I have one other question - in a debate a while back, I posted a link to two Youtube videos about why you should never agree to be "interviewed" by the cops. For the discussion it was on-topic, relevant, and a serious point to be made. Because I'm willing to actually speak my mind on occasion and say the occasional uncomfortable truth in the face of the various bury-brigaders here, I saw at least one downmod of "troll" and two "overrateds"; it was briefly sitting at -1 before someone with half a brain saw it and the trend reversed.
The surest sign for me that there are bury-brigaders at work on Slashdot, however, is the number of times I've seen old posts (as in 2+ weeks) suddenly drop from 5 down to 4, 3, or in a few cases all the way to -1. What made them 5's two weeks ago and -1's today? Nothing save for the the fact that organized bury-brigaders were launching an attack on my karma because something else I said was antithetical to their warped worldview. They can't downmod you more than once per comment on a given account, but they can find older posts to dishonestly downmod just to get at your karma.
Hell, I've been downmodded "troll" for correcting someone's bad math before thanks to the bury-brigaders.
So tell me - how does your "pass the guns and shoot to kill" solution fix these problems?
You've got your perspective upside-down and inside-out is all.
Digg has ceased to be relevant precisely because of "bury brigades" - organized groups of people who mod down anything they disagree with. Digg is where the term originated, though it fits well for a good number of Slashdot's abusive modpoint users as well (on multiple sides of any issue; look how many posts get downmodded because they discuss the good and bad of Linux or Microsoft for another example).
The purpose of Slashdot's moderation as stated is NOT to "see things gone", it's to see things rise to the top. The most insightful comments are supposed to rise. The -1 moderation options were only provided to be a last resort against truly ridiculous abuses such as GNAA trolling. Unfortunately, once you have bury brigades, this model ceases to work correctly. Organized groups work out how to use and abuse the system, create multiple accounts to game the modpoint lottery, target individuals over and over, and engage in their own brand of trolling along with modpoint abuse, the goal of which is to eliminate all thoughts but their own from view.
If you really want to see the cream rise to the crop, then give more room on the top and don't worry so much about pushing things down. And remember, what you (personally) feel is "off-topic" is relevant and even insightful to other people, which is another reason why giving out weapons is a bad thought.
Looking at your posting history is seems like many of your comments are exactly what I would like to see gone
Funny, looking at your posting history I feel the same about your comments - boring, mostly off-topic or highly redundant. The difference is that I don't want to see them "gone." I'd be perfectly content leaving them alone. If one or two of yours rose to a 6+ on the 10 scale, fine. If not, no big deal to me.
Shows what you know - how do you think Obama got the idea to solicit "donations" to the US Treasury? From an emailed suggestion!
I wonder if these "donations" are like "indulgences" the old Catholic Church sold... do you think if I donate him $5000 I can get out of paying my taxes?
See what I mean? If it wouldn't destroy all the comments I had made in this section, I'd mod you up funny right now:)
That's the point. Eliminate downmodding, and you eliminate a weapon. Eliminate the weapon, and you make it a choice: either post something insightful, or don't get modded up. If we eliminated the weapon, we could even eliminate the block against modding and posting in the same discussion: after all, the only reason it's there is so that people don't downmod their opponents (which the downmod trolls just get around by having 6-7 alternate accounts and multiple chances to play the mod point lottery anyways).
Check it out - even for speaking up on what makes a problem for Slashdot's moderation system and discussing how it could be improved, I'm labeled as a "troll" and "overrated" right now. See why the system doesn't work?
Addendum: the other thing that eliminating downmodding would do is allow us to eliminate the "Fatal Choice" of Slashdot currently: that people have to decide "do I post or do I moderate" when they see a discussion. The mod-trolls who see downmodding as a weapon have spare accounts to burn (as well as to play the modpoint lottery more often), so they don't care.
Eliminate downmodding, and the "worry" of the mod system - that someone would use downmodding to attack people who replied to them - goes away. Feel free to upmod the guy who responded to you if he was insightful!
So I don't think that the slashdot system is bad, just that you need to read at 0 to get the best use out of it, after all, every so often AC says something worth reading, which is why we are supposed to focus on modding things up instead of down
If you're supposed to focus on modding things up, why have a downmod at all? All the downmod allows for is for hacks and jerks who happen to get points in the modpoint lottery to go on an attacking spree. I know, I'm sure I'm on a few enemies lists - I've seen month-old posts suddenly drop by 2-3 points when some of these people "happened" to get mod points. I've seen the game of hunting down someone they don't like, and dinging down 5 posts back by 1 each to go after someone's karma.
The point is that the "max 5" scale is insufficient, and that "bury brigade" behavior is something far more dangerous than GNAA-style trolling. I've seen incredibly insightful posts stuck at -1 permanently (despite plenty of upmods as well!) because someone dared to offer an opposing viewpoint to the established hacks that make up the bury brigade.
Put it this way: Upmodding is a positive tool, meant to encourage good posting. Downmodding, in the eyes of the hacks, is a weapon meant to kill anyone who doesn't agree with them. We can keep the tool, but eliminate the weapon, and Slashdot's discussions will be better for it.
Getting rid of downmods on Slashdot sounds great in theory but it would just result in GNAA posts lingering at 1 (or 2 if the guy doing it has good karma).
So browse at 3 or 4. If we went to a 10-point scale and simply allowed downmods, you'd have the same effect Slashdot tries for (let the best comments rise to the top for easier browsing) while not needing the "OMG THEY SAID SOMETHING I DONT AGREE WITH KILL IT KILL IT" downmod crap that passes for "moderation" these days.
As for the karma thing, alter karma to suit. Make Karma decrease by attrition (old points expire over time) or something. GNAA-types wouldn't have enough karma to stay up because nobody sane would upmod them anyways.
The Slashdot moderation system has one major flaw. Why not fix the flaw, and make the system better?
Ironically enough, CNN's "opinion" section offers the chance for "registered members" to discuss/counterpoint the opinion columns. The only problem is that previously they've required moderators to "approve" each individual response (which never happened since their "moderators" were either too busy or too lazy, and articles were automatically flagged to "topic closed" after about 12 hours anyways), and since the site redesign they instead have someone "patrolling" as well as automatic deletion of any comment flagged by other users as supposedly "abusive."
The end result has been a copy of Slashdot's mod system but on steroids, or perhaps of Digg's "Bury Brigades": almost no comment disagreeing with a columnist ever has a shred of a chance of remaining. It's very similar to what happens here - Slashdot's system could be greatly improved by shifting to a 10-point positive scale and eliminating the mod-down option (thus getting rid of the "bury brigade" phenomenon entirely).
The other option is a "see how many positives and negatives a response has without burying anything" format, similar to Slate's forums (although Slate's forums require you to click an extra link in the article just to see responses, so they don't work too well either).
Indeed. Sometimes getting rid of the "antivirus" software is harder than cleaning off the (simple) malware.
The other problem is that for any new malware, the companies are caught between multiple rocks and hard places: - If they classify "ad programs" as viruses, they might get sued. If they leave them alone, they're not cleaning off malware. - Even while they constantly update, the virus writers (especially the ones on the pay of various countries' organized crime rings, since spam and extortion and credit card harvesting via botnet is now big business), the writers are testing against their product. The old saying goes, "a good virus scanner is effective against everything up to this week's viruses."
Add to that the rise of rootkit or "rootkit lite" behaviors (Vundo, for instance, has started attaching itself to lsass.exe and explorer.exe to hide itself from process watchers and redirect file-scan requests to innocuous locations) and your main hope for cleaning a system is to go at it from an external source (other PC and usb drive cage, LiveCD of your chosen OS, etc) because once the infected OS is in the middle, the malware is actively working to hide and protect itself. Once you've got the nasty files deleted, you can always boot without your net cable and clean your registry out properly.
If the makers of antivirus products were really smart, your antivirus package would be able to (without needing extra software) burn a LiveCD of itself for the purposes of just such externalized scans. But none of them have done it yet.
It's "politically correct" to say the civil war was "about slavery" today. It is, however, nearly total bullshit.
The civil war happened because the North had been grumbling about wanting higher tariffs (in their mind, more $ to pay for an increasing budget) and wanting to implement them on the South's main agricultural products. The South saw that this was almost inevitable and wanted out when a President was elected without the electoral votes of a single Southern state.
The civil war was about economics pure and simple. Slavery, and decrees to abolish it, were simply a weapon used by the North for the purpose of psychological warfare via the creation of domestic troubles (loss of farm workers) for their opponents.
Faced with a choice between a douche who is irresponsible with money, or a turd sandwich who is a jerk in regards to social policy, I'll take the turd. I can deal with assholes but not with mass famine and the chaos that follows.
It is the prosecutors' job to get convictions. It is the police's job, in this setting, to gather evidence against you. As far as they are concerned, you are guilty, and their purpose of interrogation is to get you to say something incriminating, or at least something that they can twist to sound incriminating later. As time has gone on, their tools have become very much tilted. The police will lie to you, they will berate you. They will pull underhanded tricks galore. They will turn off the tape recorder and video camera and keep trying to talk to you "off the record" (there's no fucking thing) while they "wait for your lawyer to arrive" trying to get you to say something anyways and circumvent your rights. They will keep you in jail all weekend before even calling for your lawyer and have the guard walk by every so often asking "want to waive your lawyer and just get this over with so you can go home?" in hopes that you'll cave in.
Meanwhile, the prosecutor has everything in his arsenal. In a truly just system, you'd be charged and THEN offered the chance to plead guilty for a reduced sentence. You'd know what the charges are, period. In our system, they offer you to "plead to a lower charge", or else they hit you with 20+ charges and all they need is to make one kinda-sorta stick with a tilted jury. People quite often plead down, not because they are guilty, but because they calculate that it's worth the injustice of pleading guilty when they're innocent just to avoid the intensive risk involved in the padded, tilted trial where the judge and prosecutor and cops are all weekend drinking buddies.
In your example, the guy was "guilty" - but not of the overblown charge they wanted.
In thousands of other cases, innocent people go to jail facing the "risk" of decades in prison when they can "plead down" to a few years that they shouldn't have to serve at all.
If the prosecutors offer a plea deal, in a just society, that's all the charges they would have to face, period. Not this "you can plead to this but if you don't we throw 100 more charges on top and one of them is sure to stick or else we just hold you in jail for 5 years holding separate state/federal/etc trials" bullcrap that they pull all the time.
Instructions on how to use (or modify) a tool are instructions on how to use or modify a tool. Nothing more.
"Illegal" (e.g. not-street-legal) modifications to a car? Done for racing, confined to racing tracks, A-OK. Same thing taken to the street? Not ok. How about utilities that can help you repair your own X-box if it has a dead hard drive? Also plausibly able to "softmod" it, but repairing your own things is a legit use. Should it be illegal?
Criminalizing the dissemination of information is ridiculous no matter what.
It's not their job to be fair. It's their job to get you to say something incriminating. Functionally, it's the cops' job to "aid and abet" the prosecutors' office in getting innocent people convicted.
Anyone who says different, is a clueless idealistic moron. You have the 5th amendment right to keep your mouth shut for a reason: NEVER say anything to the cops.
No, it's called "padding the charges to force a plea deal."
They say "well we COULD charge you with xyzqelsoerjninn but instead, we'll let you 'plead out to just xyz with reduced time'" and they're hoping to get a conviction off of it.
Not to mention this is federal court, so chances are the judge is on someone's (hollywierd, cable cartel, etc) payroll on the side.
Thousands of innocent people "plead guilty" thanks to this shit every year.
It's called "padding the charges to try to force a plea deal", and it's one of the reasons our justice system is so fucked up.
Thousands of people plead guilty to shit they didn't do each year, because they're offered the "reasonable" alternative - accept a jail sentence of X amount, OR get 5x the time and financially ruined and never be able to work again because they had the "temerity" to protest their innocence.
Welcome to America. "Justice" means jack shit here.
Says the person who obviously has lived in a cave for the last 30 years. Who was writing the budgets when Reagan was president? Are you aware how much money was wasted by Carter? How much bigger is the deficit of this year's budget (Obama's supposed "first" budget according to his supporters) than the supposedly "historic" one he signed last year and then blamed on Bush?
Please actually do the research on your answer.
Or, since you obviously have the IQ of your average supermarket-grade kumquat, follow your own advice and STFU.
We have exactly three types of politicians: the ones who inherited money (didn't lift a fucking finger to earn it), the lawyers (the ones who make their living by making contracts so incomprehensibly complex that people have to hire lawyers just to read the damn things), and the racist fucks who get donations everytime they say something stupid (see also: Robert "KKK" Byrd, Sheila Jackson Lee, etc).
Ok, we have that one guy over there who isn't, but he's a used car salesman. Would you trust a used car salesman either?
Slashdot Mirror
I have one other question - in a debate a while back, I posted a link to two Youtube videos about why you should never agree to be "interviewed" by the cops. For the discussion it was on-topic, relevant, and a serious point to be made. Because I'm willing to actually speak my mind on occasion and say the occasional uncomfortable truth in the face of the various bury-brigaders here, I saw at least one downmod of "troll" and two "overrateds"; it was briefly sitting at -1 before someone with half a brain saw it and the trend reversed.
The surest sign for me that there are bury-brigaders at work on Slashdot, however, is the number of times I've seen old posts (as in 2+ weeks) suddenly drop from 5 down to 4, 3, or in a few cases all the way to -1. What made them 5's two weeks ago and -1's today? Nothing save for the the fact that organized bury-brigaders were launching an attack on my karma because something else I said was antithetical to their warped worldview. They can't downmod you more than once per comment on a given account, but they can find older posts to dishonestly downmod just to get at your karma.
Hell, I've been downmodded "troll" for correcting someone's bad math before thanks to the bury-brigaders.
So tell me - how does your "pass the guns and shoot to kill" solution fix these problems?
Two words: Google Bomb.
All it'd take is an organized campaign (GNAA speciality) of modding down words like "it", "and", "the"...
You've got your perspective upside-down and inside-out is all.
Digg has ceased to be relevant precisely because of "bury brigades" - organized groups of people who mod down anything they disagree with. Digg is where the term originated, though it fits well for a good number of Slashdot's abusive modpoint users as well (on multiple sides of any issue; look how many posts get downmodded because they discuss the good and bad of Linux or Microsoft for another example).
The purpose of Slashdot's moderation as stated is NOT to "see things gone", it's to see things rise to the top. The most insightful comments are supposed to rise. The -1 moderation options were only provided to be a last resort against truly ridiculous abuses such as GNAA trolling. Unfortunately, once you have bury brigades, this model ceases to work correctly. Organized groups work out how to use and abuse the system, create multiple accounts to game the modpoint lottery, target individuals over and over, and engage in their own brand of trolling along with modpoint abuse, the goal of which is to eliminate all thoughts but their own from view.
If you really want to see the cream rise to the crop, then give more room on the top and don't worry so much about pushing things down. And remember, what you (personally) feel is "off-topic" is relevant and even insightful to other people, which is another reason why giving out weapons is a bad thought.
Looking at your posting history is seems like many of your comments are exactly what I would like to see gone
Funny, looking at your posting history I feel the same about your comments - boring, mostly off-topic or highly redundant. The difference is that I don't want to see them "gone." I'd be perfectly content leaving them alone. If one or two of yours rose to a 6+ on the 10 scale, fine. If not, no big deal to me.
Why, exactly, would you give the bury brigades even more weapons?
Shows what you know - how do you think Obama got the idea to solicit "donations" to the US Treasury? From an emailed suggestion!
I wonder if these "donations" are like "indulgences" the old Catholic Church sold... do you think if I donate him $5000 I can get out of paying my taxes?
See what I mean? If it wouldn't destroy all the comments I had made in this section, I'd mod you up funny right now :)
That's the point. Eliminate downmodding, and you eliminate a weapon. Eliminate the weapon, and you make it a choice: either post something insightful, or don't get modded up. If we eliminated the weapon, we could even eliminate the block against modding and posting in the same discussion: after all, the only reason it's there is so that people don't downmod their opponents (which the downmod trolls just get around by having 6-7 alternate accounts and multiple chances to play the mod point lottery anyways).
Check it out - even for speaking up on what makes a problem for Slashdot's moderation system and discussing how it could be improved, I'm labeled as a "troll" and "overrated" right now. See why the system doesn't work?
Addendum: the other thing that eliminating downmodding would do is allow us to eliminate the "Fatal Choice" of Slashdot currently: that people have to decide "do I post or do I moderate" when they see a discussion. The mod-trolls who see downmodding as a weapon have spare accounts to burn (as well as to play the modpoint lottery more often), so they don't care.
Eliminate downmodding, and the "worry" of the mod system - that someone would use downmodding to attack people who replied to them - goes away. Feel free to upmod the guy who responded to you if he was insightful!
So I don't think that the slashdot system is bad, just that you need to read at 0 to get the best use out of it, after all, every so often AC says something worth reading, which is why we are supposed to focus on modding things up instead of down
If you're supposed to focus on modding things up, why have a downmod at all? All the downmod allows for is for hacks and jerks who happen to get points in the modpoint lottery to go on an attacking spree. I know, I'm sure I'm on a few enemies lists - I've seen month-old posts suddenly drop by 2-3 points when some of these people "happened" to get mod points. I've seen the game of hunting down someone they don't like, and dinging down 5 posts back by 1 each to go after someone's karma.
The point is that the "max 5" scale is insufficient, and that "bury brigade" behavior is something far more dangerous than GNAA-style trolling. I've seen incredibly insightful posts stuck at -1 permanently (despite plenty of upmods as well!) because someone dared to offer an opposing viewpoint to the established hacks that make up the bury brigade.
Put it this way: Upmodding is a positive tool, meant to encourage good posting. Downmodding, in the eyes of the hacks, is a weapon meant to kill anyone who doesn't agree with them. We can keep the tool, but eliminate the weapon, and Slashdot's discussions will be better for it.
Getting rid of downmods on Slashdot sounds great in theory but it would just result in GNAA posts lingering at 1 (or 2 if the guy doing it has good karma).
So browse at 3 or 4. If we went to a 10-point scale and simply allowed downmods, you'd have the same effect Slashdot tries for (let the best comments rise to the top for easier browsing) while not needing the "OMG THEY SAID SOMETHING I DONT AGREE WITH KILL IT KILL IT" downmod crap that passes for "moderation" these days.
As for the karma thing, alter karma to suit. Make Karma decrease by attrition (old points expire over time) or something. GNAA-types wouldn't have enough karma to stay up because nobody sane would upmod them anyways.
The Slashdot moderation system has one major flaw. Why not fix the flaw, and make the system better?
Ironically enough, CNN's "opinion" section offers the chance for "registered members" to discuss/counterpoint the opinion columns. The only problem is that previously they've required moderators to "approve" each individual response (which never happened since their "moderators" were either too busy or too lazy, and articles were automatically flagged to "topic closed" after about 12 hours anyways), and since the site redesign they instead have someone "patrolling" as well as automatic deletion of any comment flagged by other users as supposedly "abusive."
The end result has been a copy of Slashdot's mod system but on steroids, or perhaps of Digg's "Bury Brigades": almost no comment disagreeing with a columnist ever has a shred of a chance of remaining. It's very similar to what happens here - Slashdot's system could be greatly improved by shifting to a 10-point positive scale and eliminating the mod-down option (thus getting rid of the "bury brigade" phenomenon entirely).
The other option is a "see how many positives and negatives a response has without burying anything" format, similar to Slate's forums (although Slate's forums require you to click an extra link in the article just to see responses, so they don't work too well either).
Indeed. Sometimes getting rid of the "antivirus" software is harder than cleaning off the (simple) malware.
The other problem is that for any new malware, the companies are caught between multiple rocks and hard places:
- If they classify "ad programs" as viruses, they might get sued. If they leave them alone, they're not cleaning off malware.
- Even while they constantly update, the virus writers (especially the ones on the pay of various countries' organized crime rings, since spam and extortion and credit card harvesting via botnet is now big business), the writers are testing against their product. The old saying goes, "a good virus scanner is effective against everything up to this week's viruses."
Add to that the rise of rootkit or "rootkit lite" behaviors (Vundo, for instance, has started attaching itself to lsass.exe and explorer.exe to hide itself from process watchers and redirect file-scan requests to innocuous locations) and your main hope for cleaning a system is to go at it from an external source (other PC and usb drive cage, LiveCD of your chosen OS, etc) because once the infected OS is in the middle, the malware is actively working to hide and protect itself. Once you've got the nasty files deleted, you can always boot without your net cable and clean your registry out properly.
If the makers of antivirus products were really smart, your antivirus package would be able to (without needing extra software) burn a LiveCD of itself for the purposes of just such externalized scans. But none of them have done it yet.
No shit.
It's "politically correct" to say the civil war was "about slavery" today. It is, however, nearly total bullshit.
The civil war happened because the North had been grumbling about wanting higher tariffs (in their mind, more $ to pay for an increasing budget) and wanting to implement them on the South's main agricultural products. The South saw that this was almost inevitable and wanted out when a President was elected without the electoral votes of a single Southern state.
The civil war was about economics pure and simple. Slavery, and decrees to abolish it, were simply a weapon used by the North for the purpose of psychological warfare via the creation of domestic troubles (loss of farm workers) for their opponents.
Collapse things to the point where the government dole no longer exists and watch that reverse itself real fucking quick.
Faced with a choice between a douche who is irresponsible with money, or a turd sandwich who is a jerk in regards to social policy, I'll take the turd. I can deal with assholes but not with mass famine and the chaos that follows.
I agree. Why else would they elect democrats constantly, who basically piss the budget down the drain and do no good?
Bullshit.
It is the prosecutors' job to get convictions. It is the police's job, in this setting, to gather evidence against you. As far as they are concerned, you are guilty, and their purpose of interrogation is to get you to say something incriminating, or at least something that they can twist to sound incriminating later. As time has gone on, their tools have become very much tilted. The police will lie to you, they will berate you. They will pull underhanded tricks galore. They will turn off the tape recorder and video camera and keep trying to talk to you "off the record" (there's no fucking thing) while they "wait for your lawyer to arrive" trying to get you to say something anyways and circumvent your rights. They will keep you in jail all weekend before even calling for your lawyer and have the guard walk by every so often asking "want to waive your lawyer and just get this over with so you can go home?" in hopes that you'll cave in.
Meanwhile, the prosecutor has everything in his arsenal. In a truly just system, you'd be charged and THEN offered the chance to plead guilty for a reduced sentence. You'd know what the charges are, period. In our system, they offer you to "plead to a lower charge", or else they hit you with 20+ charges and all they need is to make one kinda-sorta stick with a tilted jury. People quite often plead down, not because they are guilty, but because they calculate that it's worth the injustice of pleading guilty when they're innocent just to avoid the intensive risk involved in the padded, tilted trial where the judge and prosecutor and cops are all weekend drinking buddies.
In your example, the guy was "guilty" - but not of the overblown charge they wanted.
In thousands of other cases, innocent people go to jail facing the "risk" of decades in prison when they can "plead down" to a few years that they shouldn't have to serve at all.
If the prosecutors offer a plea deal, in a just society, that's all the charges they would have to face, period. Not this "you can plead to this but if you don't we throw 100 more charges on top and one of them is sure to stick or else we just hold you in jail for 5 years holding separate state/federal/etc trials" bullcrap that they pull all the time.
Instructions on how to use (or modify) a tool are instructions on how to use or modify a tool. Nothing more.
"Illegal" (e.g. not-street-legal) modifications to a car? Done for racing, confined to racing tracks, A-OK. Same thing taken to the street? Not ok. How about utilities that can help you repair your own X-box if it has a dead hard drive? Also plausibly able to "softmod" it, but repairing your own things is a legit use. Should it be illegal?
Criminalizing the dissemination of information is ridiculous no matter what.
And that's a great example of why you should never talk to the cops. EVER.
It's not their job to be fair. It's their job to get you to say something incriminating. Functionally, it's the cops' job to "aid and abet" the prosecutors' office in getting innocent people convicted.
Anyone who says different, is a clueless idealistic moron. You have the 5th amendment right to keep your mouth shut for a reason: NEVER say anything to the cops.
According to that logic, by selling a textbook on how to use a soldering iron, the book companies are "aiding and abetting" all sorts of things.
Please.
No, it's called "padding the charges to force a plea deal."
They say "well we COULD charge you with xyzqelsoerjninn but instead, we'll let you 'plead out to just xyz with reduced time'" and they're hoping to get a conviction off of it.
Not to mention this is federal court, so chances are the judge is on someone's (hollywierd, cable cartel, etc) payroll on the side.
Thousands of innocent people "plead guilty" thanks to this shit every year.
It's called "padding the charges to try to force a plea deal", and it's one of the reasons our justice system is so fucked up.
Thousands of people plead guilty to shit they didn't do each year, because they're offered the "reasonable" alternative - accept a jail sentence of X amount, OR get 5x the time and financially ruined and never be able to work again because they had the "temerity" to protest their innocence.
Welcome to America. "Justice" means jack shit here.
Please learn basic history or STFU
Says the person who obviously has lived in a cave for the last 30 years. Who was writing the budgets when Reagan was president? Are you aware how much money was wasted by Carter? How much bigger is the deficit of this year's budget (Obama's supposed "first" budget according to his supporters) than the supposedly "historic" one he signed last year and then blamed on Bush?
Please actually do the research on your answer.
Or, since you obviously have the IQ of your average supermarket-grade kumquat, follow your own advice and STFU.
Bullshit.
We have exactly three types of politicians: the ones who inherited money (didn't lift a fucking finger to earn it), the lawyers (the ones who make their living by making contracts so incomprehensibly complex that people have to hire lawyers just to read the damn things), and the racist fucks who get donations everytime they say something stupid (see also: Robert "KKK" Byrd, Sheila Jackson Lee, etc).
Ok, we have that one guy over there who isn't, but he's a used car salesman. Would you trust a used car salesman either?