Who are running a loss because they've been forced to via poor legislation. They were running with a surplus until they were forced to fund retirements 75 years into the future.
only voters who have no direct way to hold the management accountable
Ah yes, "voting doesn't matter." The cry of the cynic harkens again. Certainly a self-fulfilling prophesy if there ever was one.
Even very popular government run services like London Underground make huge losses every year and have to be subsidized.
And yet while the London Underground may run losses, I suspect the overall return in the economy is positive. That's one thing most people who complain about government run things running at a loss virtually always miss.
I don't see NASA having turned a profit ever yet only the most blind and anti-government can seriously argue that nothing of value has come from it. Same for projects like CERN, which I doubt a corporation would ever undertake.
It's an interesting psychological phenomenon that people will agree that the government is incredibly corrupt institution in certain areas close to their heart (in case of slashdot, privacy rights, lobbying/bribery by music/movie industries etc) and at the same time want to give government more and more power in areas that they don't understand as well (healthcare, industry regulation, public utilities). Guess what, the government is just as corrupt in those areas too.
Therefore what? What's the point you're trying to make? You can't seriously say that government is bad and we should privatize it all because it can be easily shown that privatization is no better and potentially even worse.
Publicly owned utilities have no incentive to cut costs in an effort to boost profit margins. They can run with a zero margin and no shareholders exist to whine and bitch.
Or is government a default solution to every problem regardless of its own (numerous) problems?
It's a possible course of action when private industry rears its corrupt, incompetent head.
Indeed, it should be entirely privately funded. Thus we can focus on the research that matters: only that which can be monetized within the next 4 quarters or sooner!
Your police forces are militarised because they have to assume any criminal they might be up against is armed.
This has been true since the country was formed. Why is it only in the last 30 years that S.W.A.T. has been used at the drop of a hat and average police regularly go out with military-level gear?
As long as guns are a right in the USA, you should expect a police force that is militarised.
No, we shouldn't. Armed yes, militarized no. The militarization is due largely to the drug war and departments dumping money into shit they don't need to and assuming a stance of force over communication with the citizens of whatever city they feel like pointing guns at.
As for TFA I was a FF user before it was even called FF, and the suite before that, but no more, its simply a bad idea security wise to run FF any longer from Windows. See my journal for the Yahoo Porn Bug, one of many that will ONLY run on FF thanks to their frankly piss poor security mdoel.
And yet in the journal entry you say:
I tried Chromium and FF 4, I tried with NoScript enabled, no matter what I did after surfing those sites for an hour or less, even after using CCleaner first to make sure there wasn't any info in the cache, there it was.
So it only works in Firefox, except when it works in Chromium? Have you tried it recently, given that both Chromium and Firefox have evolved significantly since then? Did you file a bug report with Mozilla? With Yahoo? How could it function without Javascript?
You provide sparse actual evidence for your claims, enough to undermine your point.
People can hate and call me names
Oh how cute, your persecution complex is showing again. No, you should be disregarded for being vulgar, overly hyperbolic, loose with the truth, and presenting technical arguments with little to no supporting data and lacking knowledge.
Yeah! How dare they act in defense of users against a technology notable for its repeated exploits! They should learn humility and how to act intelligently, like Oracle!
I don't think StackOverflow's solution applies very well to Wikipedia. Hell Wikipedia's solution doesn't apply well to Wikipedia, where you have people knowledgeable in fields being overruled by editors utterly unfamiliar with the subject. The problem with implementing any new system is converting anyone already in the system appropriately and how to prevent new users from being discouraged.
Instead of Wikipedia begging for money once a year, they could implement a wikipedia.com site which has some light advertising. By default all users go to wikipedia.org, but for those who want can manually redirect to wikipedia.com. I would be glad to support such a system.
No advertiser will move to advertise on a site that users won't see unless they explicitly go to it. I'd rather Wikipedia stick with the begging, much like NPR it lets them maintain a degree of independence from corporations who do shit like this.
Because there's no way for Ars to be legitimately critical of Google and their handling of Android? Not even someone who specializes in writing about Android?
Holy shit you provided a logical argument and a link to data to back it up, even if it's only one. I need to save a link to your post as a reference to point others to.
Actually, there is no way it will happen without a constitutional amendment allowing them to do so.
Well, we can worry about that when we get around to dismantling the armed forces. You know, since we're not at war and having a standing army is unconstitutional too.
Republican opposition is not the problem, people ignoring it or trying to get around it is the real problem.
I don't believe for a moment that their stand is so principled.
The excess costs are substantially the result of the federal government being involved in it too.
When making these claims would you do us all a favor and provide something, anything credible that supports it? Can you?
I object to the utter transformation of the US federal government without regard to the constitution that forces it to be subject of the people.
This is the worst government trainwreck of a law I have ever seen.
I've seen worse. The PATRIOT Act is one, for example.
Requiring auto insurance for drivers and (in some states) driver-license holders has demonstrably had the effect of raising auto insurance rates for all.
Oh, care to cite the data on this? Not that it's relevant to health insurance, because one can't simply opt to not get sick or hurt.
crazy is advocating things disruptive to an establishment which claims anything out of their purview or realm of thought and "wisdom", or what's good for them, is crazy.
Ah right, so I'm part of "the establishment," while people claiming that Obama is going to institute martial law (inexplicably) are not crazy.
Crazy is being as equally unmoveable as a set of powers and institutions
The rhetoric of the Tea Party is unhelpful to what might actually be otherwise useful end-goals.
causing them great fear that their sources of income and power will be disrupted by people who just want to be left the flip alone.
And I suppose I'm simply not naive enough to believe that things would fall out that way if the tea party achieved their goals of forcing the government to default.
Fedora and Suse are literally just as user friendly as Ubuntu is.
Au contraire. Fedora's installer makes me want to tear my hair out, and virtually every time I've installed it I get some sort of SELinux error. This is one reason I'm split down the middle on Ubuntu and usually go for one of the derivatives - I don't really like Unity and the Mir split annoys me, but they still offer the best setup and default configuration out there.
I just wish the derivatives would stop fucking up the UEFI installs.
He's a rightist, just like every other politician in this country.
Obama's mentor - the man who had the most influence on his life - should have gone to prison for bombing the US Capitol building. Yes, that's right, domestic terrorism of the Boston Bomber sort.
I'm sorry, is this some sort of pathetic attempt at an argument? OMG BILL AYERS, something people have been screaming for years.
After the NSA revelations, who can really say that martial law is out of the question?
Yet no one can provide a reason for why it would happen. Only that somehow, magically, it would happen under Obama and not Bush.
The NSA stuff confirmed what a lot of "nutters" had been saying for a long time.
No, the nutters believed a lot of bullshit. There were reasonable suspicions about the NSA for a long time and Snowden got everyone's attention by suppyling evidence, something the nutters never did and still don't.
But it's a better cut when it's against something you disagree with, right?
us fiscally conservative people you hate use our money more wisely than the government does.
Really? Can you back that up with evidence or is it just a blind claim?
Two weeks of no government and I didn't notice a single difference.
Give it a month or longer. Two weeks is nothing.
Global economic disaster? Melodrama much?
Fortunately we won't know how bad the effects of the US defaulting would have been. But I'm sure Ted Cruz will force us down that path again in a few months.
Obama's biggest constituencies seem to be welfare trash, non-English-speaking immigrants, drug addicts, and various other dregs of the big city.
Therefore what? Are they citizens who have registered to vote? Yes? Then shut the fuck up.
Conversely, everyone I know who owns a business AND a college degree votes Republican.
Then you live a very sheltered life.
The backbone of the American economy is not interested in the opinions of ivory tower liberals or Starbucks coffee-jerks.
The backbone of the economy are the various and sundry people working out there, the ones whose wages have been stagnant for decades so the richest can take more home - and count on you to shit on the discussion and ensure nothing productive gets done.
In other words you almost never meet them because you are so insular - I know your type
Has anyone ever told you you're an assumptive, arrogant ass?
you are the type I would not tell I am a Tea Party member because you would automatically turn against me without thought
Or maybe they'll be skeptical of your motives and your logic. Given how the Tea Party conveniently appeared only after Obama was elected, I'd be skeptical too.
you'd never suspect me of belonging because my views don't match up with your bigoted notions of Tea Party members.
But then are you a member of the Tea Party? It has no official representation or stance, so anyone can claim anything and be a "member" of the Tea Party.
there are even some people I consider good friends who I cannot admit to being fiscally conservative
There's a lot more to the tea party than just fiscal conservatism.
I see how unhinged you become at the thought of any kind of conservative in your ranks...
There you go again, assuming you know anything about the person you're attacking. Additionally, "conservative" these days isn't a very good label to apply to yourself, particularly since it's gotten tied pretty tightly to the social regressives.
Something to chew on is that Tea Party members are WAY more tolerant of alternative viewpoints than you are; we have to be.
You do, because I see sites like this: http://www.teapartypatriots.org/ and I'm left to wonder if they have any plan other than "OMG FORCE THE COUNTRY TO DEFAULT AND DAMN THE CONSEQUENCES!" It's 100% anti-Obama, Democrats are bad, burn it all down nonsense with absolutely nothing presented as alternative solutions. You say fiscal responsibility, but none of these groups existed until Obama took office. Where the shit were they when Bush started dumping money into the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq?
And even NUTTIER sites like http://www.teaparty.org/ claiming on the front page that "Ex-Navy SEAL: Government provoking vets to bring on martial law" - This is just part of why I cannot take the Tea Party seriously.
And in exchange for this liquidity, we get flash crashes and Goldman Sachs going "oops, that was a mistake. NYSE, please unroll the last thousand trades that resulted in us taking losses."
who mostly talk and argue about goofy things like the presentation of views inside textbooks.
Engaging in historical revisionism to try and change how things were to how they think things should have been. Biasing it to twist the philosophies of historical figures and to retroactively smear the reputations of people they consider their enemies. And then try to push that shit on students all over the country by abusing their position.
Those dangerous people start political debates about the contents of science in textbooks!
They do nonsensical shit like try to put creationism into science classes, where it doesn't belong at all.
And actually --- they are right! Science deserves to be continually challenged --- because science deserves to be continually challenged -- that is why it is science because science is skepticism! I think any true science can hold its own against skeptics fine, that is why it is science!
Except you give them too much credit. That's not what they're on about - they aren't capable of challenging things like evolutionary theory. They're all about letting teachers push their religion and allowing students to ignore science in favor of whatever they've been indoctrinated with by their parents.
Not to mention that our Fundamentalists also push crap like Quiverfull (breeding a Christian Army), Oathkeepers, and the Christian Dominionists who see the Federal government as their enemy and a barrier to their control. The only difference between our fundamentalists and theirs is they just haven't started shooting yet.
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Who are running a loss because they've been forced to via poor legislation. They were running with a surplus until they were forced to fund retirements 75 years into the future.
Ah yes, "voting doesn't matter." The cry of the cynic harkens again. Certainly a self-fulfilling prophesy if there ever was one.
And yet while the London Underground may run losses, I suspect the overall return in the economy is positive. That's one thing most people who complain about government run things running at a loss virtually always miss.
I don't see NASA having turned a profit ever yet only the most blind and anti-government can seriously argue that nothing of value has come from it. Same for projects like CERN, which I doubt a corporation would ever undertake.
Therefore what? What's the point you're trying to make? You can't seriously say that government is bad and we should privatize it all because it can be easily shown that privatization is no better and potentially even worse.
So... I should be hiring private security to patrol my neighborhood instead of having police?
Because the Federal government nominally represents the people who are, quite frankly, powerless before corporations.
Publicly owned utilities have no incentive to cut costs in an effort to boost profit margins. They can run with a zero margin and no shareholders exist to whine and bitch.
It's a possible course of action when private industry rears its corrupt, incompetent head.
Indeed, it should be entirely privately funded. Thus we can focus on the research that matters: only that which can be monetized within the next 4 quarters or sooner!
This has been true since the country was formed. Why is it only in the last 30 years that S.W.A.T. has been used at the drop of a hat and average police regularly go out with military-level gear?
No, we shouldn't. Armed yes, militarized no. The militarization is due largely to the drug war and departments dumping money into shit they don't need to and assuming a stance of force over communication with the citizens of whatever city they feel like pointing guns at.
And yet in the journal entry you say:
So it only works in Firefox, except when it works in Chromium? Have you tried it recently, given that both Chromium and Firefox have evolved significantly since then? Did you file a bug report with Mozilla? With Yahoo? How could it function without Javascript?
You provide sparse actual evidence for your claims, enough to undermine your point.
Oh how cute, your persecution complex is showing again. No, you should be disregarded for being vulgar, overly hyperbolic, loose with the truth, and presenting technical arguments with little to no supporting data and lacking knowledge.
Fortunately it still works, it just won't give a security hole riddled platform automatic access to your PC.
Yeah! How dare they act in defense of users against a technology notable for its repeated exploits! They should learn humility and how to act intelligently, like Oracle!
I don't think StackOverflow's solution applies very well to Wikipedia. Hell Wikipedia's solution doesn't apply well to Wikipedia, where you have people knowledgeable in fields being overruled by editors utterly unfamiliar with the subject. The problem with implementing any new system is converting anyone already in the system appropriately and how to prevent new users from being discouraged.
No advertiser will move to advertise on a site that users won't see unless they explicitly go to it. I'd rather Wikipedia stick with the begging, much like NPR it lets them maintain a degree of independence from corporations who do shit like this.
Because there's no way for Ars to be legitimately critical of Google and their handling of Android? Not even someone who specializes in writing about Android?
Holy shit you provided a logical argument and a link to data to back it up, even if it's only one. I need to save a link to your post as a reference to point others to.
Well, we can worry about that when we get around to dismantling the armed forces. You know, since we're not at war and having a standing army is unconstitutional too.
I don't believe for a moment that their stand is so principled.
When making these claims would you do us all a favor and provide something, anything credible that supports it? Can you?
Then healthcare is the least of your concerns.
Possibly here:
patriotsheartnetwork: Feds reviewed only one bid for Obamacare website design
It was the first result for 'healthcare.gov "task order"'.
Caveat being that of the first 10 results, 3 are unrelated and the rest seem be right-wing.
I've seen worse. The PATRIOT Act is one, for example.
Oh, care to cite the data on this? Not that it's relevant to health insurance, because one can't simply opt to not get sick or hurt.
Ah right, so I'm part of "the establishment," while people claiming that Obama is going to institute martial law (inexplicably) are not crazy.
The rhetoric of the Tea Party is unhelpful to what might actually be otherwise useful end-goals.
And I suppose I'm simply not naive enough to believe that things would fall out that way if the tea party achieved their goals of forcing the government to default.
Au contraire. Fedora's installer makes me want to tear my hair out, and virtually every time I've installed it I get some sort of SELinux error. This is one reason I'm split down the middle on Ubuntu and usually go for one of the derivatives - I don't really like Unity and the Mir split annoys me, but they still offer the best setup and default configuration out there.
I just wish the derivatives would stop fucking up the UEFI installs.
Yeah, intelligence doesn't mean sane. The Tea Party's problem is that they're crazy.
Yes. One group wanted to take hazardous, rash action to kill Obamacare (boogeyman that it is) and the others did not.
They did. But only after threatening the fiscal stability of the country, and only because they failed at the proper legislative paths.
Probably because he knew his vote against it was symbolic, and not part of a mad attempt to run the country off the rails.
When their "ideas" coincide with a lot of wild, unfounded conspiracy theory, it's hard to take them seriously.
He's a rightist, just like every other politician in this country.
I'm sorry, is this some sort of pathetic attempt at an argument? OMG BILL AYERS, something people have been screaming for years.
Yet no one can provide a reason for why it would happen. Only that somehow, magically, it would happen under Obama and not Bush.
No, the nutters believed a lot of bullshit. There were reasonable suspicions about the NSA for a long time and Snowden got everyone's attention by suppyling evidence, something the nutters never did and still don't.
But it's a better cut when it's against something you disagree with, right?
Really? Can you back that up with evidence or is it just a blind claim?
Give it a month or longer. Two weeks is nothing.
Fortunately we won't know how bad the effects of the US defaulting would have been. But I'm sure Ted Cruz will force us down that path again in a few months.
Therefore what? Are they citizens who have registered to vote? Yes? Then shut the fuck up.
Then you live a very sheltered life.
The backbone of the economy are the various and sundry people working out there, the ones whose wages have been stagnant for decades so the richest can take more home - and count on you to shit on the discussion and ensure nothing productive gets done.
Has anyone ever told you you're an assumptive, arrogant ass?
Or maybe they'll be skeptical of your motives and your logic. Given how the Tea Party conveniently appeared only after Obama was elected, I'd be skeptical too.
But then are you a member of the Tea Party? It has no official representation or stance, so anyone can claim anything and be a "member" of the Tea Party.
There's a lot more to the tea party than just fiscal conservatism.
There you go again, assuming you know anything about the person you're attacking. Additionally, "conservative" these days isn't a very good label to apply to yourself, particularly since it's gotten tied pretty tightly to the social regressives.
You do, because I see sites like this: http://www.teapartypatriots.org/ and I'm left to wonder if they have any plan other than "OMG FORCE THE COUNTRY TO DEFAULT AND DAMN THE CONSEQUENCES!" It's 100% anti-Obama, Democrats are bad, burn it all down nonsense with absolutely nothing presented as alternative solutions. You say fiscal responsibility, but none of these groups existed until Obama took office. Where the shit were they when Bush started dumping money into the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq?
And even NUTTIER sites like http://www.teaparty.org/ claiming on the front page that "Ex-Navy SEAL: Government provoking vets to bring on martial law" - This is just part of why I cannot take the Tea Party seriously.
Don't work? Or just disagree with on ideological grounds?
Two weeks isn't nearly enough time to determine knock-on effects of a continued government shutdown.
And in exchange for this liquidity, we get flash crashes and Goldman Sachs going "oops, that was a mistake. NYSE, please unroll the last thousand trades that resulted in us taking losses."
Engaging in historical revisionism to try and change how things were to how they think things should have been. Biasing it to twist the philosophies of historical figures and to retroactively smear the reputations of people they consider their enemies. And then try to push that shit on students all over the country by abusing their position.
They do nonsensical shit like try to put creationism into science classes, where it doesn't belong at all.
Except you give them too much credit. That's not what they're on about - they aren't capable of challenging things like evolutionary theory. They're all about letting teachers push their religion and allowing students to ignore science in favor of whatever they've been indoctrinated with by their parents.
Not to mention that our Fundamentalists also push crap like Quiverfull (breeding a Christian Army), Oathkeepers, and the Christian Dominionists who see the Federal government as their enemy and a barrier to their control. The only difference between our fundamentalists and theirs is they just haven't started shooting yet.