Oh really? Having held such a clearance for years (I left that work about 5 years ago) I can tell you that the situation is in many ways reversed. Your very behavior is held hostage just so you keep your job. Want to try some weed while in Colorado? Want to go see the Great Wall of China (actually, you might get this approved)? Three beers at happy hour and get pulled over for speeding? Buy a house at the height of the housing boom and your spouse lose her job so it is foreclosed upon, or she gets sick and the medical bills pile up...
All of these things can lead to your ticket being clipped.
Besides - people act like a clearance is some magical thing that they have earned. Nothing is further from the truth. It simply means you have a clean police and financial record, and don't hang out with militants. All of the investigations and polygraphs boil down to determining that. You fill out the forms honestly, and wait for investigators to determine that indeed you did not lie on your application. Sometimes you sit in a silly little room over by BWI with weird cloud scenes on the florescent lights and answer the same questions while some polygraph examiner tries to upset you. Again, nothing that you have earned through hard work or being special, just that you waited out the process and didn't lie.
This is basically my impression. I have a number of friends and coworkers with clearance. I was up for it, but was honest on my application, so I was rejected. Apparently they don't clear unrepentant pot smokers. Who knew?
Call me crazy, but last time I looked in the help wanteds I started to get the feeling our society is divided into two halves: Those with above secret clearance, who live normal lives, and those without it, who are lied to and treated like animals.
Those with clearance, especially above secret, can live normal lives as long as they live conventional, ordinary lives. When you have clearance the government watches you. Not too closely perhaps, depending on what level clearance you hold and what you're working on. But if anything of any import happens in your life you must let your security officer know. And rest assured, people with clearance are lied to as well. That's partly how compartmentalization works.
I'm also hoping this whole thing "that, when unobserved, the photons exist in all possible states simultaneously" eventually goes away.
It has to be that we can't know what state it's in, not that it's actually in all of them. Can't it? Please? At some point, this quantum stuff should stop being magic.
Does it make you uncomfortable the idea that we are creating reality through our very consciousness? That sounds like woo-woo new-age shit, but one can interpret quantum mechanics in that way. The past and future do not exist except in our minds. The only time that truly exists is Now. Everything that has ever happened and ever will happen is happening now. We are choosing, through our consciousness, which part of that to experience.
That said they'll have to pry my steering wheel away from my cold dead hands before I cede control to the computer. That is why self-driving cars will take a while not technology.
+1. I actually enjoy driving and have no interest in a self-driving car.
Oh, they're working on it. As with a lot of this stuff it is being sold as convenience. Most people don't appreciate the value and importance of cash and are happy to use Level Up or Apple Pay or whatever other payment method. I'm not saying those services are in league with NSA/CIA/etc. (though it wouldn't surprise me). But as the public gets more used to using cashless systems the idea or getting rid of cash will seem natural. Once that's done say goodbye to any anonymous transaction. There will be a record of every purchase we make, subject to review.
I use cash whenever possible, even when it isn't convenient. But I think it's only a matter of time.
Sure you can print more money but if you don't back it with a loan or some other kind of security it will lose value and then you will need to spend more for everything else thus no money created, only more paper printed with no net effect of "more money".
Sure trickery can temporarily make it seem like you have more money to pay for social security or whatever but it can't in the long run.
If you want to pay for things with public funds you need a decently balanced budget or you will become Greece sooner or later.
No, you don't. Greece got into the trouble it did because it did not have control of the Euro. It was more like a State or local government in the US; it had to tax in order to spend and it ran out of money. That can't happen to the US government. Greece got to a point where it couldn't pay its debts. The US government will always be able to pay its debts because it can create its own currency.
saying that Social Security will run out of money is incorrect. Sure, if the money supply grows too much faster than the overall economy it will lose value. But saying the Federal government doesn't have the money for something is just not the case.
But it's important to note that the Social Security Program will run out of money, and soon. By any honest accounting, it did in the 90s - there's nothing but IOUs left after that pool of funds was looted by Reagan/Bush/Clinton. It's all just fresh taxes now for outgoing payments.
And, sure, it will never run out of dollars, but so what?
"But, though we had plenty of money, there was nothing our money could buy" - Kipling, The Gods of the Copybook Headings
Those "IOU's" are treasury bonds. They are worth something. Sure, it's the government borrowing from itself. But since the government can always create dollars to pay that debt, it really doesn't matter to anyone but accountants.
Neither would Blues, or pretty much any major iconic genre. Depending on how this case is construed it's basically going to kill homages and the like. FUN paying tribute to 99 luftballoons with a line in the lyrics? Better get that contractually approved.
Yes, it's ridiculous. To quote the Beastie Boys, "Only 24 hours in a day, only twelve notes that a man can play". That's it; twelve notes. Really? At some point in music's long history two people came up with the same sequence? You don't say!
As a musician, I often take ideas from songs I like. Just a little phrase here and there. It's natural and it happens all the time. Like I said, there are only so many combinations of notes, and then only a subset of those are pleasant or catchy. It's too bad the music industry is more concerned about protecting what is supposedly theirs than with appreciating artistry and making what was old new again.
According Wikipedia, South Africa's post-apartheid economy was mostly shaped by the World Bank's trickle-down theories:
The early ANC envisioned a more socialist South Africa, but this was unpopular with businessmen, foreign politicians, and the established media. For example, Mandela strongly supported nationalizing banking, mining, and monopolies, but was forced to change this goal due to pressures from stock traders and international economic entities like the World Bank. The World Bank encouraged the new South African government to promote the growth of the private sector, which trickle-down economics theory proposes will create jobs that will alleviate poverty.
Social security seems to be set in stone even though everyone knows it's broken and going to run out of money. These govt programs seem to gain entropy and never stop or get fixed.
The US government can print as much money as it wants. It literally cannot run out of money. So saying that Social Security will run out of money is incorrect. Sure, if the money supply grows too much faster than the overall economy it will lose value. But saying the Federal government doesn't have the money for something is just not the case.
It's always amusing to me to see how money is discussed at the Federal level; we can't afford this, there's no money for that. It's a joke. The US government will always have money to do what it wants. It's always a political choice, not a monetary one.
Sending political prisoners to asylums on a regular basis?
We still have the Guantanamo Bay prison open. Not really political prisoners, but a number are innocent yet still stuck there. The government does go after people who try to act politically. They just don't send them to asylums (usually). But they do try to intimidate them, interfere with their plans and try to discredit them publicly.
Shooting people who try and leave your country?
Yeah, we don't do that, thankfully.
Covering up gigantic nuclear power plant meltdowns until there's so much radiation that denying it ceases to have a point?
Remember when the EPA said it was safe for people to return to lower Manhattan after 9/11/01? It wasn't, and they knew it.
So here's me saying that I don't really agree with you on your assertion.
I don't completely agree with it either. But the US has dropped a few notches over the past 15 years when it comes to political and human rights. These abuses aren't so much about any political or social ideology anyway. They are about power maintaining power and can happen in any country given the right circumstances.
The government gives big corporations tax dollars to kill people and destroy their property. Since it is done with secrecy, citizens can't have any control. Killing people is the most profitable business in the United States.
And... Many of the citizens joke about the killing.
Don't they realize that killing people is theft from their pocketbooks?
No, of course they don't. The American people, on average, don't know much. See my sig for further insight.
What the fuck year is this? Do you still name your files using the 8.3 format? The filetype is now contained in the icon. With long file names that are abbreviated it's not like I can see what the extension is anyway. When I need to know the extension I'll right click thanks.
What? The icon is arbitrary. I can give a file any icon I want. If I change the extension of a file, it affects how the file is handled by the OS. The icon, no so much.
Combine these emitter glasses with a tin foil hat for improve results.
Right! It's funny because all of these people are wacky and paranoid to think that government or private industry would surveil and track people for their own purposes regardless of the benefit or harm to the individual. Silly people, why would anyone think that?
And, unlike most of us, Snowden actually did something about it. As a result of his revelations, political pressure is being applied to the government from many different directions to get the situation resolved.
Of course, it cost Snowden his job, and his ability to live in his own country, and might still land him in jail or worse.
You could swallow some of that cynicism and at least try to improve things. Maybe ask the government to grant snowden clemency?
Nah. Why exert the effort to click an online petition when it is so much easier to just bitch about how hopeless things are?
I'm going to go with "because an online petition won't do a damn thing" for $1000, Alex.
It's like we're all in a coffee shop, and a man armed with a 12 gauge just barged in to rob the place...
Yeah, in really slow motion, over a four year time period.
The polls are bullshit. Count the votes. only there will you find what people really think. Everything else is just bad theater.
Considering the voter participation rate, I'd say the votes tell us most people think it isn't worth the effort to vote. Though I do vote, I can't really blame them. I vote because I'm acting on principle (I almost always vote third party), not because I think it will make a damn bit of difference. The Us "republic" is unresponsive to the will of the people. The people know this and act accordingly.
I considered moderating this down, but I will reply instead. This is such a warped, confused view of history it's hard to know where to start. However; there is such a thing as a just war, international security is hard, and Russia had and has no right to Crimea or the Ukraine. Iraq WMDs: I remind you that Saddam believed he had WMDs. As for the Lusitania, I would remind you Churchill had his hands full with a minor issue called Gallipoli. And in Syria and Libya, there were no good options, and the situation was not of the West's making; it's difficult to know when a market trader's messy suicide will start a regional revolution.
We are lied into every war; every single one. The actual reasons we go to war often have to do with economic or strategic interests. But people don't get ready to fight and die for economic interests. They fight and die for survival. So you make it about survival, and tell the people how the enemy is coming to kill their children in their beds. Or you appeal to their sense of righteousness and tell them how we must save this other poor downtrodden people from the dictator we installed (oops, did I say that last part out loud?). After all, it is the leaders of the country who determine the policy. The people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. The United States isn't the only place this is done, of course. It works the same way in any country.
On the global scene the USA is too busy putting its nose into places where it doesn't belong. Maybe if they focused more on the mother land and made a dent in idiotic wars like "War on Drugs"...
Excuse me, I believe the propaganda word that has been chosen to pull at our emotions and get us to rally around the State is "homeland". Boy, did my ears perk up when I first heard that word used to describe the United States.
Slashdot Mirror
Oh really? Having held such a clearance for years (I left that work about 5 years ago) I can tell you that the situation is in many ways reversed. Your very behavior is held hostage just so you keep your job. Want to try some weed while in Colorado? Want to go see the Great Wall of China (actually, you might get this approved)? Three beers at happy hour and get pulled over for speeding? Buy a house at the height of the housing boom and your spouse lose her job so it is foreclosed upon, or she gets sick and the medical bills pile up...
All of these things can lead to your ticket being clipped.
Besides - people act like a clearance is some magical thing that they have earned. Nothing is further from the truth. It simply means you have a clean police and financial record, and don't hang out with militants. All of the investigations and polygraphs boil down to determining that. You fill out the forms honestly, and wait for investigators to determine that indeed you did not lie on your application. Sometimes you sit in a silly little room over by BWI with weird cloud scenes on the florescent lights and answer the same questions while some polygraph examiner tries to upset you. Again, nothing that you have earned through hard work or being special, just that you waited out the process and didn't lie.
This is basically my impression. I have a number of friends and coworkers with clearance. I was up for it, but was honest on my application, so I was rejected. Apparently they don't clear unrepentant pot smokers. Who knew?
Call me crazy, but last time I looked in the help wanteds I started to get the feeling our society is divided into two halves: Those with above secret clearance, who live normal lives, and those without it, who are lied to and treated like animals.
Those with clearance, especially above secret, can live normal lives as long as they live conventional, ordinary lives. When you have clearance the government watches you. Not too closely perhaps, depending on what level clearance you hold and what you're working on. But if anything of any import happens in your life you must let your security officer know. And rest assured, people with clearance are lied to as well. That's partly how compartmentalization works.
I'm also hoping this whole thing "that, when unobserved, the photons exist in all possible states simultaneously" eventually goes away.
It has to be that we can't know what state it's in, not that it's actually in all of them. Can't it? Please? At some point, this quantum stuff should stop being magic.
Does it make you uncomfortable the idea that we are creating reality through our very consciousness? That sounds like woo-woo new-age shit, but one can interpret quantum mechanics in that way. The past and future do not exist except in our minds. The only time that truly exists is Now. Everything that has ever happened and ever will happen is happening now. We are choosing, through our consciousness, which part of that to experience.
Woo Woo! ;-)
That said they'll have to pry my steering wheel away from my cold dead hands before I cede control to the computer. That is why self-driving cars will take a while not technology.
+1. I actually enjoy driving and have no interest in a self-driving car.
...next thing they're going to get rid of cash.
Oh, they're working on it. As with a lot of this stuff it is being sold as convenience. Most people don't appreciate the value and importance of cash and are happy to use Level Up or Apple Pay or whatever other payment method. I'm not saying those services are in league with NSA/CIA/etc. (though it wouldn't surprise me). But as the public gets more used to using cashless systems the idea or getting rid of cash will seem natural. Once that's done say goodbye to any anonymous transaction. There will be a record of every purchase we make, subject to review.
I use cash whenever possible, even when it isn't convenient. But I think it's only a matter of time.
"Money" is not the same as "paper".
Sure you can print more money but if you don't back it with a loan or some other kind of security it will lose value and then you will need to spend more for everything else thus no money created, only more paper printed with no net effect of "more money".
Sure trickery can temporarily make it seem like you have more money to pay for social security or whatever but it can't in the long run.
If you want to pay for things with public funds you need a decently balanced budget or you will become Greece sooner or later.
No, you don't. Greece got into the trouble it did because it did not have control of the Euro. It was more like a State or local government in the US; it had to tax in order to spend and it ran out of money. That can't happen to the US government. Greece got to a point where it couldn't pay its debts. The US government will always be able to pay its debts because it can create its own currency.
saying that Social Security will run out of money is incorrect. Sure, if the money supply grows too much faster than the overall economy it will lose value. But saying the Federal government doesn't have the money for something is just not the case.
But it's important to note that the Social Security Program will run out of money, and soon. By any honest accounting, it did in the 90s - there's nothing but IOUs left after that pool of funds was looted by Reagan/Bush/Clinton. It's all just fresh taxes now for outgoing payments.
And, sure, it will never run out of dollars, but so what?
"But, though we had plenty of money, there was nothing our money could buy" - Kipling, The Gods of the Copybook Headings
Those "IOU's" are treasury bonds. They are worth something. Sure, it's the government borrowing from itself. But since the government can always create dollars to pay that debt, it really doesn't matter to anyone but accountants.
Neither would Blues, or pretty much any major iconic genre. Depending on how this case is construed it's basically going to kill homages and the like. FUN paying tribute to 99 luftballoons with a line in the lyrics? Better get that contractually approved.
Yes, it's ridiculous. To quote the Beastie Boys, "Only 24 hours in a day, only twelve notes that a man can play". That's it; twelve notes. Really? At some point in music's long history two people came up with the same sequence? You don't say!
As a musician, I often take ideas from songs I like. Just a little phrase here and there. It's natural and it happens all the time. Like I said, there are only so many combinations of notes, and then only a subset of those are pleasant or catchy. It's too bad the music industry is more concerned about protecting what is supposedly theirs than with appreciating artistry and making what was old new again.
Mandela was a ... MARXIST ...
According Wikipedia, South Africa's post-apartheid economy was mostly shaped by the World Bank's trickle-down theories:
The early ANC envisioned a more socialist South Africa, but this was unpopular with businessmen, foreign politicians, and the established media. For example, Mandela strongly supported nationalizing banking, mining, and monopolies, but was forced to change this goal due to pressures from stock traders and international economic entities like the World Bank. The World Bank encouraged the new South African government to promote the growth of the private sector, which trickle-down economics theory proposes will create jobs that will alleviate poverty.
John Perkins was right.
Social security seems to be set in stone even though everyone knows it's broken and going to run out of money. These govt programs seem to gain entropy and never stop or get fixed.
The US government can print as much money as it wants. It literally cannot run out of money. So saying that Social Security will run out of money is incorrect. Sure, if the money supply grows too much faster than the overall economy it will lose value. But saying the Federal government doesn't have the money for something is just not the case.
It's always amusing to me to see how money is discussed at the Federal level; we can't afford this, there's no money for that. It's a joke. The US government will always have money to do what it wants. It's always a political choice, not a monetary one.
Sending political prisoners to asylums on a regular basis?
We still have the Guantanamo Bay prison open. Not really political prisoners, but a number are innocent yet still stuck there. The government does go after people who try to act politically. They just don't send them to asylums (usually). But they do try to intimidate them, interfere with their plans and try to discredit them publicly.
Shooting people who try and leave your country?
Yeah, we don't do that, thankfully.
Covering up gigantic nuclear power plant meltdowns until there's so much radiation that denying it ceases to have a point?
Remember when the EPA said it was safe for people to return to lower Manhattan after 9/11/01? It wasn't, and they knew it.
So here's me saying that I don't really agree with you on your assertion.
I don't completely agree with it either. But the US has dropped a few notches over the past 15 years when it comes to political and human rights. These abuses aren't so much about any political or social ideology anyway. They are about power maintaining power and can happen in any country given the right circumstances.
The government gives big corporations tax dollars to kill people and destroy their property. Since it is done with secrecy, citizens can't have any control. Killing people is the most profitable business in the United States. And... Many of the citizens joke about the killing. Don't they realize that killing people is theft from their pocketbooks?
No, of course they don't. The American people, on average, don't know much. See my sig for further insight.
What the fuck year is this? Do you still name your files using the 8.3 format? The filetype is now contained in the icon. With long file names that are abbreviated it's not like I can see what the extension is anyway. When I need to know the extension I'll right click thanks.
What? The icon is arbitrary. I can give a file any icon I want. If I change the extension of a file, it affects how the file is handled by the OS. The icon, no so much.
WHOOSH! Seriously?
Combine these emitter glasses with a tin foil hat for improve results.
Right! It's funny because all of these people are wacky and paranoid to think that government or private industry would surveil and track people for their own purposes regardless of the benefit or harm to the individual. Silly people, why would anyone think that?
Oh, and I should have mentioned that I'm already a fan of John Taylor Gatto. My political and social views are, let's say outside the mainstream.
Thanks for the link, but I'm not sure how I got here after a subtle joke about how Americans have been propagandized after 9/11/2001.
Yeah, well we don't have a War Department anymore either.
And, unlike most of us, Snowden actually did something about it. As a result of his revelations, political pressure is being applied to the government from many different directions to get the situation resolved.
Of course, it cost Snowden his job, and his ability to live in his own country, and might still land him in jail or worse.
You could swallow some of that cynicism and at least try to improve things. Maybe ask the government to grant snowden clemency?
Nah. Why exert the effort to click an online petition when it is so much easier to just bitch about how hopeless things are?
I'm going to go with "because an online petition won't do a damn thing" for $1000, Alex.
Under what possible interpretation of the law can this be considered the actions of lawful government?
Oh, do you have standing to bring a suit? No? Know anyone who does? No? Well, that's that, then.
It's like we're all in a coffee shop, and a man armed with a 12 gauge just barged in to rob the place...
Yeah, in really slow motion, over a four year time period.
The polls are bullshit. Count the votes. only there will you find what people really think. Everything else is just bad theater.
Considering the voter participation rate, I'd say the votes tell us most people think it isn't worth the effort to vote. Though I do vote, I can't really blame them. I vote because I'm acting on principle (I almost always vote third party), not because I think it will make a damn bit of difference. The Us "republic" is unresponsive to the will of the people. The people know this and act accordingly.
I agree. It is becoming increasingly difficult to consider the NSA as anything other than an extremely well-funded criminal organization.
Psssh! They need to get in line behind the CIA.
Are you familiar with the story of the Golem or Frankenstein's monster?
I considered moderating this down, but I will reply instead. This is such a warped, confused view of history it's hard to know where to start. However; there is such a thing as a just war, international security is hard, and Russia had and has no right to Crimea or the Ukraine. Iraq WMDs: I remind you that Saddam believed he had WMDs. As for the Lusitania, I would remind you Churchill had his hands full with a minor issue called Gallipoli. And in Syria and Libya, there were no good options, and the situation was not of the West's making; it's difficult to know when a market trader's messy suicide will start a regional revolution.
We are lied into every war; every single one. The actual reasons we go to war often have to do with economic or strategic interests. But people don't get ready to fight and die for economic interests. They fight and die for survival. So you make it about survival, and tell the people how the enemy is coming to kill their children in their beds. Or you appeal to their sense of righteousness and tell them how we must save this other poor downtrodden people from the dictator we installed (oops, did I say that last part out loud?). After all, it is the leaders of the country who determine the policy. The people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. The United States isn't the only place this is done, of course. It works the same way in any country.
On the global scene the USA is too busy putting its nose into places where it doesn't belong. Maybe if they focused more on the mother land and made a dent in idiotic wars like "War on Drugs"...
Excuse me, I believe the propaganda word that has been chosen to pull at our emotions and get us to rally around the State is "homeland". Boy, did my ears perk up when I first heard that word used to describe the United States.