Your question about starvation besides being morbid shows a profound lack of compassion or understanding about those who suffer from chronic hunger and malnutrition and the very nature of starvation itself. Very few people literally "Starve to death" in America. You can eat garbage, you can eat almost anything (including tree bark and animal feces, in some places in the deep South during the 60s, as a result of abject poverty, a significant population was reduced to eating dirt with all the health impacts that created), you just need to be hungry enough. Its amazingly hard to starve to death, you can survive appalling levels of malnutrition especially in a country where you can go behind any fast food place or market and eat their garbage. That doesn't even vaguely suggest things are good here by a pretty serious stretch. It took months, even years to starve people to death in Nazi concentration camps. So I guess you win some kind of intellectual victory, America isn't as bad as a Nazi concentration camp, bravo, well played.
As well, our government has avoided looking at death directly attributable to starvation and malnutrition. Its very hard to find these values. I was able to find the following statistics regarding cause of death by percentage, however there is no information regarding what part of these values is cause purely from starvation.
The values I found are;
Respiratory Infections, 6.95% of total deaths
Parinatal conditions, 4.82% of total deaths
Diarrheal Disease, 3.15% of total deaths
Nutritional deficiencies, 0.85% of total deaths
Anemia, 0.24% of total deaths
So figure deaths caused by conditions of malnutrition exist inside a pool of conditions representing about 16% of all deaths. The bottom two conditions would be almost entirely represented by starvation as cause, the middle two strongly represented by those suffering malnutrition, and the first cause only somewhat represented by complications caused by malnutrition. Even so, its fair to say that starvation and malnutrition is a significant factor in between 5% to 10% of total deaths in the country. If you just need a number, look up total deaths and take at least 5%.
The people killed in Iraq were not slaughtered in death camps, however living conditions in the country as a whole are horrific, and we're responsible for a near collapse of the nations operational infrastructure, certainly contributing to deaths and suffering. By the way we don't send combatants to death camps ourselves. We commit rendition and take people to other countries who will torture or kill them on our behalf, we just love that plausible deniability (though GitMo and other U.S. combatant detainee sites have been involved in what certainly amounts to breaches of the Geneva Convention.) There have been significant murders between Sunni and Shiites, and we would be the one's who destabilized relations between the sects in Iraq and set up a situation where Iran would now be the primary political influence in Iraq. The are no great numbers for the number of civilian casualties, but from 2003 -2011 our best guess is over 100,000 civilians with about another 50,000 dead combatants. Go here for a quick look. Please look up the 14 common attributes of a Fascist states. You'll find the behavior of George W. Bush and his cabinet are by DEFINITION a fascist invasion on Iraq, a misadventure designed specifically to control Iraq's oil supply and build a base of political influence in the middle east facing Iran outside of Saudi Arabia. This is not the place for arguing over 100 points, but if you even bothered to read a single reliable source of news you wouldn't even be asking this questions.
What are you smoking? There is no Federal Referendum in the United States. There are people EVERYWHERE howling for one, but as of yet, it doesn't exist. I would also suggest, that those currently in control would be more frightened of a National Re
In the mid 90s I worked with several good friends on a research project investigating the sexually based dimorphism of the human corpus collosum. It not only looked at the dimorphism among a large Stanford based MRI baseline data set, but also looked at hundreds of people from around the world, who were gay, lesbian and transgendered to determine if preference and/or gender identity could be fully or partially explained by brain morphology (i.e. brain sexing.) The project was not affiliated with any school or industrial organization. It was a fascinating project.
This is one of the most cynical, ignorant responses I've ever read. In America people don't die of "Hunger". It looks bad. People die of the diseases that are caused by hunger; still birth and birth complications, anemia, heart failure, diarrheal diseases, pneumonia and diseases of an immune system compromised by malnutrition. What is clear, is that today, the condition of the poor and hungry in America is very near its all time worst. That and compared to other developed nations America is quick slipping into the kinds of statistical health and mortality rates one might expect from a third world country.
Its kind of hard to tell how many innocent people we've "Killed by Accident" in other countries over the last ten years, but its somewhere over a hundred thousand in Iraq alone. As for our new for profit prisons, new laws have been passed and are being passed to dramatically extend prison terms for minor offenses and imprison people who have traditionally not gone to prison. All to supply a new prison workforce in for profit prisons. We've begun the process of criminalizing poverty and mental illness. It may not be death camps or ethnic cleansing, but its certainly nothing like Freedom or Liberty either.
All those new billionaires, a bunch have been created by legitimate business breakthroughs, but a huge number of those new wealthy over the last ten years have gotten their by manipulating stock markets, insane gyrations caused by derivatives and other destructive instruments, and plain simple corporate greed. Wealthy and powerful executives bleeding their own companies and building financial empires on the backs of the middle class.
The American dream is in serious danger. Banks have taken hundreds of billions in tax payer bailouts and then sat on the money, refusing to loan money to stimulate the economy and empower new entrepreneurs. A recent report says class mobility is now easier in Europe, than America. Intelligence, hard work and talent are no longer the only ingredients required to succeed. Oh and as for that referendum, there are now nearly a thousand lobbyists per representative in Washinton D.C. These people wield tremendous influence with large campaign contributions and are the walking army representing the powerful and wealthy in this country today. The average citizen has no way to compete with that, save a grassroots movement to get the entire country to act in concert against an issue. The problem is that those in power have systematically thrown up a wall of distractions, gay marriage, abortion, immigration. All things to get the public wound up and distracted while greedy men go about their business. We've been bled, mislead, and if we don't move soon, may be left for dead. The fact that you can't see this is sad. This is not the country of our Fathers and we had best take it back if we still can.
Why not sell observing time over the internet? I'll bet there would be folks interested all over the world who would be willing to rent observing time over the internet. Just put a decent digital camera on the scope and interface the scopes to a network server. Allow folks to do some interesting work on both scopes when you're not using them for viewing. Check the online rates for telescope time, figure what, perhaps a 25%-50% rent out, and you should have more than enough to cover you costs and still put a little money aside for improving the observatory and have 100-150 nights a year of observing left over.
By the way, put a 105mm ELD refractor on the 20 inch as a finder scope (Orion has fair sized ELDs for a great price.) Put an image intensifier and a webcam on the 105mm to allow your internet users real time searching for deep space objects and your online users will be very happy. Oh and an automated filter loader to allow creating those beautiful synthetic colored images. Your initial outlay of cash would be what $10,000? Figure with a little advertisement in the popular science and astronomy magazines, you could recoup that in about 6-8 months and by your second year start making a profit.
Are you using the scopes primarily for photographic or visual research? If it turns out you can't keep them, would you at all be interested in having them set up in an observatory in the U.S. in a great location (high altitude desert, with great seeing) with the promise you and yours would have plenty of scope time over internet?
Today a nuclear device was detonated in Abuja Nigeria. The source of the detonation is unknown and nobody is claiming responsibility, but sources say that ground zero appears to have been an internet cafe.
Capitulating? Are you insane. The supreme court was STUFFED with justices for the express purpose of giving corporations anything they damn well want. They didn't Capitulate, they laid down, spread their leg wide and screamed "Me love you long time" at the top of their lungs. Capitulate... what the hell are you smoking???
Oh and don't forget that for every representative in D.C. there are about 600 paid lobbyist representing all those monied interests and the vast majority of those lobbyists are ex representatives who were offered fat lobbying jobs before their terms ended so that's a HUGE source of bribery. As has already been said, the Congress write the laws controlling what Congress can and can't do, so at this point as long as they don't rape babies on the bodies of dead nuns in the town square at high noon, they pretty much walk away free and clear.
They just recently got embarrassed into repealing a law that allowed them to invest in stock with prior knowledge of impending events, what we refer to as insider trading. Anyone else does that and the FTC will march right up their hinnies with torches and pitchforks. Most of the current Congress critters have made millions in legal insider trading. Like I said, it was embarrassing.
The prior president, a professional douchebag for hire, put a corporate hitman in the supreme court by the name of... well anyway, he and several of his cronies shoved a decision through that stated Corporations have the right to give politicians as much as they bloody well like. You can see the problem that causes. So now we have the best Government money can buy.
This is the problem. Vapid, ignorant, uninterested people who don't even bother to illuminate the vast empty place between their ears. You mention Nazis. So let's do this by the numbers. WHY WERE NAZIS BAD? Because they were Fascists and slaughtered a bunch of innocent folks. What is a Fascist? Well, Mussolini, a Fascist, said its the corporate state. Why is this bad? Well when a nation's corporations determine the fate of that nation and its people all kind of predictable things, bad things, begin to happen. You see profit is a great thing to motivate people, but as a guiding target for a society, it can lead to dark things. At first everything is great and the society enjoys explosive growth. But soon, the system begins to cannibalize itself. Ultimately the wheels come off, it crashes and explodes, and often a lot of people die. That why we don't like fascism. If you want to know how to tell a Fascist State here are some signs to look at. If you've not been in a coma for the last decade, you may notice that modern day America now has something in common with Germany and sadly its not the love of beer. So your Nazi comment as clever as you might have thought it was echoes a sad and frightening irony.
As for soup kitchens and bread lines, are you brain damaged? Here, try these sites: People in line at foodbank, The State of Poverty in America, What replaced the Soup Kitchens, The real state of Unemployment in America Today, Tent Cities Sprouting up all over the country. One in five children in America today goes to bed hungry. One in six people in this country suffers chronic malnutrition. One in eight is out of work and can't find employment. Entire regions of America have been depressed for so long, they now have names like "The Rust Belt." One in seven people in this country is saved from hunger by food stamps or federal food programs. There are scenes all over the country of people lined up for blocks waiting for food from food banks. There are shanty towns and tent cities across the nation of homeless people who were formerly middle class, and tens of millions of middle class Americans who live a single pay check away from becoming homeless. Food banks are pleading for support, they've never before been required to support so many people and many are on the verge of collapse. Are you so blind and poorly informed that you don't even see the profound state of social collapse around you? Are you sleep walking? Medicated? Either you have no mind or you have no heart, please which is it?
As for the ruling class, the top 400 people in this country now have the same wealth as the bottom HALF of the country, over 160,000,000 people. The imbalance of wealth in America today is greater THAN ANY TIME IN HUMAN HISTORY. That is the ruling class. They have hijacked our government. They have hijacked the media and our sources of free information. They have robbed us of our Bill of Rights and damaged our form of government to the very edge of its ability to be repaired. They are working hard to rob us of our last best hope for human freedom and development, the internet.
I don't advocate violence, and never have, but I tell you now, I am plenty angry. I pray that we find our way back without the spilling of blood, but I have a hard time imagining a bright future with so many like you walking the street today. You scare me more than the despots.
Clearly you haven't been paying attention. Media has been consolidated. Television, Radio and virtually all printed media have been consolidated to what, a dozen companies, fewer?. The only free sources of information left are the internet and short wave radio. Leading us back to SOPA and PIPA... hello?!!! Have you not seen 60 Minutes? Every phone call, every email, every financial transaction over $10,000 is being scrutinized by powerful search algorithms at the CIA, FBI and NSA. Say or write the wrong combination of words and get a really BIG SURPRISE!
Can you see it now. All your information will come from people who want you to see and think only what they want. You couldn't have a thoughtful intelligent show like MASH on TV today. It questioned authority and put man's inhumanity on trial. Instead today we have American Idol, and vote for some sheep to escape the herd. Go watch "Farehheit 451", watch the seen of Montag's wife "acting" and tell me we aren't right there, right now.
Do you think for a minute if SOPA passes that you'll see anything on the internet that you wouldn't see on TV? At best Youtube would just degenerate into one of several info-tainment portals.
Now I do agree that we still may be able to rise to the occasion and take back what is rightfully ours, but we best act soon, because our openings for such are fast closing. Who the FSCK do you think the Wachowskis were talking to when they made "V"? WAKE UP!!!
Sir, I have nothing but the greatest of respect for the Israeli people and I do have profound empathy for their fear and suffering. Though not Jewish, I have many friends who are and have shared their celebrations all my life. I've broken bread with my friends orthodox and not, Shabbat and Seder. I've stood beside a good friend as he joyfully blew his shofar, so believe me when I tell you I love your culture, and count your people among the very best of my friends.
I think Israel has dealt with the Palestinians poorly. These were an angry and displaced people from the very start. I realize the Jews were themselves just confronting the emotional trauma of the holocaust, but if they'd embraced their angry neighbors, instead of a tooth for a tooth and an eye for an eye. If they'd have said at the very start "We're here as an attempt to address an unforgivable atrocity committed against our people and therefore we devote ourselves to ensuring that atrocities won't be further propagated in righting that wrong." The world might be a very different place today. Part of the problem is that of demonizing others. The Nazis portrayed Jews and less than animals, to be reviled, so slaughtering millions was acceptable. When Israel tries to portray Palestinians as animals deserving nothing but extermination, you simply hurt your own case and lower yourself to the level of those you despise most.
I do not excuse the atrocities committed against Israel. I've spoken to a young man who lives in Jerusalem, who carried a girl blocks to a hospital in his arms after a bus bombing. She died in his arms and for the longest time he wanted to see every Palestinian slaughtered. I've also seen armed Jewish soldiers return rocks thrown by children with automatic machine gun fire on Palestinian land. I've seen innocent Palestinians killed, homes bombed and innocents tortured. I've seen Israel expanding settlements where they do not belong. And I've seen an Israeli slaughter his own Prime Minister for trying to bring equitable peace to the region. Israel has committed its own atrocities and what's happening in Palestine today is itself a genocide. Maybe its not fair, but I expect more of the Jewish people. I expect them to rise above their hate and fear and anger and find a moral solution that dignifies all parties. Maybe that's too much to much to expect of anyone, but I hope not.
By the way, that young man who carried the girl? He's devoted his life to bringing peace to the Middle East. I can't tell you how proud I am of him
First of all, the fact that Mr. Obama has made it clear he respects the Constitution doesn't mean some other idiot (let's say some clone of Mr. Obama's predecessor) who neither understands the Constitution nor respects it, won't add or remove a section of this legislation resulting in the total gutting of due processor and citizen's civil rights. Even with Mr Obama, you think if someone declared open season on the White House, that they wouldn't forget all about that "Constitutional Stuff"? The American Civil Liberty Union states that the lack of duration or geographic limitation of this law makes it particularly troubling. If for one moment, you don't think this isn't a serious brick in a wall that spells totalitarianism, you my friend need a reality check. There is no way to be concerned enough about this legislation.
As for shooting puppets vs. puppet masters, excuse me, but the line of puppets is longer than the eye can see, I hope you have a lot of ammunition. Other than satisfying your unwholesome distaste for compromised statesmen, I have to ask why plug pawns and leave the the higher point pieces walking the chess board with impunity? Anyway, the act of parting some fools hair (no matter how deserving) has never been the answer, to quote Gandhi "I appall the use of violence, because even when it seems good; the good is only temporary, the bad it does is always permanent."
You may be right, it may be too late, especially with a general populace that is superstitious, mislead, misinformed and sadly complacent. I still hope that a small dedicated group of people can move the masses. Its happened before and today more than ever, a single committed voice can make a real difference.
The problem isn't that government is inherently failed or bad. Its that human being are primates and that if we don't design our institutions to manage that fact responsibly, we will in the end lose our institutions to the lowest and worst of human impulses. Our wise founding Fathers built checks and balances into the system because they honestly didn't trust "Those who govern" any further than they could throw them. That is nothing less than pure genius, and may be the most magnificent single gift they gave us.
We've in our ignorance and self interest, given the inmates the key to the asylum. Human enterprise, government, corporation, even non profit enterprises are all subject to the human need to serve ego and garner wealth. By limiting government, but not corporation, we've allowed our corporations to buy our government so now they are one and the same. They've removed checks and balances. So it doesn't matter what Congress understands, only what its paid to vote for.
We can design games that work, zero sum games and a wide variety of systems that serve the intended purpose without allowing the participants from taking wealth or power for their participation. Our government needs to be engineered to both eliminate concentration of power and manage clear separation from church and business. In fact, government should be fire-walled, to ensure no other social entity other than the people can exercise influence. As well, we need to remove the rights of human beings from corporations. We need to overhaul our law to serve people and not corporations. We need to reinstate the bill of rights from the ground up, and remove any law that abridges those rights. In short we need to take our country back and clean up the mess that took 30 years to make.
Friend, I want you to stop for a moment, maybe have a good friend slap you in the face or splash you with some cold water, you know, get you present to the here and now. Our President just signed the National Defense Authorization Act. This bill dramatically extends the Patriot Act, and now allows the government to detain American citizens at home and abroad without due process. With the stroke of a pen, your government has just declared WAR ON YOU! Over the last decade they have constructed a completely privatized army ready and waiting, as some subsidiary of Halliburton, only too happy to shoot you as easily as they did strangers in Iraq (do you really for a moment think our soldiers needed guarding by Blackwater employees in Iaq?)
You think the wealthy and powerful are just going to sit still high on a hill and let you take potshots. You've been bled dry, used badly by a host of political whores who attained wealth and power by sucking the teat of those who now own this country. And now we sit on the verge of a new society, a fascist state where all liberty and freedom has been sequestered to those who rule. Do you think for a second this is some strange alignment of the stars or an accident of fate? In the late 70s business and wealthy conservative leaders spent billions on conservative think tanks, strategizing ways take our nation over, and move government out of the venue of politics and into the venue of Wallstreet marketing. Since then, our candidates have been bought and sold. The take-over is near complete, all they have to do is have an "Emergency" and declare marshal law.
You want to get this deep down in your bones. You are the terrorist. The wealthy and powerful are well educated. They remember what happened to the French elite during their revolution, and you best believe they like the way their heads are attached to their necks. SOPA and PIPA are just another small nudge down the road called "You are just property" and we can crush you any time we please. When you speak about shooting representatives, I say first, your gun is pointed at the puppet and not the puppet master. I say second, you justify their fear and what you start will end in horror and blood for a great many innocent people, perhaps for all of us. We have a tiny, tiny, small, little window of opportunity still open to take our government back, by ballot box. People need to be informed what it going on, and stop listening to that little lying box in the living-room which is now a wholly owned outlet of the very people of whom I speak. The internet is still free enough, you just have to pick sane sources, sadly those same people own most of the wires and they are fighting hard to rob you of that last bit of light. Its time to stand on a very high place and say, we will not give up our freedom. We are taking our nation back, and we will clean up the horror these people have made. I used to think this was just the boundless greed of a few ego maniacs. The pattern is clear now. This is a coup is slow motion. The road ahead in any case is broken and will be hard to travel, the only question left is will we travel it as free men or slaves to ungrateful despots.
Are you kidding me? Do you remember history in school? History is the story of life, the dramas and ideas that made this very moment possible filled with incredible feats of courage and sacrifice. And elementary school boils it down to the banal tasteless pap that drives kids brain-dead. You think for even a femtosecond they wouldn't do exactly the same thing to teaching computer history?
Stop teaching kids crap. Stupid little rhymes like "In fourteen hundred and ninety two..." Instead, give kids things to play with. Explain the significance of the play. Watch movies. Listen to music. Explain how music used to be made on vinyl platters and this guy named Edison had this amazingly cool idea. And how now we have these machines that work so fast that they can cut a second of music into tens of thousands of little pieces and encode that as information, then latter put it all back together again and play it exactly the same somewhere else. The world is bug fscking amazing! Awesome, magical, mysterious. Kids are born desperate, literllay starving to understand and we kill them off in prepubescent nursing homes, and call it education.
I just recently saw these little beauties, they're called cubelets. how much fun do you think your kids could have with these? Then teaching them how they work, and how one can combine an action with a flow of information and suddenly you have a living OO representations that's as natural as breathing. Everything is information. Information naturally forms language. From DNA to Swahili. The human mind is the universe trying to understand itself. What child wouldn't be fascinated with the amazing truth about the world. All you ever have to do is feed the wonder.
Sadly most corporate management has trivialized the importance of planning for the growing strength and frequency of precisely this kind of natural disaster. Global climate change is clearly happening and whatever its cause, it makes good solid predictions of where to be careful and where to be safe. Heavier flooding particularly near large bodies of water and tropical regions is well understood. Lowlands will experience more frequent and substantial flooding events. Wildfires and social impact to local populations will be significant as the growing number of flooding and drought events hit tropical and temperate zones around the world.
Business needs to stop politicizing climate change, and begin using the data to protect production in the face of growing environmental instability.
Please accept my humblest apology for those who are in pain, and in their pain may be less than gracious to you and yours. There have always been immigrants to this country. For the most part, their arrival was met by anger and frustration at those whose jobs were impacted by their arrival. Its a normal thing here. Sadly that puts you at the bottom of the Schist List. Worse, you aren't taking low paying minimum wage service jobs, you're hitting us at the upper middle class region and for the first time people who normally never see the threat you impose, feel seriously put upon.
We have for generations been told by our political representatives that we have, if not the right, at least the expectation of good work available for all. Your coming here threatens this. You can't compare life here with life in India. We for the longest time were a nation with a low population density and a high natural resource level. That meant that anyone with even the slightest intent, a functioning frontal lobe and a smattering of gumption could fully expect to thrive and if lucky even become wealthy. By opening our economic borders to the world, our wealth has exploded out and the world's people have exploded in. The effect is to quickly make America a second and potentially a third world nation in what amounts to record time. We used to keep a very high economic wall around us to artificially maintain our standards of living. Of course that came at the price of keeping poorer nations poor.
You might want to have a little compassion for people being pinched in the adjustment. I don't blame you for wanting a better life. Some will. I blame short sighted, greedy men who have no vision and think that human beings are an interchangeable commodity. Since 1980 our way of life has been hijacked by blind corporate interest. Its been a slow motion car wreck for our environment, our middle class, and the body of laws and distinctions that form our system of civil rights. Business people simply can't distinguish an American engineer from an Indian engineer, its all head count to them. From my experience of Indian engineers, most of you are extremely well trained and at the top of your classes. However, to get there you often have a rather narrow technological focus (because that is what the market is looking for) and in the process of getting there you often neglect the kind of broader education that would provide you with the kind of fun, inventive and creative skills that I find so prevalent in American engineers. This makes Indian engineers a bit more rigid, less adaptable and less figurative in their undertakings. For a tenth run on a legacy product that's wonderful. For a first run at a start-up that's a disaster. The start-up doesn't need product X,00000000.000000. It needs product X +/- 4. You then dance with change as your customers tell you what they really want. This is the frustration you hear in the parent responses comment. Its often hard for artists to play with accountants and at their best, America's scientists and engineers have artistic souls.
So there is a place here for you and your son. You just want to notice for whom the bell tolls, because you best of all should know the benefits and dangers of the Karmic Wheel... those it raises today, it rolls over tomorrow. In the end if we feel entitled, its because for the longest time, our government was interested in protecting our working class, and we were entitled. Just as your government is now doing, so you should be very careful about who you are judging because once our economies reach parity, you may live to regret the very words you speak. And if your son grows up in this culture, who knows, you may find yourself with a rapper and not an engineer.
A friend of mine in Eugene Or., ended up in a fray with a TSA agent. He has seizures. The result of a brain injury when he was a child (think car accident.) His seizures manifest by loud sometime ranting behavior. He's careful to explain to people not to take it personal or seriously, because he simply can't help it and it doesn't mean anything. While collecting his social security check, he had a dispute with a clerk, which escalated and was asked to go outside. There was a TSA agent in the area who overheard him yelling at the security guard. He explained his problem, what the clerk had done wrong, and why he was yelling.
The TSA agent determined he was a threat and proceeded to beat the ever living hell out of him. When my friend continued to try to explain, he was further charged with resisting and was ultimately charged with over half a dozen felony counts including assaulting a TSA agent. Of course the humorous part is that my friend is about five foot three, one hundred and fifteen pounds soaking wet and the TSA agent was over six foot and more than a hundred pounds heavier. All the while claiming my friend was threatening and menacing. It took two years to finally resolve this in court. It was a ridiculous trial and he escaped jail time by the skin of his teeth and though the agent clearly used excessive force, was never held responsible for his actions.
Our society is shifting in dark and unpleasant ways, and I fear that if the public at large doesn't do something soon, the window of opportunity to put things right may pass us by.
Not to put too fine a point on it, It was immigrant Irish who cleaned up the swamps surrounding New Orleans and Baton Rouge, because nobody would consider using an expensive slave to do what was considered effectively a suicide job. The Irish who arrived fresh from the potato famines were considered less than human. They were used for all kinds of jobs ranging from clearing disease infested swamps to military cannon fodder. Any place where you wanted a steady supply of disposable human beings. Same with the Chinese building the railroad from the west. Slave were valuable. Immigrants, not so much.
Friend, its not dwindling salaries. Its NO SALARIES. In 1970 99% of the clothing Americans wore was made in the United States. Today 99% is made out of country. The clothing industrial for all intents and purposes has been eliminated from this country. So go right ahead, tell the American worker "Y'all have to live on 35% of your highest point wage and not only is your child not going to college, you'd better like the car you have because you're driving it till the wheels fall off, oh, and you need to sell the house and move into a 2 bedroom apartment because you sure as Jebus made little green apples aren't going to be able to afford the tax, insurance and maintenance." How fast do you think the rioting will start? How about we come up with a new product made from starving babies, nip the poor right in the bud as it were. We'll call it SoylentAC.
Now tell American workers "Guys, the world's economy is flattening out so for maybe 5 to 10 years, all the jobs are leaving the country. Don't worry, when the working wage of an American is the same as for a Somali street person, all the jobs will be back and you too can work 16 hours a day for all the gruel you can choke down. Actually it won't be that bad, because with 5 to 10 years of no income, most of you will be dead anyway, so with only a handful of workers left there'll be plenty of work to go around." Explain to me how any part of that is in any way acceptable.
You throw that comment off pretty glibly Mr. AC. What makes you think you won't be one the folks that starves on the street when there are ten guys in other countries happy to do your job for less than you can live on.
You know, this is a really difficult problem and because everything is part of a larger dynamical system, so often pressure applied anywhere has unexpected results. that said, I'm less interested in punishing foreign products, and far more interested in splinting the break in our economic system. I believe the best thing to to do is applying firm but even pressure on corporations to do what in the end is actually in their own best interest (healthy workforce = healthy consumer = healthy economy = happy corporation), and explain to them openly, all along the way we're all trying to do 'X', because we want to create 'Y', and 'Y' is good for you and me both, so please don't struggle too much.
In the end its a little like being a good parent. You can't be your children's friend. A child will want to eat candy and not their vegetables. This is perfect childhood logic, candy is delicious. Its up to a responsible party (the Parent) to ensure the child does want is good for the child and good for society (grows up to be a good citizen.) For the exact same reason, a corporation (an entity with only one purpose, make profit), needs a responsible external party to make certain it does what's good for it and society. We do this by creating a body of laws and regulations. Just as a parent manages a child by regulating that which is important to the child, a government must regulate that which is important to the corporation, as we already said, that would be profit. If it profits a corporation to be responsible, they will be responsible. Just put the dots close together and point the way and let them figure it out for themselves.
And for the "Objectivists" among us who think there is something magical in the intelligence of the marketplace, I would posit that the average corporation is no brighter intrinsically than a 5 year old child. It will kill itself in the long term for short term profit, it happens every day. I'm somehow fascinated by people who'd never dream of letting an out of control 5 year old run amok, but would never dream of constraining corporate mischief and misbehavior. CAN YOU SAY CREDIT DEFAULT SWAP!!! We are now chewing on the broken dreams of greedy men and women. Its time for our society to grow a pair, and spank the wicked, reward the steadfast, and tell the entire class to be quiet and do as they are told.
Perhaps you should look up what a shift from 70% to 57% from 1980 means. That is, when you compare the amount provided by private sector research investment and what happened to that research. So just throwing off a smug comment about statistics that actually contributes nothing to the conversation is at best dilatory, you might want to bother digging a little deeper into the facts behind the conversation.
Here are some interesting questions whose answers would be most illuminating;
1. What was the total spending on research per year for the United States since 1980?
2. By dollars spent or GDP%, what was the amount spent by the US government vs Corporate sources?
3. What percentage of that research was made available for public consumption vs what was bound up in corporate patents per year?
4. What was the breakdown of investment dollars or GDP%, tending over the 30 years in question?
For the most part, the government spent significantly less on research over the last 30 years. Moreover, though the total spending on research per year leading up to 2005 wavered between 2 and 3 percent of the GDP, we are currently in something of a research slump. Research spending for the last 6 years has remained virtually constant, except for defense based research which increased markedly. In short, those with whom we are competing, are substantially outspending us in research, which every viable source tells us is one of Governments best investments (extremely high return on investment), with the exception of military research which has for the most part, a rather low return on investment. Finally, corporate research tends to get tied up in patents (I hope you're not surprised) meaning that government research often but not always has more public value. There is a current push to have University research that has been government funded released to public access. Of course the Universities are complaining, but if the research was paid for by tax dollars, all Americans should receive the benefit.
If you'd like to evaluate some of the source reference for these observations I suggest The Congressional Budget Office and perhaps this document by the AASS. There are plenty of other sources if you'd bother to research the issue. Other iInteresting sources put us in global context and point at how we've degenerated into our current political, economic and sociological state. If it weren't so worrisome, it would be fascinating.
Its not the issue of racism. Its the wholesale destruction of entire sectors of the work force as companies look for ways to cut their bottom line. I'm looking for a tech job in the silicon valley. Over the last 3 months I have to say I'm getting sick and tired of not having spoken to a single person who is American, speaks without an intense Indian or Chinese accent (in fact I may have passed over perfectly good jobs because the person speaking to me was completely and I mean completely unintelligible.) I've worked with hundreds of people from India and China (hell I'm half Chinese, my Mother is Chinese, I was born in Taiwan.) I don't have a problem with these people's race, I like them, I like their food, I love their cultures. I have a problem with the fact that I've watched my salary slowly erode to about 50%. How am I supposed to compete with a tidal wave of HB-1 visas who come from a country with a billion people so the fact that they represent the top half a percentile and have a Masters degree, still means there are millions of them and they're perfectly willing to take my job at half the price. If it now takes a Masters Degree to get a job pushing a broom in the valley because of the glut of skilled foreign workers, there's no room for native workers, how is a native worker supposed to compete. there's no finance for older native workers to improve themselves (the collapsing state economy has steadily made going back to school harder and harder.) There's no market for young fresh native workers coming out of school. All the while, money that would be spent here to improve our State's economy is being pumped into making China or India more wealthy.
Out sourcing jobs in general and the tech market in particular is, in my opinion the very best way possible to implode both America's economy and future ability to determine it's own technological future. All you have to do to make something disappear in America is stop investing in it. Stop investing in skilled American workers, and surprise, in no time at all, they'll just go away. I have good friends who used to be happy engineers, engineering away. Now they cook food, or sell real estate (good luck with that), or they've moved into the health care industry. What they don't do is engineering. All it took was two massive economic busts since 2001. I look at the ads today on DICE, and its crazy what they're asking now for a customer support engineer. If you're tired of talking to people with Punjabi accents think enough to dull a knife when you call for technical support, tell the vendors you deal with, that you want to speak to an American support engineers in the future, in fact let them know you will now stop doing business with companies that outsource their support. OR, you won't have to worry any more, because very soon there won't be any here to do the job anyway.
Outsourcing makes sense for tiny start-ups paying to realize a dream out of there own packets in the midst of the bootstrap (though as our currency meets parity with the yuan and the rupee, even this use is quick disappearing.) I'm just saying, we need to provide serious tax incentives for companies that use native workers and even more serious tax liabilities for companies that heavily outsource. The world is flattening out economically, and that's probably a good thing at a number of levels. But until we reach that point, if we don't protect our working class, we'll destroy the American consumer, and then where's our economy? We're in the midst of the economic spasms caused by American corporations trying to squeeze the beast from both ends and killing off the American workforce in the process. Its time to say enough. its time to ensure that Americans have meaningful work first, because short-sighted runs to profit ultimately hurt everyone save a vanishingly small few. This blind free-fall to the bottom of the pig trough by Corporate America needs to come to a crashing halt, while there's something still left to save.
At one level I agree. The problem is that you're painting with a mighty broad brush. If what you say is true, then virtually all corporate IP is equally evil, and the use of patents to protect one's "ideological turf" is as bad as using IP to extort the corporate landscape. There is nothing inherently wrong with a corporation or person having self interest. In fact self interest is at the crux of our design, even our genes want to survive.
There are ethical questions about what we are willing to do to fulfill our own personal interest. Some look for constructive answers to the question, others find solutions that are destructive. I would argue that defending yourself from constant attack, though not purely constructive is certainly not destructive. Its sad that our business landscape has degenerated into IP turf wars, but Google didn't invent that either. Using IP as a weapon to demand tribute, control economies, destroy competition and/or dominate the playing field would fall under the heading of destructive acts of self interest. Patent Trolls, do not contribute to society, they get wealthy by destroying innovation and they are simply parasites. We need to build a little more pest control into our IP legal system, its horribly broken.
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Your question about starvation besides being morbid shows a profound lack of compassion or understanding about those who suffer from chronic hunger and malnutrition and the very nature of starvation itself. Very few people literally "Starve to death" in America. You can eat garbage, you can eat almost anything (including tree bark and animal feces, in some places in the deep South during the 60s, as a result of abject poverty, a significant population was reduced to eating dirt with all the health impacts that created), you just need to be hungry enough. Its amazingly hard to starve to death, you can survive appalling levels of malnutrition especially in a country where you can go behind any fast food place or market and eat their garbage. That doesn't even vaguely suggest things are good here by a pretty serious stretch. It took months, even years to starve people to death in Nazi concentration camps. So I guess you win some kind of intellectual victory, America isn't as bad as a Nazi concentration camp, bravo, well played.
As well, our government has avoided looking at death directly attributable to starvation and malnutrition. Its very hard to find these values. I was able to find the following statistics regarding cause of death by percentage, however there is no information regarding what part of these values is cause purely from starvation.
The values I found are;
So figure deaths caused by conditions of malnutrition exist inside a pool of conditions representing about 16% of all deaths. The bottom two conditions would be almost entirely represented by starvation as cause, the middle two strongly represented by those suffering malnutrition, and the first cause only somewhat represented by complications caused by malnutrition. Even so, its fair to say that starvation and malnutrition is a significant factor in between 5% to 10% of total deaths in the country. If you just need a number, look up total deaths and take at least 5%.
The people killed in Iraq were not slaughtered in death camps, however living conditions in the country as a whole are horrific, and we're responsible for a near collapse of the nations operational infrastructure, certainly contributing to deaths and suffering. By the way we don't send combatants to death camps ourselves. We commit rendition and take people to other countries who will torture or kill them on our behalf, we just love that plausible deniability (though GitMo and other U.S. combatant detainee sites have been involved in what certainly amounts to breaches of the Geneva Convention.) There have been significant murders between Sunni and Shiites, and we would be the one's who destabilized relations between the sects in Iraq and set up a situation where Iran would now be the primary political influence in Iraq. The are no great numbers for the number of civilian casualties, but from 2003 -2011 our best guess is over 100,000 civilians with about another 50,000 dead combatants. Go here for a quick look. Please look up the 14 common attributes of a Fascist states. You'll find the behavior of George W. Bush and his cabinet are by DEFINITION a fascist invasion on Iraq, a misadventure designed specifically to control Iraq's oil supply and build a base of political influence in the middle east facing Iran outside of Saudi Arabia. This is not the place for arguing over 100 points, but if you even bothered to read a single reliable source of news you wouldn't even be asking this questions.
What are you smoking? There is no Federal Referendum in the United States. There are people EVERYWHERE howling for one, but as of yet, it doesn't exist. I would also suggest, that those currently in control would be more frightened of a National Re
In the mid 90s I worked with several good friends on a research project investigating the sexually based dimorphism of the human corpus collosum. It not only looked at the dimorphism among a large Stanford based MRI baseline data set, but also looked at hundreds of people from around the world, who were gay, lesbian and transgendered to determine if preference and/or gender identity could be fully or partially explained by brain morphology (i.e. brain sexing.) The project was not affiliated with any school or industrial organization. It was a fascinating project.
This is one of the most cynical, ignorant responses I've ever read. In America people don't die of "Hunger". It looks bad. People die of the diseases that are caused by hunger; still birth and birth complications, anemia, heart failure, diarrheal diseases, pneumonia and diseases of an immune system compromised by malnutrition. What is clear, is that today, the condition of the poor and hungry in America is very near its all time worst. That and compared to other developed nations America is quick slipping into the kinds of statistical health and mortality rates one might expect from a third world country.
Its kind of hard to tell how many innocent people we've "Killed by Accident" in other countries over the last ten years, but its somewhere over a hundred thousand in Iraq alone. As for our new for profit prisons, new laws have been passed and are being passed to dramatically extend prison terms for minor offenses and imprison people who have traditionally not gone to prison. All to supply a new prison workforce in for profit prisons. We've begun the process of criminalizing poverty and mental illness. It may not be death camps or ethnic cleansing, but its certainly nothing like Freedom or Liberty either.
All those new billionaires, a bunch have been created by legitimate business breakthroughs, but a huge number of those new wealthy over the last ten years have gotten their by manipulating stock markets, insane gyrations caused by derivatives and other destructive instruments, and plain simple corporate greed. Wealthy and powerful executives bleeding their own companies and building financial empires on the backs of the middle class.
The American dream is in serious danger. Banks have taken hundreds of billions in tax payer bailouts and then sat on the money, refusing to loan money to stimulate the economy and empower new entrepreneurs. A recent report says class mobility is now easier in Europe, than America. Intelligence, hard work and talent are no longer the only ingredients required to succeed. Oh and as for that referendum, there are now nearly a thousand lobbyists per representative in Washinton D.C. These people wield tremendous influence with large campaign contributions and are the walking army representing the powerful and wealthy in this country today. The average citizen has no way to compete with that, save a grassroots movement to get the entire country to act in concert against an issue. The problem is that those in power have systematically thrown up a wall of distractions, gay marriage, abortion, immigration. All things to get the public wound up and distracted while greedy men go about their business. We've been bled, mislead, and if we don't move soon, may be left for dead. The fact that you can't see this is sad. This is not the country of our Fathers and we had best take it back if we still can.
Why not sell observing time over the internet? I'll bet there would be folks interested all over the world who would be willing to rent observing time over the internet. Just put a decent digital camera on the scope and interface the scopes to a network server. Allow folks to do some interesting work on both scopes when you're not using them for viewing. Check the online rates for telescope time, figure what, perhaps a 25%-50% rent out, and you should have more than enough to cover you costs and still put a little money aside for improving the observatory and have 100-150 nights a year of observing left over.
By the way, put a 105mm ELD refractor on the 20 inch as a finder scope (Orion has fair sized ELDs for a great price.) Put an image intensifier and a webcam on the 105mm to allow your internet users real time searching for deep space objects and your online users will be very happy. Oh and an automated filter loader to allow creating those beautiful synthetic colored images. Your initial outlay of cash would be what $10,000? Figure with a little advertisement in the popular science and astronomy magazines, you could recoup that in about 6-8 months and by your second year start making a profit.
Are you using the scopes primarily for photographic or visual research? If it turns out you can't keep them, would you at all be interested in having them set up in an observatory in the U.S. in a great location (high altitude desert, with great seeing) with the promise you and yours would have plenty of scope time over internet?
What kind of seeing do you have there?
Today a nuclear device was detonated in Abuja Nigeria. The source of the detonation is unknown and nobody is claiming responsibility, but sources say that ground zero appears to have been an internet cafe.
Capitulating? Are you insane. The supreme court was STUFFED with justices for the express purpose of giving corporations anything they damn well want. They didn't Capitulate, they laid down, spread their leg wide and screamed "Me love you long time" at the top of their lungs. Capitulate... what the hell are you smoking???
Oh and don't forget that for every representative in D.C. there are about 600 paid lobbyist representing all those monied interests and the vast majority of those lobbyists are ex representatives who were offered fat lobbying jobs before their terms ended so that's a HUGE source of bribery. As has already been said, the Congress write the laws controlling what Congress can and can't do, so at this point as long as they don't rape babies on the bodies of dead nuns in the town square at high noon, they pretty much walk away free and clear.
They just recently got embarrassed into repealing a law that allowed them to invest in stock with prior knowledge of impending events, what we refer to as insider trading. Anyone else does that and the FTC will march right up their hinnies with torches and pitchforks. Most of the current Congress critters have made millions in legal insider trading. Like I said, it was embarrassing.
The prior president, a professional douchebag for hire, put a corporate hitman in the supreme court by the name of... well anyway, he and several of his cronies shoved a decision through that stated Corporations have the right to give politicians as much as they bloody well like. You can see the problem that causes. So now we have the best Government money can buy.
This is the problem. Vapid, ignorant, uninterested people who don't even bother to illuminate the vast empty place between their ears. You mention Nazis. So let's do this by the numbers. WHY WERE NAZIS BAD? Because they were Fascists and slaughtered a bunch of innocent folks. What is a Fascist? Well, Mussolini, a Fascist, said its the corporate state. Why is this bad? Well when a nation's corporations determine the fate of that nation and its people all kind of predictable things, bad things, begin to happen. You see profit is a great thing to motivate people, but as a guiding target for a society, it can lead to dark things. At first everything is great and the society enjoys explosive growth. But soon, the system begins to cannibalize itself. Ultimately the wheels come off, it crashes and explodes, and often a lot of people die. That why we don't like fascism. If you want to know how to tell a Fascist State here are some signs to look at. If you've not been in a coma for the last decade, you may notice that modern day America now has something in common with Germany and sadly its not the love of beer. So your Nazi comment as clever as you might have thought it was echoes a sad and frightening irony.
As for soup kitchens and bread lines, are you brain damaged? Here, try these sites: People in line at foodbank, The State of Poverty in America, What replaced the Soup Kitchens, The real state of Unemployment in America Today, Tent Cities Sprouting up all over the country. One in five children in America today goes to bed hungry. One in six people in this country suffers chronic malnutrition. One in eight is out of work and can't find employment. Entire regions of America have been depressed for so long, they now have names like "The Rust Belt." One in seven people in this country is saved from hunger by food stamps or federal food programs. There are scenes all over the country of people lined up for blocks waiting for food from food banks. There are shanty towns and tent cities across the nation of homeless people who were formerly middle class, and tens of millions of middle class Americans who live a single pay check away from becoming homeless. Food banks are pleading for support, they've never before been required to support so many people and many are on the verge of collapse. Are you so blind and poorly informed that you don't even see the profound state of social collapse around you? Are you sleep walking? Medicated? Either you have no mind or you have no heart, please which is it?
As for the ruling class, the top 400 people in this country now have the same wealth as the bottom HALF of the country, over 160,000,000 people. The imbalance of wealth in America today is greater THAN ANY TIME IN HUMAN HISTORY. That is the ruling class. They have hijacked our government. They have hijacked the media and our sources of free information. They have robbed us of our Bill of Rights and damaged our form of government to the very edge of its ability to be repaired. They are working hard to rob us of our last best hope for human freedom and development, the internet.
I don't advocate violence, and never have, but I tell you now, I am plenty angry. I pray that we find our way back without the spilling of blood, but I have a hard time imagining a bright future with so many like you walking the street today. You scare me more than the despots.
Clearly you haven't been paying attention. Media has been consolidated. Television, Radio and virtually all printed media have been consolidated to what, a dozen companies, fewer?. The only free sources of information left are the internet and short wave radio. Leading us back to SOPA and PIPA... hello?!!! Have you not seen 60 Minutes? Every phone call, every email, every financial transaction over $10,000 is being scrutinized by powerful search algorithms at the CIA, FBI and NSA. Say or write the wrong combination of words and get a really BIG SURPRISE!
Can you see it now. All your information will come from people who want you to see and think only what they want. You couldn't have a thoughtful intelligent show like MASH on TV today. It questioned authority and put man's inhumanity on trial. Instead today we have American Idol, and vote for some sheep to escape the herd. Go watch "Farehheit 451", watch the seen of Montag's wife "acting" and tell me we aren't right there, right now.
Do you think for a minute if SOPA passes that you'll see anything on the internet that you wouldn't see on TV? At best Youtube would just degenerate into one of several info-tainment portals.
Now I do agree that we still may be able to rise to the occasion and take back what is rightfully ours, but we best act soon, because our openings for such are fast closing. Who the FSCK do you think the Wachowskis were talking to when they made "V"? WAKE UP!!!
Sir, I have nothing but the greatest of respect for the Israeli people and I do have profound empathy for their fear and suffering. Though not Jewish, I have many friends who are and have shared their celebrations all my life. I've broken bread with my friends orthodox and not, Shabbat and Seder. I've stood beside a good friend as he joyfully blew his shofar, so believe me when I tell you I love your culture, and count your people among the very best of my friends.
I think Israel has dealt with the Palestinians poorly. These were an angry and displaced people from the very start. I realize the Jews were themselves just confronting the emotional trauma of the holocaust, but if they'd embraced their angry neighbors, instead of a tooth for a tooth and an eye for an eye. If they'd have said at the very start "We're here as an attempt to address an unforgivable atrocity committed against our people and therefore we devote ourselves to ensuring that atrocities won't be further propagated in righting that wrong." The world might be a very different place today. Part of the problem is that of demonizing others. The Nazis portrayed Jews and less than animals, to be reviled, so slaughtering millions was acceptable. When Israel tries to portray Palestinians as animals deserving nothing but extermination, you simply hurt your own case and lower yourself to the level of those you despise most.
I do not excuse the atrocities committed against Israel. I've spoken to a young man who lives in Jerusalem, who carried a girl blocks to a hospital in his arms after a bus bombing. She died in his arms and for the longest time he wanted to see every Palestinian slaughtered. I've also seen armed Jewish soldiers return rocks thrown by children with automatic machine gun fire on Palestinian land. I've seen innocent Palestinians killed, homes bombed and innocents tortured. I've seen Israel expanding settlements where they do not belong. And I've seen an Israeli slaughter his own Prime Minister for trying to bring equitable peace to the region. Israel has committed its own atrocities and what's happening in Palestine today is itself a genocide. Maybe its not fair, but I expect more of the Jewish people. I expect them to rise above their hate and fear and anger and find a moral solution that dignifies all parties. Maybe that's too much to much to expect of anyone, but I hope not.
By the way, that young man who carried the girl? He's devoted his life to bringing peace to the Middle East. I can't tell you how proud I am of him
First of all, the fact that Mr. Obama has made it clear he respects the Constitution doesn't mean some other idiot (let's say some clone of Mr. Obama's predecessor) who neither understands the Constitution nor respects it, won't add or remove a section of this legislation resulting in the total gutting of due processor and citizen's civil rights. Even with Mr Obama, you think if someone declared open season on the White House, that they wouldn't forget all about that "Constitutional Stuff"? The American Civil Liberty Union states that the lack of duration or geographic limitation of this law makes it particularly troubling. If for one moment, you don't think this isn't a serious brick in a wall that spells totalitarianism, you my friend need a reality check. There is no way to be concerned enough about this legislation.
As for shooting puppets vs. puppet masters, excuse me, but the line of puppets is longer than the eye can see, I hope you have a lot of ammunition. Other than satisfying your unwholesome distaste for compromised statesmen, I have to ask why plug pawns and leave the the higher point pieces walking the chess board with impunity? Anyway, the act of parting some fools hair (no matter how deserving) has never been the answer, to quote Gandhi "I appall the use of violence, because even when it seems good; the good is only temporary, the bad it does is always permanent."
You may be right, it may be too late, especially with a general populace that is superstitious, mislead, misinformed and sadly complacent. I still hope that a small dedicated group of people can move the masses. Its happened before and today more than ever, a single committed voice can make a real difference.
The problem isn't that government is inherently failed or bad. Its that human being are primates and that if we don't design our institutions to manage that fact responsibly, we will in the end lose our institutions to the lowest and worst of human impulses. Our wise founding Fathers built checks and balances into the system because they honestly didn't trust "Those who govern" any further than they could throw them. That is nothing less than pure genius, and may be the most magnificent single gift they gave us.
We've in our ignorance and self interest, given the inmates the key to the asylum. Human enterprise, government, corporation, even non profit enterprises are all subject to the human need to serve ego and garner wealth. By limiting government, but not corporation, we've allowed our corporations to buy our government so now they are one and the same. They've removed checks and balances. So it doesn't matter what Congress understands, only what its paid to vote for.
We can design games that work, zero sum games and a wide variety of systems that serve the intended purpose without allowing the participants from taking wealth or power for their participation. Our government needs to be engineered to both eliminate concentration of power and manage clear separation from church and business. In fact, government should be fire-walled, to ensure no other social entity other than the people can exercise influence. As well, we need to remove the rights of human beings from corporations. We need to overhaul our law to serve people and not corporations. We need to reinstate the bill of rights from the ground up, and remove any law that abridges those rights. In short we need to take our country back and clean up the mess that took 30 years to make.
Friend, I want you to stop for a moment, maybe have a good friend slap you in the face or splash you with some cold water, you know, get you present to the here and now. Our President just signed the National Defense Authorization Act. This bill dramatically extends the Patriot Act, and now allows the government to detain American citizens at home and abroad without due process. With the stroke of a pen, your government has just declared WAR ON YOU! Over the last decade they have constructed a completely privatized army ready and waiting, as some subsidiary of Halliburton, only too happy to shoot you as easily as they did strangers in Iraq (do you really for a moment think our soldiers needed guarding by Blackwater employees in Iaq?)
You think the wealthy and powerful are just going to sit still high on a hill and let you take potshots. You've been bled dry, used badly by a host of political whores who attained wealth and power by sucking the teat of those who now own this country. And now we sit on the verge of a new society, a fascist state where all liberty and freedom has been sequestered to those who rule. Do you think for a second this is some strange alignment of the stars or an accident of fate? In the late 70s business and wealthy conservative leaders spent billions on conservative think tanks, strategizing ways take our nation over, and move government out of the venue of politics and into the venue of Wallstreet marketing. Since then, our candidates have been bought and sold. The take-over is near complete, all they have to do is have an "Emergency" and declare marshal law.
You want to get this deep down in your bones. You are the terrorist. The wealthy and powerful are well educated. They remember what happened to the French elite during their revolution, and you best believe they like the way their heads are attached to their necks. SOPA and PIPA are just another small nudge down the road called "You are just property" and we can crush you any time we please. When you speak about shooting representatives, I say first, your gun is pointed at the puppet and not the puppet master. I say second, you justify their fear and what you start will end in horror and blood for a great many innocent people, perhaps for all of us. We have a tiny, tiny, small, little window of opportunity still open to take our government back, by ballot box. People need to be informed what it going on, and stop listening to that little lying box in the living-room which is now a wholly owned outlet of the very people of whom I speak. The internet is still free enough, you just have to pick sane sources, sadly those same people own most of the wires and they are fighting hard to rob you of that last bit of light. Its time to stand on a very high place and say, we will not give up our freedom. We are taking our nation back, and we will clean up the horror these people have made. I used to think this was just the boundless greed of a few ego maniacs. The pattern is clear now. This is a coup is slow motion. The road ahead in any case is broken and will be hard to travel, the only question left is will we travel it as free men or slaves to ungrateful despots.
Are you kidding me? Do you remember history in school? History is the story of life, the dramas and ideas that made this very moment possible filled with incredible feats of courage and sacrifice. And elementary school boils it down to the banal tasteless pap that drives kids brain-dead. You think for even a femtosecond they wouldn't do exactly the same thing to teaching computer history?
Stop teaching kids crap. Stupid little rhymes like "In fourteen hundred and ninety two..." Instead, give kids things to play with. Explain the significance of the play. Watch movies. Listen to music. Explain how music used to be made on vinyl platters and this guy named Edison had this amazingly cool idea. And how now we have these machines that work so fast that they can cut a second of music into tens of thousands of little pieces and encode that as information, then latter put it all back together again and play it exactly the same somewhere else. The world is bug fscking amazing! Awesome, magical, mysterious. Kids are born desperate, literllay starving to understand and we kill them off in prepubescent nursing homes, and call it education.
I just recently saw these little beauties, they're called cubelets. how much fun do you think your kids could have with these? Then teaching them how they work, and how one can combine an action with a flow of information and suddenly you have a living OO representations that's as natural as breathing. Everything is information. Information naturally forms language. From DNA to Swahili. The human mind is the universe trying to understand itself. What child wouldn't be fascinated with the amazing truth about the world. All you ever have to do is feed the wonder.
Sadly most corporate management has trivialized the importance of planning for the growing strength and frequency of precisely this kind of natural disaster. Global climate change is clearly happening and whatever its cause, it makes good solid predictions of where to be careful and where to be safe. Heavier flooding particularly near large bodies of water and tropical regions is well understood. Lowlands will experience more frequent and substantial flooding events. Wildfires and social impact to local populations will be significant as the growing number of flooding and drought events hit tropical and temperate zones around the world.
Business needs to stop politicizing climate change, and begin using the data to protect production in the face of growing environmental instability.
Please accept my humblest apology for those who are in pain, and in their pain may be less than gracious to you and yours. There have always been immigrants to this country. For the most part, their arrival was met by anger and frustration at those whose jobs were impacted by their arrival. Its a normal thing here. Sadly that puts you at the bottom of the Schist List. Worse, you aren't taking low paying minimum wage service jobs, you're hitting us at the upper middle class region and for the first time people who normally never see the threat you impose, feel seriously put upon.
We have for generations been told by our political representatives that we have, if not the right, at least the expectation of good work available for all. Your coming here threatens this. You can't compare life here with life in India. We for the longest time were a nation with a low population density and a high natural resource level. That meant that anyone with even the slightest intent, a functioning frontal lobe and a smattering of gumption could fully expect to thrive and if lucky even become wealthy. By opening our economic borders to the world, our wealth has exploded out and the world's people have exploded in. The effect is to quickly make America a second and potentially a third world nation in what amounts to record time. We used to keep a very high economic wall around us to artificially maintain our standards of living. Of course that came at the price of keeping poorer nations poor.
You might want to have a little compassion for people being pinched in the adjustment. I don't blame you for wanting a better life. Some will. I blame short sighted, greedy men who have no vision and think that human beings are an interchangeable commodity. Since 1980 our way of life has been hijacked by blind corporate interest. Its been a slow motion car wreck for our environment, our middle class, and the body of laws and distinctions that form our system of civil rights. Business people simply can't distinguish an American engineer from an Indian engineer, its all head count to them. From my experience of Indian engineers, most of you are extremely well trained and at the top of your classes. However, to get there you often have a rather narrow technological focus (because that is what the market is looking for) and in the process of getting there you often neglect the kind of broader education that would provide you with the kind of fun, inventive and creative skills that I find so prevalent in American engineers. This makes Indian engineers a bit more rigid, less adaptable and less figurative in their undertakings. For a tenth run on a legacy product that's wonderful. For a first run at a start-up that's a disaster. The start-up doesn't need product X,00000000.000000. It needs product X +/- 4. You then dance with change as your customers tell you what they really want. This is the frustration you hear in the parent responses comment. Its often hard for artists to play with accountants and at their best, America's scientists and engineers have artistic souls.
So there is a place here for you and your son. You just want to notice for whom the bell tolls, because you best of all should know the benefits and dangers of the Karmic Wheel... those it raises today, it rolls over tomorrow. In the end if we feel entitled, its because for the longest time, our government was interested in protecting our working class, and we were entitled. Just as your government is now doing, so you should be very careful about who you are judging because once our economies reach parity, you may live to regret the very words you speak. And if your son grows up in this culture, who knows, you may find yourself with a rapper and not an engineer.
A friend of mine in Eugene Or., ended up in a fray with a TSA agent. He has seizures. The result of a brain injury when he was a child (think car accident.) His seizures manifest by loud sometime ranting behavior. He's careful to explain to people not to take it personal or seriously, because he simply can't help it and it doesn't mean anything. While collecting his social security check, he had a dispute with a clerk, which escalated and was asked to go outside. There was a TSA agent in the area who overheard him yelling at the security guard. He explained his problem, what the clerk had done wrong, and why he was yelling.
The TSA agent determined he was a threat and proceeded to beat the ever living hell out of him. When my friend continued to try to explain, he was further charged with resisting and was ultimately charged with over half a dozen felony counts including assaulting a TSA agent. Of course the humorous part is that my friend is about five foot three, one hundred and fifteen pounds soaking wet and the TSA agent was over six foot and more than a hundred pounds heavier. All the while claiming my friend was threatening and menacing. It took two years to finally resolve this in court. It was a ridiculous trial and he escaped jail time by the skin of his teeth and though the agent clearly used excessive force, was never held responsible for his actions.
Our society is shifting in dark and unpleasant ways, and I fear that if the public at large doesn't do something soon, the window of opportunity to put things right may pass us by.
Not to put too fine a point on it, It was immigrant Irish who cleaned up the swamps surrounding New Orleans and Baton Rouge, because nobody would consider using an expensive slave to do what was considered effectively a suicide job. The Irish who arrived fresh from the potato famines were considered less than human. They were used for all kinds of jobs ranging from clearing disease infested swamps to military cannon fodder. Any place where you wanted a steady supply of disposable human beings. Same with the Chinese building the railroad from the west. Slave were valuable. Immigrants, not so much.
Friend, its not dwindling salaries. Its NO SALARIES. In 1970 99% of the clothing Americans wore was made in the United States. Today 99% is made out of country. The clothing industrial for all intents and purposes has been eliminated from this country. So go right ahead, tell the American worker "Y'all have to live on 35% of your highest point wage and not only is your child not going to college, you'd better like the car you have because you're driving it till the wheels fall off, oh, and you need to sell the house and move into a 2 bedroom apartment because you sure as Jebus made little green apples aren't going to be able to afford the tax, insurance and maintenance." How fast do you think the rioting will start? How about we come up with a new product made from starving babies, nip the poor right in the bud as it were. We'll call it SoylentAC.
Now tell American workers "Guys, the world's economy is flattening out so for maybe 5 to 10 years, all the jobs are leaving the country. Don't worry, when the working wage of an American is the same as for a Somali street person, all the jobs will be back and you too can work 16 hours a day for all the gruel you can choke down. Actually it won't be that bad, because with 5 to 10 years of no income, most of you will be dead anyway, so with only a handful of workers left there'll be plenty of work to go around." Explain to me how any part of that is in any way acceptable.
You throw that comment off pretty glibly Mr. AC. What makes you think you won't be one the folks that starves on the street when there are ten guys in other countries happy to do your job for less than you can live on.
You know, this is a really difficult problem and because everything is part of a larger dynamical system, so often pressure applied anywhere has unexpected results. that said, I'm less interested in punishing foreign products, and far more interested in splinting the break in our economic system. I believe the best thing to to do is applying firm but even pressure on corporations to do what in the end is actually in their own best interest (healthy workforce = healthy consumer = healthy economy = happy corporation), and explain to them openly, all along the way we're all trying to do 'X', because we want to create 'Y', and 'Y' is good for you and me both, so please don't struggle too much.
In the end its a little like being a good parent. You can't be your children's friend. A child will want to eat candy and not their vegetables. This is perfect childhood logic, candy is delicious. Its up to a responsible party (the Parent) to ensure the child does want is good for the child and good for society (grows up to be a good citizen.) For the exact same reason, a corporation (an entity with only one purpose, make profit), needs a responsible external party to make certain it does what's good for it and society. We do this by creating a body of laws and regulations. Just as a parent manages a child by regulating that which is important to the child, a government must regulate that which is important to the corporation, as we already said, that would be profit. If it profits a corporation to be responsible, they will be responsible. Just put the dots close together and point the way and let them figure it out for themselves.
And for the "Objectivists" among us who think there is something magical in the intelligence of the marketplace, I would posit that the average corporation is no brighter intrinsically than a 5 year old child. It will kill itself in the long term for short term profit, it happens every day. I'm somehow fascinated by people who'd never dream of letting an out of control 5 year old run amok, but would never dream of constraining corporate mischief and misbehavior. CAN YOU SAY CREDIT DEFAULT SWAP!!! We are now chewing on the broken dreams of greedy men and women. Its time for our society to grow a pair, and spank the wicked, reward the steadfast, and tell the entire class to be quiet and do as they are told.
Perhaps you should look up what a shift from 70% to 57% from 1980 means. That is, when you compare the amount provided by private sector research investment and what happened to that research. So just throwing off a smug comment about statistics that actually contributes nothing to the conversation is at best dilatory, you might want to bother digging a little deeper into the facts behind the conversation.
Here are some interesting questions whose answers would be most illuminating;
1. What was the total spending on research per year for the United States since 1980?
2. By dollars spent or GDP%, what was the amount spent by the US government vs Corporate sources?
3. What percentage of that research was made available for public consumption vs what was bound up in corporate patents per year?
4. What was the breakdown of investment dollars or GDP%, tending over the 30 years in question?
For the most part, the government spent significantly less on research over the last 30 years. Moreover, though the total spending on research per year leading up to 2005 wavered between 2 and 3 percent of the GDP, we are currently in something of a research slump. Research spending for the last 6 years has remained virtually constant, except for defense based research which increased markedly. In short, those with whom we are competing, are substantially outspending us in research, which every viable source tells us is one of Governments best investments (extremely high return on investment), with the exception of military research which has for the most part, a rather low return on investment. Finally, corporate research tends to get tied up in patents (I hope you're not surprised) meaning that government research often but not always has more public value. There is a current push to have University research that has been government funded released to public access. Of course the Universities are complaining, but if the research was paid for by tax dollars, all Americans should receive the benefit.
If you'd like to evaluate some of the source reference for these observations I suggest The Congressional Budget Office and perhaps this document by the AASS. There are plenty of other sources if you'd bother to research the issue. Other iInteresting sources put us in global context and point at how we've degenerated into our current political, economic and sociological state. If it weren't so worrisome, it would be fascinating.
Its not the issue of racism. Its the wholesale destruction of entire sectors of the work force as companies look for ways to cut their bottom line. I'm looking for a tech job in the silicon valley. Over the last 3 months I have to say I'm getting sick and tired of not having spoken to a single person who is American, speaks without an intense Indian or Chinese accent (in fact I may have passed over perfectly good jobs because the person speaking to me was completely and I mean completely unintelligible.) I've worked with hundreds of people from India and China (hell I'm half Chinese, my Mother is Chinese, I was born in Taiwan.) I don't have a problem with these people's race, I like them, I like their food, I love their cultures. I have a problem with the fact that I've watched my salary slowly erode to about 50%. How am I supposed to compete with a tidal wave of HB-1 visas who come from a country with a billion people so the fact that they represent the top half a percentile and have a Masters degree, still means there are millions of them and they're perfectly willing to take my job at half the price. If it now takes a Masters Degree to get a job pushing a broom in the valley because of the glut of skilled foreign workers, there's no room for native workers, how is a native worker supposed to compete. there's no finance for older native workers to improve themselves (the collapsing state economy has steadily made going back to school harder and harder.) There's no market for young fresh native workers coming out of school. All the while, money that would be spent here to improve our State's economy is being pumped into making China or India more wealthy.
Out sourcing jobs in general and the tech market in particular is, in my opinion the very best way possible to implode both America's economy and future ability to determine it's own technological future. All you have to do to make something disappear in America is stop investing in it. Stop investing in skilled American workers, and surprise, in no time at all, they'll just go away. I have good friends who used to be happy engineers, engineering away. Now they cook food, or sell real estate (good luck with that), or they've moved into the health care industry. What they don't do is engineering. All it took was two massive economic busts since 2001. I look at the ads today on DICE, and its crazy what they're asking now for a customer support engineer. If you're tired of talking to people with Punjabi accents think enough to dull a knife when you call for technical support, tell the vendors you deal with, that you want to speak to an American support engineers in the future, in fact let them know you will now stop doing business with companies that outsource their support. OR, you won't have to worry any more, because very soon there won't be any here to do the job anyway.
Outsourcing makes sense for tiny start-ups paying to realize a dream out of there own packets in the midst of the bootstrap (though as our currency meets parity with the yuan and the rupee, even this use is quick disappearing.) I'm just saying, we need to provide serious tax incentives for companies that use native workers and even more serious tax liabilities for companies that heavily outsource. The world is flattening out economically, and that's probably a good thing at a number of levels. But until we reach that point, if we don't protect our working class, we'll destroy the American consumer, and then where's our economy? We're in the midst of the economic spasms caused by American corporations trying to squeeze the beast from both ends and killing off the American workforce in the process. Its time to say enough. its time to ensure that Americans have meaningful work first, because short-sighted runs to profit ultimately hurt everyone save a vanishingly small few. This blind free-fall to the bottom of the pig trough by Corporate America needs to come to a crashing halt, while there's something still left to save.
At one level I agree. The problem is that you're painting with a mighty broad brush. If what you say is true, then virtually all corporate IP is equally evil, and the use of patents to protect one's "ideological turf" is as bad as using IP to extort the corporate landscape. There is nothing inherently wrong with a corporation or person having self interest. In fact self interest is at the crux of our design, even our genes want to survive.
There are ethical questions about what we are willing to do to fulfill our own personal interest. Some look for constructive answers to the question, others find solutions that are destructive. I would argue that defending yourself from constant attack, though not purely constructive is certainly not destructive. Its sad that our business landscape has degenerated into IP turf wars, but Google didn't invent that either. Using IP as a weapon to demand tribute, control economies, destroy competition and/or dominate the playing field would fall under the heading of destructive acts of self interest. Patent Trolls, do not contribute to society, they get wealthy by destroying innovation and they are simply parasites. We need to build a little more pest control into our IP legal system, its horribly broken.