do they not lose money, they don't lose property either. Win-win for them. We taxpayers *already* relieved the debt problem by covering their losses.
My solution would have been to also seize all of the mortgages from the banks who had made/purchased the bad loans, send a bunch of people to jail, and then rework the terms of the mortgages to something that the homeowners could afford to pay so the whole thing wasn't a total loss to the taxpayers.
Far worse, it sets a bad precedent. Clowns who got a house by signing a mortgage they couldn't afford, get to keep their house without further payments. What's their reaction going to be? "Cool, dude, but now I want a bigger house. Let's do it again!" Failing to allow market processes to punish bad behavior guarantees that the bad behavior will be repeated.
As opposed to the precedent that we already set that clowns who give out foolish mortgages can just come crying to the government when their bad investments implode on them? Again, have you forgotten TARP?
I also like how you conveniently make everyone who got into a mortgage they couldn't afford as being some sort of greedy idiot who'll just trade up for a bigger house. I'm sure in your mind, everyone who ended up in that situation did so because they waste a bunch of money on tattoos and $2000 rims for their $2000 car, while working as a fryer for Taco Bell, but the reality is that a lot of reasonable people got screwed.
Alright, but should people who don't pay their mortgages continue to live in their homes rent free while the rest of us continue to pay mortgage or rent? How is that fair or moral? They received all of the enjoyments of home ownership that resulted from receiving credit from the rest of us. Their borrowing increased the money supply and forced the rest of us to run a bit faster to avoid falling off the back of the inflation and cost of living treadmill.
It's not fair, but I'd argue that it is moral. Many of these people were sold things they couldn't afford, but in a *lot* of cases the loan agent (who is supposed to be working *for* them) would take advantage of them. I work in an office that deals with a lot of loan-related junk, and one of my coworkers was in the process of buying a house. Through the course of the buying process, she repeatedly said "No ARM" and the lender agreed "No ARM." When it came down to the time to sign paperwork, sure enough, the lender brought a contract for an ARM, and the only reason my coworker caught it was because she read the entire thing and understood it. This isn't something that most people are going to be able to do. It's not fair to just kick everyone out of their homes, and it's arguably much more damaging to society to suddenly have thousands of foreclosed homes on the market and thousands of homeless families with destroyed credit struggling to find places to live.
So it's not fair that you have to pay for some inflation they caused. It's not fair that you're responsible and they're not and they're not punished for it. Life's not fair. Lots of conservatives like to point out this fact all the time.
You have to see the bigger picture and forget the sour grapes of "but they got something for nothing!" The homeowners who ended up in houses they couldn't afford are small potatoes. The people selling the loans are the juicy target that really need to go to jail. It's the same reason that drug possession will get you a couple years in prison, while trafficking is a much more serious offense.
We didn't take out loans that we couldn't afford and instead saved our money and lived frugally. Is it not a slap in our collective faces to reward the profligate and punish the prudent amongst us for the monetary sins of others?
And you don't know the situations of all these profligate borrowers, so don't be so quick to judge. Obviously, you're frugal and would *never* make a financial mistake, or get laid off in the worst economic crisis in 70 years, but not everybody is quite as awesome or perfect as you, so be a little more patient with people, please?
The only reason the rich have anything is because of the labors of the 99%. They don't magically create mansions and vast fortunes all by themselves. If they die, the world doesn't plummet into chaos because they were just that fucking important to the rest of society.
If they want our support, they support us. It's that simple. It's not about "soaking" them, and even if they were somehow "soaked," well, fuck 'em, because they weren't special to begin with. If they'd been content to do what they do and live within reasonable means like everyone else, there'd be no problem. But they control the economy, they control the government, and they control most everything we do, and that's not cool.
Keep in mind, here, that we're not talking about the top 1%. Not even the top 0.1%. It is the top 0.01% that control a vast amount of wealth and power. The "rich" aren't the working people making $200-$500k/year. Those people are doing pretty well, but they can't afford to buy real political influence. It is a vanishingly small number of people with much more power than is healthy to a country that is supposed to be based on equality.
This idea that there is a large class of people too stupid to make decisions is fallacious.. in fact the idea that a lot of people need government to help them was the fucking problem to begin with. Families that bring home $35K/year know that they cannot afford a fucking $300,000 home. Don't let some twat trying to lay all the blame on the banks tell you differently.
If you know you can't afford a fucking $300,000 home, but some schmuck is willing to give you the cash to do it, why the fuck *wouldn't* you take the fucking $300,000 home and run? It's not like someone making $35k/year has a lot to lose.
And they started requiring that banks made bad loans -- in the name of "social justice", of course!
Are you talking about the CRA? I wish people would lose this tired old lie. I was with you up until this point. Everything else in your post stems from this false assumption.
Link 1: The two phones pictured have a similar shape. That's about where the similarity ends. The Samsung phone has a larger screen. It has more physical buttons. The icons are not the same, though they are laid out on a grid. It has more external connectors. The profile is not the same. And that's just the obvious stuff that the obviously biased story failed to make look similar; the phones aren't photographed next to each other, so it's impossible to know from that whether the size and color balance were messed with to make them look even more similar.
Link 2: I've got a ton of USB adapters; the one I have for my Logitech Harmony Remote looks a *lot* like the Apple adapter too. There are only so many ways you can design a small wall wart with a port for USB charging. The Apple packaging looks more like a rip-off of the Wii's packaging to me. Every smart phone and tablet I've seen comes in a box that's roughly the size of the width/height of the device, so when you open it up you have the screen staring you in the face. The reason all this stuff is so similar is because it's *so damn common and obvious.*
Link 3: a placeholder graphic didn't get replaced for production. Oh God, it's the end of the fucking world. The funniest thing about this one though is that the last paragraph from Link 3 directly debunks part of the bitching from Link 2, so that's a nice little bonus.
The belief that all you have to do is give everyone a college degree and we will all magically become wealthy with excellent jobs and benefits is as asinine as it gets.
Find me one credible source on the 'left' that actually argues that this is the case, and then you *might* have a point.
Capitalism is the worst system ever invented. Except for every other system ever invented. The problem is that the current system the US is operating under isn't really capitalism, it's crony-capitalism, and people opposed to capitalism point to the crony-capitalists and claim capitalism is to blame, when it's actually the corrupt politicians who have caused the problems and allowed and covered for the crony-capitalists to continue their corrupt ways.
And the really funny thing is that you recognize this, but when we lefties do things to try to acknowledge and do something about the cronyism (see the OWS demonstrations), we're accused of class warfare.
Heh, you bought that one hook, line, and sinker too. The reason why it's only available on the 4S is because they want to sell 4Ses.
"Encode" the message? It's a freaking blob of audio data. The worst that would need to be done is compression. My dinky little HTC Hero had no problem passing audio data back to the server farm for processing, I'm sure the suddenly-woefully-inadequate iPhone 4 could handle it just fine too.
It's not like promotional videos are made to highlight everything that's good about what they're trying to sell, and downplay anything that isn't perfectly magical.
No, it was the Republican minority that somehow maneuvered the health care bill into a situation where the individual mandate was the *only* way to pay for it. I'm not sure how else they expected it to work when they took the single payer option off the table.
I'd claim that it was just an unintended consequence, except I'm pretty sure this was *exactly* what was intended. They get to force the issue, then blame Obama for what they did. Brilliant, really, especially considering how many dupes will happily swallow the lie whole as long as it fits with their "Obama and the Democrats are big spenders!" mantra.
Sorry, but anyone referring to Obama as the "Messiah" or the "One" or the "Chosen" or whatever deserves to be modded to oblivion because it's flamebait. Essentially you're insulting both Obama *and* insinuating that his supporters are fanatical, irrational worshippers, without having the balls to come out and say it. It's a nice little straw man for you to attack without putting any effort or thought into it.
I'll admit that I didn't even read the rest of your OP, because I figured it would be more of the same.
Hey, the party affiliation of Wyden isn't mentioned in the article! Where are all of the typical whines about the lib'rul media neglecting to mention that the dude(s) mentioned in the article are (D)s? Oh, is it because he's doing something that's good?
This story is a perfect case to illustrate the confirmation bias of butt-hurt whiners and their persecution complexes.
Furthermore they made a comment at the launch of the iPhone 4S that the graphics were now console level. Whether you accept that or not, it again reveals their ambitions.
Wait, they actually made that claim? I never saw that. <quick Google search> Holy shit, you're correct. Did people actually buy that garbage? I mean, it definitely looks good, but it's not even *close* to the graphical power of the 360 or PS3.
Just as you said, they've turned themselves into everything that sucks about the modern entertainment industry. Which means that 90% is going to be uninspired garbage that you have to sift through to find the good stuff. Which means if you're just playing reskinned Unreal engine games with 20% more zombies, you're doin' it wrong.
I realized that the games industry was no longer had me as their target demographic years ago. It takes a period of adjustment, but once you realize that following blockbuster titles is about the *worst* way to find original, interesting stuff, your life will be a lot easier.
Seriously, how do Android fans accept the cognitive dissonance that allows them to complain about anything on the iPhone that requires jailbreaking while ignoring that just to backup an Android phone requires rooting?
Agreed, it should be a standard feature out-of-the-box on every smartphone sold. However, if you sync your phone with your Google account, it really does do a pretty respectable job of backing most everything up.
And fortunately, that's not the only reason I choose Android over iOS, so I don't have to live with some sort of cognitive dissonance label. There are pros and cons to both environments, and I feel that Android is a better overall solution and less harmful to customers' rights in the long run.
And the analogy (similarity) presented was EXACTLY what happened.
No, it wasn't, for the reasons laid out by the GP. It was a stupid analogy because people don't intentionally leave phones and personal electronics lying around unattended in public places and expect them to be there when they get back. Cars get left in public places all the time and people rightfully expect them to stay put most of the time.
Slashdot Mirror
Ban all political advertisement. Set up a publicly-funded internet forum where candidates can clearly spell out their stances on the issues. Run a series of debates (broadcast on public TV, free to be simulcast/rebroadcast by anyone else) where the moderator actually forces the participants to answer questions. Give nobody preferential treatment. Have a little paperwork and possibly a nominal fee to get access to the forum and the debates to keep out anyone who isn't serious about it, possibly require some petition with a number of signatures to qualify as well.
You can't claim that any one person is being silenced, because they have a free forum at their disposal. They can say whatever they want there. We don't need the airwaves dominated by rich, powerful organizations that run scary sound-bite attack ads to have an effective democracy. We need good information. Advertisements are almost, by definition, the opposite of good information.
--Jeremy
Again with the well poisoning and straw men?
Try going down and talking to people AND NOT INSULTING THEM and see if maybe they treat you a little better. I'll bet you'd be surprised that when you're not an asshole to others, they aren't an asshole to you.
--Jeremy
Sounds like some of the projects I work on. In the private sector.
Maybe this is just something in human nature that has to be overcome to get stuff done in any avenue of life, and not just an example of "oh god look how bad government is."
--Jeremy
It's a bad idea. A currency should represent and serve a single culture/nation/society. When you implement a single currency across a range of disparate economies you end up with the "Euro crisis" presently unfolding before us.
This is a really stupid statement, equal to saying that the United States should get rid of the dollar because it's a bad idea because of all of the disparate economies of the states.
--Jeremy
A bunch of patchoulli-stinking young adults polluting a sidewalk in front of some financial buildings is going to accomplish nothing, particularly when their gross hypocrisy is so evident (campaigning against greedy corporations? Organize that on your iPhone did you? Or maybe on Facebook?). They're nothing more than the bachelor lions yowling in the night because THEY don't get a comfortable place to sleep and nobody to breed with.
Nice strawman there, with a side of poisoning the well.
--Jeremy
Even if you could get them out, how do you keep the next ones from taking their place?
So because we have to be eternally vigilant, we should just give up? Fuck you and your defeatist attitude.
--Jeremy
Your proposal does not truly eliminate the debt, it just changes who gets stolen from. Saying "You don't owe this anymore" may relieve your particular debt problem, but it damages people who fronted the money in the first place and who have put things at risk that may not be recognized by the word "debt."
Ok, so here's the deal. We passed TARP, which basically gave banks the money they had lost on these bad loans. But they also got to keep the mortgages for the houses. So they made idiotic decisions to lend more money than a home was worth to people who couldn't afford the loan, and not only do they not lose money, they don't lose property either. Win-win for them. We taxpayers *already* relieved the debt problem by covering their losses.
My solution would have been to also seize all of the mortgages from the banks who had made/purchased the bad loans, send a bunch of people to jail, and then rework the terms of the mortgages to something that the homeowners could afford to pay so the whole thing wasn't a total loss to the taxpayers.
Far worse, it sets a bad precedent. Clowns who got a house by signing a mortgage they couldn't afford, get to keep their house without further payments. What's their reaction going to be? "Cool, dude, but now I want a bigger house. Let's do it again!" Failing to allow market processes to punish bad behavior guarantees that the bad behavior will be repeated.
As opposed to the precedent that we already set that clowns who give out foolish mortgages can just come crying to the government when their bad investments implode on them? Again, have you forgotten TARP?
I also like how you conveniently make everyone who got into a mortgage they couldn't afford as being some sort of greedy idiot who'll just trade up for a bigger house. I'm sure in your mind, everyone who ended up in that situation did so because they waste a bunch of money on tattoos and $2000 rims for their $2000 car, while working as a fryer for Taco Bell, but the reality is that a lot of reasonable people got screwed.
--Jeremy
Alright, but should people who don't pay their mortgages continue to live in their homes rent free while the rest of us continue to pay mortgage or rent? How is that fair or moral? They received all of the enjoyments of home ownership that resulted from receiving credit from the rest of us. Their borrowing increased the money supply and forced the rest of us to run a bit faster to avoid falling off the back of the inflation and cost of living treadmill.
It's not fair, but I'd argue that it is moral. Many of these people were sold things they couldn't afford, but in a *lot* of cases the loan agent (who is supposed to be working *for* them) would take advantage of them. I work in an office that deals with a lot of loan-related junk, and one of my coworkers was in the process of buying a house. Through the course of the buying process, she repeatedly said "No ARM" and the lender agreed "No ARM." When it came down to the time to sign paperwork, sure enough, the lender brought a contract for an ARM, and the only reason my coworker caught it was because she read the entire thing and understood it. This isn't something that most people are going to be able to do. It's not fair to just kick everyone out of their homes, and it's arguably much more damaging to society to suddenly have thousands of foreclosed homes on the market and thousands of homeless families with destroyed credit struggling to find places to live.
So it's not fair that you have to pay for some inflation they caused. It's not fair that you're responsible and they're not and they're not punished for it. Life's not fair. Lots of conservatives like to point out this fact all the time.
You have to see the bigger picture and forget the sour grapes of "but they got something for nothing!" The homeowners who ended up in houses they couldn't afford are small potatoes. The people selling the loans are the juicy target that really need to go to jail. It's the same reason that drug possession will get you a couple years in prison, while trafficking is a much more serious offense.
We didn't take out loans that we couldn't afford and instead saved our money and lived frugally. Is it not a slap in our collective faces to reward the profligate and punish the prudent amongst us for the monetary sins of others?
And you don't know the situations of all these profligate borrowers, so don't be so quick to judge. Obviously, you're frugal and would *never* make a financial mistake, or get laid off in the worst economic crisis in 70 years, but not everybody is quite as awesome or perfect as you, so be a little more patient with people, please?
--Jeremy
The only reason the rich have anything is because of the labors of the 99%. They don't magically create mansions and vast fortunes all by themselves. If they die, the world doesn't plummet into chaos because they were just that fucking important to the rest of society.
If they want our support, they support us. It's that simple. It's not about "soaking" them, and even if they were somehow "soaked," well, fuck 'em, because they weren't special to begin with. If they'd been content to do what they do and live within reasonable means like everyone else, there'd be no problem. But they control the economy, they control the government, and they control most everything we do, and that's not cool.
Keep in mind, here, that we're not talking about the top 1%. Not even the top 0.1%. It is the top 0.01% that control a vast amount of wealth and power. The "rich" aren't the working people making $200-$500k/year. Those people are doing pretty well, but they can't afford to buy real political influence. It is a vanishingly small number of people with much more power than is healthy to a country that is supposed to be based on equality.
--Jeremy
This idea that there is a large class of people too stupid to make decisions is fallacious.. in fact the idea that a lot of people need government to help them was the fucking problem to begin with. Families that bring home $35K/year know that they cannot afford a fucking $300,000 home. Don't let some twat trying to lay all the blame on the banks tell you differently.
If you know you can't afford a fucking $300,000 home, but some schmuck is willing to give you the cash to do it, why the fuck *wouldn't* you take the fucking $300,000 home and run? It's not like someone making $35k/year has a lot to lose.
--Jeremy
And they started requiring that banks made bad loans -- in the name of "social justice", of course!
Are you talking about the CRA? I wish people would lose this tired old lie. I was with you up until this point. Everything else in your post stems from this false assumption.
--Jeremy
Link 1: The two phones pictured have a similar shape. That's about where the similarity ends. The Samsung phone has a larger screen. It has more physical buttons. The icons are not the same, though they are laid out on a grid. It has more external connectors. The profile is not the same. And that's just the obvious stuff that the obviously biased story failed to make look similar; the phones aren't photographed next to each other, so it's impossible to know from that whether the size and color balance were messed with to make them look even more similar.
Link 2: I've got a ton of USB adapters; the one I have for my Logitech Harmony Remote looks a *lot* like the Apple adapter too. There are only so many ways you can design a small wall wart with a port for USB charging. The Apple packaging looks more like a rip-off of the Wii's packaging to me. Every smart phone and tablet I've seen comes in a box that's roughly the size of the width/height of the device, so when you open it up you have the screen staring you in the face. The reason all this stuff is so similar is because it's *so damn common and obvious.*
Link 3: a placeholder graphic didn't get replaced for production. Oh God, it's the end of the fucking world. The funniest thing about this one though is that the last paragraph from Link 3 directly debunks part of the bitching from Link 2, so that's a nice little bonus.
Yes, seriously.
--Jeremy
The belief that all you have to do is give everyone a college degree and we will all magically become wealthy with excellent jobs and benefits is as asinine as it gets.
Find me one credible source on the 'left' that actually argues that this is the case, and then you *might* have a point.
--Jeremy
Capitalism is the worst system ever invented. Except for every other system ever invented. The problem is that the current system the US is operating under isn't really capitalism, it's crony-capitalism, and people opposed to capitalism point to the crony-capitalists and claim capitalism is to blame, when it's actually the corrupt politicians who have caused the problems and allowed and covered for the crony-capitalists to continue their corrupt ways.
And the really funny thing is that you recognize this, but when we lefties do things to try to acknowledge and do something about the cronyism (see the OWS demonstrations), we're accused of class warfare.
--Jeremy
So... why are you here? For the fandroid bashing?
--Jeremy
Because they don't know what they are protesting.
It's a good thing you're smarter than all of them and setting them straight here on Slashdot.
--Jeremy
Heh, you bought that one hook, line, and sinker too. The reason why it's only available on the 4S is because they want to sell 4Ses.
"Encode" the message? It's a freaking blob of audio data. The worst that would need to be done is compression. My dinky little HTC Hero had no problem passing audio data back to the server farm for processing, I'm sure the suddenly-woefully-inadequate iPhone 4 could handle it just fine too.
--Jeremy
It's not like promotional videos are made to highlight everything that's good about what they're trying to sell, and downplay anything that isn't perfectly magical.
--Jeremy
No, it was the Republican minority that somehow maneuvered the health care bill into a situation where the individual mandate was the *only* way to pay for it. I'm not sure how else they expected it to work when they took the single payer option off the table.
I'd claim that it was just an unintended consequence, except I'm pretty sure this was *exactly* what was intended. They get to force the issue, then blame Obama for what they did. Brilliant, really, especially considering how many dupes will happily swallow the lie whole as long as it fits with their "Obama and the Democrats are big spenders!" mantra.
--Jeremy
Sorry, but anyone referring to Obama as the "Messiah" or the "One" or the "Chosen" or whatever deserves to be modded to oblivion because it's flamebait. Essentially you're insulting both Obama *and* insinuating that his supporters are fanatical, irrational worshippers, without having the balls to come out and say it. It's a nice little straw man for you to attack without putting any effort or thought into it.
I'll admit that I didn't even read the rest of your OP, because I figured it would be more of the same.
--Jeremy
Completely off-topic, but...
Hey, the party affiliation of Wyden isn't mentioned in the article! Where are all of the typical whines about the lib'rul media neglecting to mention that the dude(s) mentioned in the article are (D)s? Oh, is it because he's doing something that's good?
This story is a perfect case to illustrate the confirmation bias of butt-hurt whiners and their persecution complexes.
--Jeremy
Furthermore they made a comment at the launch of the iPhone 4S that the graphics were now console level. Whether you accept that or not, it again reveals their ambitions.
Wait, they actually made that claim? I never saw that. <quick Google search> Holy shit, you're correct. Did people actually buy that garbage? I mean, it definitely looks good, but it's not even *close* to the graphical power of the 360 or PS3.
--Jeremy
Just as you said, they've turned themselves into everything that sucks about the modern entertainment industry. Which means that 90% is going to be uninspired garbage that you have to sift through to find the good stuff. Which means if you're just playing reskinned Unreal engine games with 20% more zombies, you're doin' it wrong.
I realized that the games industry was no longer had me as their target demographic years ago. It takes a period of adjustment, but once you realize that following blockbuster titles is about the *worst* way to find original, interesting stuff, your life will be a lot easier.
--Jeremy
Seriously, how do Android fans accept the cognitive dissonance that allows them to complain about anything on the iPhone that requires jailbreaking while ignoring that just to backup an Android phone requires rooting?
Agreed, it should be a standard feature out-of-the-box on every smartphone sold. However, if you sync your phone with your Google account, it really does do a pretty respectable job of backing most everything up.
And fortunately, that's not the only reason I choose Android over iOS, so I don't have to live with some sort of cognitive dissonance label. There are pros and cons to both environments, and I feel that Android is a better overall solution and less harmful to customers' rights in the long run.
--Jeremy
And the analogy (similarity) presented was EXACTLY what happened.
No, it wasn't, for the reasons laid out by the GP. It was a stupid analogy because people don't intentionally leave phones and personal electronics lying around unattended in public places and expect them to be there when they get back. Cars get left in public places all the time and people rightfully expect them to stay put most of the time.
--Jeremy