Whether or not you think so, the actual data says otherwise: * Marijuana legalization recently crossed 50% support. * Gay marriage, which has been steadily shifting in favor of legalization. * Leaving Afghanistan polls at 56% in favor, and has for months. * Iraq War polls at 66% opposed, and the majority has been opposed to the war since at least 2006.
The only presidential candidate who even comes close to following the majority's wishes on those issues is Ron Paul, and he's generally been dismissed as a nutcase.
The entire country has moved to the right. Democrats are where the Republicans used to be, and Republicans are out in Crazy Town (pop. Way Too Many).
Actually, there's a massive disconnect between the politicians and the people of the United States. If the country were majority rule, which it isn't, marijuana would be legalized, gay marriage would be legal in more places, we would be completely out of Afghanistan and Iraq (not the "we're out, but there are drones and 15,000 soldiers / mercenaries to... uh... protect our embassy" version), many congresspersons would be indicted for bribery, many many banking executives (as well as some other corporate executives) would be indicted for multi-billion dollar fraud, the Consumer Finance Protection Bureau would be operating with full force, thousands of foreclosures would be ruled invalid and the people's homes restored, Bradley Manning and Julian Assange would be free, and there'd quite possibly be a massive public works program to keep people employed.
And that's why both the Tea Party and the Occupiers exist - the system is failing to respond to what the people want.
If existing laws are inadequate, the FBI would not have been able to take down MegaUpload.
You are making the unwarranted assumption that the FBI acts legally, when there is evidence that in many cases they do not. For instance, they bugged Martin Luther King's hotel room, and then tried to blackmail him with the sounds of him getting it on.
What do you do about those industries that require such a huge investment of capital to get started and such high fixed running costs that it's basically impossible to start up a new company without prohibitively large amounts of capital?
Imagine, for instance, a world in which there are no regulations on telecoms other than the easements required to put lines on government-owned land. Now you want to start up a telecom company, but you don't have the startup capital to set up lines all around the country, so instead you create a plan to set them up all around your town. But the thing is, even if your service is somewhat cheaper or better, nobody wants to buy it, because they want to call people in both Boston and Los Angeles. You could set the price so low that people in your town would buy it, but then you'd be losing money every month (due to the high fixed running costs) and have already burnt through your startup capital. You could negotiate a peering agreement with the big companies that control the telecom backbone, but since your service is much less valuable to them as theirs is to yours, they're going to charge you more than you can afford. Being a shrewd businessperson, you make this analysis before spending cash setting up telephone lines in your town, and don't start the company. And since all other businesspeople in your universe make the same choice, there can be no new sellers in the market, leaving the oligopoly intact. Which leaves everyone else either doing without whatever the oligopoly is selling, or going with the least bad option, and the members of the oligopoly trying to ensure that the least bad option for the customers is lousy service at a way-too-high price.
That's real capitalism, not the bogus libertarian fantasy.
Actually, in the US, they can deny you the job capriciously. If you go in for an interview, and they deny you the job because they just don't feel like hiring you, that's legal.
What's not typically legal is failing to hire you because of race, gender, religion (except if the organization is a religious group), age (although this one is often violated), marital status, military service (although lack of military service could be relevent), national origin, or union activity. So if they either specifically make it clear that's the reason you aren't hired, or there's a distinct pattern in who's hired and who's not, that will get the NLRB interested.
I guess you could say it isn't, but the threat of workers being poached (in *some* sense) is what keeps wages from falling to zero in the first place, protecting the worker.
You exaggerate a bit. The average wage you would get in a world without the threat of workers quitting or getting hired away is basically W = (R + T) / 40 + U, where W = annual wages, T is the cost of training the worker, R is the cost of providing the basic necessities of the future worker from birth to the start of their career, and U is the annual upkeep of the worker (food, shelter, water, clothing, health care, transportation to/from work and stores). The '40' is the length of the worker's career, generally assumed here to be something like 24-64.
For a software developer, that comes out to something like: R = $270,000 T = $150,000 U = $20,000 W = ($270000+$150000) / 40 + $25000 = ($420000) / 40 + $25000 = $10500+$25000 = $35,500 annual after-tax income. Which is still obviously way lower than the competitive salary of a developer.
There are lots of problems with that argument: 1 (A) Every generation has improved the refining of recreational drugs. For instance, the hallucinogenic drugs like LSD were found in mushrooms, and used there, but there was no process for extracting just the drug. Similarly, cocaine was a more refined version of opium,
1 (B) Similarly, while sex has always happened, what's acceptable to talk about has changed. For instance, homosexuality was perfectly acceptable in ancient Greece and Rome, became completely unacceptable by the 1800's, became steadily more acceptable thanks to late Victorians like Oscar Wilde but still mostly behind closed doors, and in modern times the debate about whether homosexual couples can formalize their relationship with a marriage.
So while they didn't invent it, it's foolish to say that each generation doesn't change things.
2. Not everyone who protests something the government is doing is a teenager. A lot of the Occupyers, the majority of Tea Partyers were over 60 years old, and a lot of the protesters in Egypt, Tunesia, and Syria were over 30. In addition, not all teenagers get into political protest - a lot are just trying to find a way to make it through high school, college, or their first job.
3. The reason opinions *may* change as people get older (again, no guarantee there - I've known plenty of people who's opinions didn't change much between their 30's and their 80's) is because as people get older they're more able to accumulate wealth and power. Therefor, those policies that favor those with wealth and power, which were oppressive when the person was a teenager, are now benefiting them. For instance, it's not uncommon for people to be vehemantly against paying Social Security taxes when they're working, and then vehemently opposed to any measure that would threaten their Social Security benefits when they're retired. In other words, pure self-interest pushes them that way.
Specifically, the Fourth Amendment eliminates the authority of the federal government to monitor private communications (as interpreted by SCOTUS, phone calls, emails, etc are considered part of the 'papers and effects'), and the Fourteenth Amendment means the same rule also applies to the states.
Not that that's really going to stop this sort of thing from being implemented, since the only opposition will come from those without political power.
After building a base on the moon, he will point a giant "laser" at the Earth, and threaten the rest of the world with annihilating a major city every day unless the world pays the US (evil pinky finger) $10.5 trillion. Then he will use that money to pay off the national debt (except that which is owed to Social Security), and thus balance the budget.
Of course, the whole thing will be stopped when a spy with bad teeth shows up.
I don't know about the EU, but in the US, a criminal penalty does not prevent a civil lawsuit for defamation and/or breach of contract. So, if Facebook broke the rules, Vivian Reading would give Facebook a multi-billion euro fine, and all that criminal evidence would make the class-action lawsuit a relatively simple affair (because the evidence is already introduced in the criminal proceeding, so proving Facebook broke the rules is quite easy).
This is my big chance to sell tinfoil hats to all the people who think that this won't be disappated by the atmosphere.
And I should point out that for those who make tinfoil hats themselves, they're probably using knockoff aluminum foil rather than tin foil, so they won't work as well.
Way more than 9 elsewhere
on
Tales of IT Idiocy
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· Score: 5, Interesting
The Daily WTF has a lot of fantastic stories about what not to do. The stories include horrific interviews, code that makes you want to squirm at best, and plenty of IT mistakes.
(The earliest I can think of is the suspension of habeas corpus in the Civil War.)
The earliest prominent example was 1798, with the Sedition Act. Set to expire the day before John Adams left office, it was used by Federalists to punish journalists and even a Congressman who wrote mean things about the Federalist government.
Actually, that's not necessarily true. For instance, check out this poll: * 62% disapprove of congressional Democrats. 75% disapprove of congressional Republicans. Congress in general is currently at 13% approval, only 3% saying strong approval. If I'm reading the data correctly, that's the lowest congressional approval since before 1974. * When asked whether the President or congressional Republicans would do a better job handling the issues of the day, 13% said neither, despite that not even being an option. * 37% identified themselves as independent voters, a higher percentage than both Democrats (32%) or Republicans (25%) * 48% of those polled believe a third party is necessary, 28% strongly. That's stronger support in this poll than Mitt Romney or Barack Obama. * A third party candidate that supported the positions of those polled would pull 22% immediately, and another 46% would at least consider it. Now, of course, the 'supported the positions of those polled' means that you'd need a mythical candidate who was all things to all people, but it suggests that the 2-party monopoly is actually quite weak.
The banks didn't do what was best for them long-term, but they definitely did what was best for the people managing them. If the bank posted a higher quarterly profit by engaging in stupid credit default swaps, the CEO did well, the manager who ran that division did well, and probably the people much further down who actually made the deals did well for as long as the music kept playing. Once the music stopped, the CEO, managers, etc could just take their $millions and retire very comfortably, or they could probably fairly easily find work elsewhere.
Consider a bank executive with this choice: (A) don't approve a dumb deal - piss off those who wanted to make a deal, not make as much money now as possible, have a tough time convincing the boss / shareholders it was the right move, but it might make the company more sound so long as nobody else in the company approves similar deals. (B) approve the dumb deal - rake in nice bonuses now, and it's conceivable that it might bust up the company some time in the future, but then you can always go with the old standby excuses of "nobody could have predicted..." and "I understand this better than you, so you need to keep me on board to fix it."
We already decide punishments of crimes in part based on the state of mind of the perpetrator. For instance, if somebody comes home, sees their spouse in bed with somebody else, and in a fit of rage kills the spouse (or the outside lover), we treat that as a lesser crime than somebody who carefully hires a hit man to kill their spouse for the life insurance money.
Bias crimes arguably risk the safety not just of the individuals but entire groups of Americans. If, for instance, somebody is killed because of their race, and government does nothing (as used to happen in the Deep South), then eventually members of the race who were being killed will find a non-government response, because nobody wants to have their life at risk just walking down a street. If you're lucky, it's a non-violent protest aimed at shaming everyone into stopping the killing. If you're not lucky, it's a riot. So there is a legitimate government interest in stopping bias crimes.
First of all, why do they have to go to Iraq to go hiking?
One possibility: Their CIA or DIA superiors ordered them to. Just because the Iranians are bastards about who they'll execute doesn't mean that they weren't spies, and the US intelligence agencies would definitely lie to the US public about whether they were spies in order to avoid blowing people's cover. In fact, they may even use a completely false story to try to convince the public that going to war with Iran is a good idea, if they have leadership that is part of the old and honorable profession of starting wars.
Slashdot Mirror
Required reading on this very subject: Upton Sinclair's The Jungle, which was mostly about precisely this phenomenon in Chicago.
Whether or not you think so, the actual data says otherwise:
* Marijuana legalization recently crossed 50% support.
* Gay marriage, which has been steadily shifting in favor of legalization.
* Leaving Afghanistan polls at 56% in favor, and has for months.
* Iraq War polls at 66% opposed, and the majority has been opposed to the war since at least 2006.
The only presidential candidate who even comes close to following the majority's wishes on those issues is Ron Paul, and he's generally been dismissed as a nutcase.
The entire country has moved to the right. Democrats are where the Republicans used to be, and Republicans are out in Crazy Town (pop. Way Too Many).
Actually, there's a massive disconnect between the politicians and the people of the United States. If the country were majority rule, which it isn't, marijuana would be legalized, gay marriage would be legal in more places, we would be completely out of Afghanistan and Iraq (not the "we're out, but there are drones and 15,000 soldiers / mercenaries to ... uh ... protect our embassy" version), many congresspersons would be indicted for bribery, many many banking executives (as well as some other corporate executives) would be indicted for multi-billion dollar fraud, the Consumer Finance Protection Bureau would be operating with full force, thousands of foreclosures would be ruled invalid and the people's homes restored, Bradley Manning and Julian Assange would be free, and there'd quite possibly be a massive public works program to keep people employed.
And that's why both the Tea Party and the Occupiers exist - the system is failing to respond to what the people want.
Besides, it's not how large the bomb is, it's how you use it.
I believe the correct way to drop a giant bomb looks something like this.
the Cathedral and Bazaar meme here, I'm gonna call a GodWin.
You just did, so GodWin!
And seriously, it's not a meme, it's an essay by Eric S Raymond which seems to capture pretty well exactly why Paul Saffo is completely wrong.
If existing laws are inadequate, the FBI would not have been able to take down MegaUpload.
You are making the unwarranted assumption that the FBI acts legally, when there is evidence that in many cases they do not. For instance, they bugged Martin Luther King's hotel room, and then tried to blackmail him with the sounds of him getting it on.
Well, there's your problem.
What do you do about those industries that require such a huge investment of capital to get started and such high fixed running costs that it's basically impossible to start up a new company without prohibitively large amounts of capital?
Imagine, for instance, a world in which there are no regulations on telecoms other than the easements required to put lines on government-owned land. Now you want to start up a telecom company, but you don't have the startup capital to set up lines all around the country, so instead you create a plan to set them up all around your town. But the thing is, even if your service is somewhat cheaper or better, nobody wants to buy it, because they want to call people in both Boston and Los Angeles. You could set the price so low that people in your town would buy it, but then you'd be losing money every month (due to the high fixed running costs) and have already burnt through your startup capital. You could negotiate a peering agreement with the big companies that control the telecom backbone, but since your service is much less valuable to them as theirs is to yours, they're going to charge you more than you can afford. Being a shrewd businessperson, you make this analysis before spending cash setting up telephone lines in your town, and don't start the company. And since all other businesspeople in your universe make the same choice, there can be no new sellers in the market, leaving the oligopoly intact. Which leaves everyone else either doing without whatever the oligopoly is selling, or going with the least bad option, and the members of the oligopoly trying to ensure that the least bad option for the customers is lousy service at a way-too-high price.
That's real capitalism, not the bogus libertarian fantasy.
Actually, in the US, they can deny you the job capriciously. If you go in for an interview, and they deny you the job because they just don't feel like hiring you, that's legal.
What's not typically legal is failing to hire you because of race, gender, religion (except if the organization is a religious group), age (although this one is often violated), marital status, military service (although lack of military service could be relevent), national origin, or union activity. So if they either specifically make it clear that's the reason you aren't hired, or there's a distinct pattern in who's hired and who's not, that will get the NLRB interested.
IANAL, TINLA, YMMV
I guess you could say it isn't, but the threat of workers being poached (in *some* sense) is what keeps wages from falling to zero in the first place, protecting the worker.
You exaggerate a bit. The average wage you would get in a world without the threat of workers quitting or getting hired away is basically W = (R + T) / 40 + U, where W = annual wages, T is the cost of training the worker, R is the cost of providing the basic necessities of the future worker from birth to the start of their career, and U is the annual upkeep of the worker (food, shelter, water, clothing, health care, transportation to/from work and stores). The '40' is the length of the worker's career, generally assumed here to be something like 24-64.
For a software developer, that comes out to something like:
R = $270,000
T = $150,000
U = $20,000
W = ($270000+$150000) / 40 + $25000 = ($420000) / 40 + $25000 = $10500+$25000 = $35,500 annual after-tax income.
Which is still obviously way lower than the competitive salary of a developer.
Actually, I've never used anything stronger than alcohol, which is why I know so little about them.
There are lots of problems with that argument:
1 (A) Every generation has improved the refining of recreational drugs. For instance, the hallucinogenic drugs like LSD were found in mushrooms, and used there, but there was no process for extracting just the drug. Similarly, cocaine was a more refined version of opium,
1 (B) Similarly, while sex has always happened, what's acceptable to talk about has changed. For instance, homosexuality was perfectly acceptable in ancient Greece and Rome, became completely unacceptable by the 1800's, became steadily more acceptable thanks to late Victorians like Oscar Wilde but still mostly behind closed doors, and in modern times the debate about whether homosexual couples can formalize their relationship with a marriage.
So while they didn't invent it, it's foolish to say that each generation doesn't change things.
2. Not everyone who protests something the government is doing is a teenager. A lot of the Occupyers, the majority of Tea Partyers were over 60 years old, and a lot of the protesters in Egypt, Tunesia, and Syria were over 30. In addition, not all teenagers get into political protest - a lot are just trying to find a way to make it through high school, college, or their first job.
3. The reason opinions *may* change as people get older (again, no guarantee there - I've known plenty of people who's opinions didn't change much between their 30's and their 80's) is because as people get older they're more able to accumulate wealth and power. Therefor, those policies that favor those with wealth and power, which were oppressive when the person was a teenager, are now benefiting them. For instance, it's not uncommon for people to be vehemantly against paying Social Security taxes when they're working, and then vehemently opposed to any measure that would threaten their Social Security benefits when they're retired. In other words, pure self-interest pushes them that way.
Specifically, the Fourth Amendment eliminates the authority of the federal government to monitor private communications (as interpreted by SCOTUS, phone calls, emails, etc are considered part of the 'papers and effects'), and the Fourteenth Amendment means the same rule also applies to the states.
Not that that's really going to stop this sort of thing from being implemented, since the only opposition will come from those without political power.
After building a base on the moon, he will point a giant "laser" at the Earth, and threaten the rest of the world with annihilating a major city every day unless the world pays the US (evil pinky finger) $10.5 trillion. Then he will use that money to pay off the national debt (except that which is owed to Social Security), and thus balance the budget.
Of course, the whole thing will be stopped when a spy with bad teeth shows up.
Barack Obama (D) 38%
Mitt Romney (R) 37%
DLL Not Found (I) 15%
Ron Paul (I) 10%
I don't know about the EU, but in the US, a criminal penalty does not prevent a civil lawsuit for defamation and/or breach of contract. So, if Facebook broke the rules, Vivian Reading would give Facebook a multi-billion euro fine, and all that criminal evidence would make the class-action lawsuit a relatively simple affair (because the evidence is already introduced in the criminal proceeding, so proving Facebook broke the rules is quite easy).
This is my big chance to sell tinfoil hats to all the people who think that this won't be disappated by the atmosphere.
And I should point out that for those who make tinfoil hats themselves, they're probably using knockoff aluminum foil rather than tin foil, so they won't work as well.
The Daily WTF has a lot of fantastic stories about what not to do. The stories include horrific interviews, code that makes you want to squirm at best, and plenty of IT mistakes.
And most obvious weak spots, like say the US electricity grid, have proven near 100% impervious for a decade now.
There's no point in terrorizing the US electricity grid, when the power companies seem perfectly capable of wrecking it on their own.
(The earliest I can think of is the suspension of habeas corpus in the Civil War.)
The earliest prominent example was 1798, with the Sedition Act. Set to expire the day before John Adams left office, it was used by Federalists to punish journalists and even a Congressman who wrote mean things about the Federalist government.
We run a secret intelligence agency, and have an acknowledged PsyOp division, aimed at the general US population.
Incidentally, that would be admitting to breaking the law, because the US military is bound by law to aim psyops solely at foreign populations.
Actually, that's not necessarily true. For instance, check out this poll:
* 62% disapprove of congressional Democrats. 75% disapprove of congressional Republicans. Congress in general is currently at 13% approval, only 3% saying strong approval. If I'm reading the data correctly, that's the lowest congressional approval since before 1974.
* When asked whether the President or congressional Republicans would do a better job handling the issues of the day, 13% said neither, despite that not even being an option.
* 37% identified themselves as independent voters, a higher percentage than both Democrats (32%) or Republicans (25%)
* 48% of those polled believe a third party is necessary, 28% strongly. That's stronger support in this poll than Mitt Romney or Barack Obama.
* A third party candidate that supported the positions of those polled would pull 22% immediately, and another 46% would at least consider it. Now, of course, the 'supported the positions of those polled' means that you'd need a mythical candidate who was all things to all people, but it suggests that the 2-party monopoly is actually quite weak.
The banks didn't do what was best for them long-term, but they definitely did what was best for the people managing them. If the bank posted a higher quarterly profit by engaging in stupid credit default swaps, the CEO did well, the manager who ran that division did well, and probably the people much further down who actually made the deals did well for as long as the music kept playing. Once the music stopped, the CEO, managers, etc could just take their $millions and retire very comfortably, or they could probably fairly easily find work elsewhere.
Consider a bank executive with this choice:
(A) don't approve a dumb deal - piss off those who wanted to make a deal, not make as much money now as possible, have a tough time convincing the boss / shareholders it was the right move, but it might make the company more sound so long as nobody else in the company approves similar deals.
(B) approve the dumb deal - rake in nice bonuses now, and it's conceivable that it might bust up the company some time in the future, but then you can always go with the old standby excuses of "nobody could have predicted..." and "I understand this better than you, so you need to keep me on board to fix it."
Suddenly it doesn't seem surprising at all.
We already decide punishments of crimes in part based on the state of mind of the perpetrator. For instance, if somebody comes home, sees their spouse in bed with somebody else, and in a fit of rage kills the spouse (or the outside lover), we treat that as a lesser crime than somebody who carefully hires a hit man to kill their spouse for the life insurance money.
Bias crimes arguably risk the safety not just of the individuals but entire groups of Americans. If, for instance, somebody is killed because of their race, and government does nothing (as used to happen in the Deep South), then eventually members of the race who were being killed will find a non-government response, because nobody wants to have their life at risk just walking down a street. If you're lucky, it's a non-violent protest aimed at shaming everyone into stopping the killing. If you're not lucky, it's a riot. So there is a legitimate government interest in stopping bias crimes.
First of all, why do they have to go to Iraq to go hiking?
One possibility: Their CIA or DIA superiors ordered them to. Just because the Iranians are bastards about who they'll execute doesn't mean that they weren't spies, and the US intelligence agencies would definitely lie to the US public about whether they were spies in order to avoid blowing people's cover. In fact, they may even use a completely false story to try to convince the public that going to war with Iran is a good idea, if they have leadership that is part of the old and honorable profession of starting wars.