And vote in who? That's the problem, there is no candidate or major party right now that could come close to winning a stamp of approval from folks who care about civil liberties.
The police are supportive of Occupy Cleveland as well, and a lot of the local spin-offs are very keen on making the police allies of the protests (they're union guys, after all). I was referring to Occupy Wall St in New York specifically, where there have been plenty of incidents beyond the infamous pepper-spraying.
Actually, if you start with the premise that wealth is an abstraction of labor, then you very quickly get the system to break down completely when you turn labor into something that can be bought and sold directly, rather than the stuff you make with labor being bought and sold. The analysis of exactly why that happens was in fact the core argument of Karl Marx's Das Kapital.
Now unions are co-opting it,... democratic party operatives are co-opting it...
They're certainly trying to co-opt it, but the kids organizing Occupy Wall St are doing something very smart, namely not letting any one organization control it. They're basically running things by direct democracy as much as possible, and the whole thing is rather anarchist. Those with money but no real support (i.e. the Democratic Party) can't buy off the protest organizers because if someone got up and said "To solve this problem, we need to re-elect Barack Obama" would pretty quickly be marginalized.
In fact, that seems to be one of the things that was driving the media nuts early on: they have no official leaders to talk to, no office headquarters you could call up and get a statement from, no press conferences, no official platform to refer to. This meant that if they had wanted to find out what the protests really were all about, they'd have to go down there and spend a lot of time talking to the protesters, which is a lot more work than re-printing corporate press releases and the like.
That's how you grab a nation by the balls without ever using physical force.
Sure you do, if the powerless ever get too uppity: Kent State is the most extreme example in the US, but there are plenty of more recent examples. You don't get involved yourself, of course, but you get your pals in government to organize riot police protection whenever you're having a major gathering that might attract the attention of the rabble. And here's the best part: You can use your control of government to convince the police to buy all sorts of weapons from the corporations you control, so that you're effectively using the protester's own tax money to fund beating them.
And in the Third World countries they care about, they don't bother with the niceties of limiting themselves to non-lethal force. Sometimes they use the US military for that, sometimes the poor nation's own military and police, sometimes private security forces, but the effect is always the same. It's not all that uncommon, for instance, for sweatshop workers who dare to talk about organizing to be killed by private companies.
I doubt these protestors have the sophistication or the awareness to see through the bullshit and understand what they're actually opposing.
Well, for starters, they had the sense to target Wall Street rather than Washington DC and government. That suggests that they're seeing through at least one of the illusions put forward by the real power brokers.
The three aspects of Occupy Wall St that are like the Tea Party are: 1. It's without question a populist movement. 2. It's emphasizing peaceful protest as a way of getting what you want. 3. It's not coming from either major party's political apparatus.
That's about where the similarities end. Some of the more significant differences: 1. Police have generally been favorable to or at least tolerant of Tea Party protests. They have been hostile and violent towards Occupy Wall St. 2. As of yet, there have been no indications that Occupy Wall St will turn into "elect Democrats" in a way that the Tea Party turned into "elect Republicans". There are also indications that attempts to turn it into an effort to elect Democrats would likely end in failure. 3. There are no wealthy donors and no major corporations giving money to Occupy Wall St, in the way that the Tea Party was financially supported by News Corp.
I didn't say which views those Americans out in the streets held - I'm pro-free speech regardless of who's doing the speaking or what they're saying.
Now, as far as the exact policies I put forward: - The kind of legal minimum wage I'm referring to would be enough to cover (a) rent on a modest place to live (1 bedroom apt, trailer, something along those lines), (b) food, and (c) $900 a year for everything else like clothing and transportation. What that number actually varies depends a lot on the metro area, but the math comes out to about $8 per hour. Police and firefighters both make way more than that, but a lot of people make less.
- I'd be pushing for the richest of the rich taking home about 50% of their salary, and 80% of their investment income. That's the combined effect 3 proposals: (a) return income and capital gains taxes to the rates they were at in the 1990's, (b) apply FICA taxes to incomes between $106K and $250K, and (c) create a 44% income tax bracket for incomes above $1 million.
Imagine a society in which only a couple of you know has anything beyond a high school education. This could be in the inner city, it could be in Appalachia, it could be in the middle of rural Kansas. There's basically no difference in expected income between those who made the effort to get a high school degree and those who didn't, because most everybody who can get a job is working at about $6-10 an hour (retail, fast food, etc).
Now, when a kid in that society gets into high school, they have 3 basic options: 1. Work their butt off and hope that their grades and community work and the like are enough to get them some scholarships so they can get out of the 'hood / town / middle of nowhere. 2. Muddle their way through with mid-to-low-level grades, work part time if possible, and hope that their diploma will get them to the point where they can get closer to the $10-15 per hour level rather than the $6-10 per hour level. 3. Get a job when they're 16 and stop going to school, maybe picking up a GED somewhere along the line.
Now, for a very few very smart kids, option 1 is viable. But most of the rest will have a choice between 2 and 3. Now, the long-term prospects for a kid who chooses to finish high school are somewhat better, but the short-term prospects are better for the kid who starts working full time because their family almost definitely needs the money. So just based on rational economic choices, it's not surprising that investing heavily in studying is not something that most kids in this situation will do.
What, and make the government responsive to the uneducated masses? I'll bet you're also one of those nutcases that supports Americans getting out on the streets and making their views known, or taking the time to chat with their neighbors about upcoming local elections. A few more like you and the place might turn into some sort of democracy.
And the worst part of that: The people might vote for candidates end up taxing the rich and using the extra cash to hire the unemployed to build highways and the like. And of course one side effect of this is that it would get workers thinking they could demand a minimum wage so that they can survive on a 40-hour work week. Any moves in that direction would quite obviously lead to socialism!
(A) Test scores are heavily correlated with demographic factors such as race and social class. In fact, there's some evidence that they're correlated more with those sorts of demographics than they are with factors like time spent studying. So whether it was intended or not, it's quite possible that the effect of this would have been to separate out, with official sanction, the generally wealthier white and Asian-American kids from the mostly poorer black and Hispanic kids, and treat the first group better than the second group.
(B) For kids who's friends are generally anti-intellectual, they might be more embarrassed to be in the "smart" line rather than the "stupid" line. If you're in a crowd where most everybody is heading nowhere in life and knows it, they will often single out the people who are going somewhere for bullying to try to make themselves feel better about their utter lack of prospects.
(C) Threats only get kids to fake learning, not to really learn stuff. You can get kids to pretend to go to study groups but really just hang out with friends. You can get kids to cram for the next exam and promptly forget everything the next day. You can get kids to cheat on their test to avoid school or parental consequences. But you can't get kids to really learn and internalize what they're supposed to know with threats - for that you need to actually give them a goal that their learning will help accomplish.
"It's better to keep people poor, so they can be more environmentally friendly." Is that a fair summary of what you're trying to say ? This is generally not true poorer countries are generally not as environmentally friendly as rich ones.
The reason poor countries tend to have environmental problems is because of the stuff they make for export to the US. The reason you can't drink the water in, say, Honduras, has a lot to do with the US moving the production of stuff for Americans to consume from the US over to Honduras. So the question is, do you describe Honduras as not environmental friendly because they've endured all sorts of environmental damage to make prices in the US cheaper, or do you describe the US as not environmentally friendly because instead of polluting our own land we're now polluting somebody else's?
What GP seems to be saying is that when the right incentives are in place to embrace conservation, rich societies can in fact embrace conservation and adapt. For instance, in Europe, oil-based products are much more expensive than in the US, and so people have adjusted by using public transit frequently, pushing for more insulated homes, making smaller cars, and using fewer plastic bags (among other things).
For your basic corporate conservative, the only things that have value are those things that are owned by somebody. And that's a private owner, not a government.
So, for instance, breathable air is worthless under this philosophy. Worthless, that is, unless you can charge people to breathe it, maybe put it in cans. I wish this were a joke, but the corporations, with the World Bank practically forcing the government's hand, already tried to do the same thing to rainwater.
The US Supreme Court has found on at least twooccasions that collecting fingerprints constitutes a search, and that the government must therefor produce probable cause before being allowed to do so.
Especially when you consider that for kids under the age of 16, attendance at High School is required by law, they are now in the ridiculous position of requiring a search without probable cause for failing to break the law.
If you've pissed off the military enough for them to launch a rocket at you, being a citizen isn't a concern.
So say you're Ron Paul or Dennis Kucinich or Cindy Sheehan, all of whom have definitely pissed off the military quite a bit by advocating significantly reducing their funding or ordering them to stop engaging the enemy. Some of those military guys might think it's OK to launch a rocket at them to eliminate the problem of anti-military activity in the US. Does them all being US citizens make it a concern? Do you still see no problem?
The whole point of having a court system is that we can't trust the executive branch to decide who's a Good Guy and who's a Bad Guy.
I would not rule out the chance to preserve a nucleus of human specimens. It would be quite easy at the bottom of some of our deeper mine shafts. The radioactivity would never penetrate a mine some thousands of feet deep. And in a matter of weeks, sufficient improvements in dwelling space could easily be provided. Nuclear reactors could provide power almost indefinitely. Greenhouses could maintain plantlife. Animals could be bred and slaughtered. A quick survey would have to be made of all the available mine sites in the country. But I would guess that dwelling space for several hundred thousands of our people could easily be provided. With the proper breeding techniques and a ratio of say, ten females to each male, I would guess that they could then work their way back to the present gross national product within say, twenty years.
This time though, unlike the Evil Communists, the Evil Terrorists can't just call it quits and screw up the whole program. That's because if Al Qaida announced, today, that "Hey everyone, we're giving up trying to attack the US", they'd just find some other group of people to call the Evil Terrorists, and all the oppressive tactics can continue unabated.
There are, generally speaking, 4 basic ways musicians have managed the survival problem: 1. connect with a religious group. The religious group pays the musician so the musician can help draw in the JS Bach would be the best known example of this - a huge percentage of what he wrote was for worship services for the Lutheran Church. 2. make themselves either formally or informally to the household of a noble or ruler. Basically, the noble helps pay for the upkeep of the musician in exchange for the prestige of having them. Beethoven, for instance, had several noble patrons that paid him a regular stipend, and he repaid them by performing at their parties and dedicating some of his works to them. 3. do a completely different job and making music for the sheer fun of it. This would be most of the folk and pub musicians that have ever existed. 4. teach the children of the rich to make music of their own. Sometimes that was in conjunction with being attached to their household.
Modern times aren't much different, except that instead of attaching themselves to nobility, some are now attached to major labels. Only a very small number of musicians are actually able to make a living by performing music.
No, it's not a big risk. See, as the Arrogant Worms explains when introducing the Mounted Animal Nature Trail, there's only 1 girl per 30 guys in that area (she's really popular, that's for sure). So no real risk of a baby boom.
One reason abusive mods prefer Overrated to Troll or Flamebait is that they aren't (or at least weren't at some point) subject to meta-moderation. This allowed somebody with a bunch of mod points, particularly somebody with a load of mod points on multiple sock-puppet accounts, to downmod to oblivion any comment they disagreed with.
And it's worth pointing out the majority of mods seem pretty fair, except that they don't tend to follow the rule about browsing at -1 to help keep their other mods in check.
Can we PLEASE overhaul / ditch copyright law already?
No, we can't. Not because it's a bad idea, but because on the side of copyright as it is we have all the big media companies which every single politician depends on for a successful campaign.
You are in fact quite incorrect - I specifically referenced the well-documented fact that police and courts tend to treat white men better than they do non-white men.
Slashdot Mirror
Don't you mean ... This! Is! Slashdot! *kick*
And vote in who? That's the problem, there is no candidate or major party right now that could come close to winning a stamp of approval from folks who care about civil liberties.
The police are supportive of Occupy Cleveland as well, and a lot of the local spin-offs are very keen on making the police allies of the protests (they're union guys, after all). I was referring to Occupy Wall St in New York specifically, where there have been plenty of incidents beyond the infamous pepper-spraying.
You got the stat backwards: I was saying that you'd tax away 20% of the capital gain, not 80% of it. The 80% would be what the investor keeps.
Actually, if you start with the premise that wealth is an abstraction of labor, then you very quickly get the system to break down completely when you turn labor into something that can be bought and sold directly, rather than the stuff you make with labor being bought and sold. The analysis of exactly why that happens was in fact the core argument of Karl Marx's Das Kapital.
Now unions are co-opting it, ... democratic party operatives are co-opting it ...
They're certainly trying to co-opt it, but the kids organizing Occupy Wall St are doing something very smart, namely not letting any one organization control it. They're basically running things by direct democracy as much as possible, and the whole thing is rather anarchist. Those with money but no real support (i.e. the Democratic Party) can't buy off the protest organizers because if someone got up and said "To solve this problem, we need to re-elect Barack Obama" would pretty quickly be marginalized.
In fact, that seems to be one of the things that was driving the media nuts early on: they have no official leaders to talk to, no office headquarters you could call up and get a statement from, no press conferences, no official platform to refer to. This meant that if they had wanted to find out what the protests really were all about, they'd have to go down there and spend a lot of time talking to the protesters, which is a lot more work than re-printing corporate press releases and the like.
That's how you grab a nation by the balls without ever using physical force.
Sure you do, if the powerless ever get too uppity: Kent State is the most extreme example in the US, but there are plenty of more recent examples. You don't get involved yourself, of course, but you get your pals in government to organize riot police protection whenever you're having a major gathering that might attract the attention of the rabble. And here's the best part: You can use your control of government to convince the police to buy all sorts of weapons from the corporations you control, so that you're effectively using the protester's own tax money to fund beating them.
And in the Third World countries they care about, they don't bother with the niceties of limiting themselves to non-lethal force. Sometimes they use the US military for that, sometimes the poor nation's own military and police, sometimes private security forces, but the effect is always the same. It's not all that uncommon, for instance, for sweatshop workers who dare to talk about organizing to be killed by private companies.
I doubt these protestors have the sophistication or the awareness to see through the bullshit and understand what they're actually opposing.
Well, for starters, they had the sense to target Wall Street rather than Washington DC and government. That suggests that they're seeing through at least one of the illusions put forward by the real power brokers.
The three aspects of Occupy Wall St that are like the Tea Party are:
1. It's without question a populist movement.
2. It's emphasizing peaceful protest as a way of getting what you want.
3. It's not coming from either major party's political apparatus.
That's about where the similarities end. Some of the more significant differences:
1. Police have generally been favorable to or at least tolerant of Tea Party protests. They have been hostile and violent towards Occupy Wall St.
2. As of yet, there have been no indications that Occupy Wall St will turn into "elect Democrats" in a way that the Tea Party turned into "elect Republicans". There are also indications that attempts to turn it into an effort to elect Democrats would likely end in failure.
3. There are no wealthy donors and no major corporations giving money to Occupy Wall St, in the way that the Tea Party was financially supported by News Corp.
I didn't say which views those Americans out in the streets held - I'm pro-free speech regardless of who's doing the speaking or what they're saying.
Now, as far as the exact policies I put forward:
- The kind of legal minimum wage I'm referring to would be enough to cover (a) rent on a modest place to live (1 bedroom apt, trailer, something along those lines), (b) food, and (c) $900 a year for everything else like clothing and transportation. What that number actually varies depends a lot on the metro area, but the math comes out to about $8 per hour. Police and firefighters both make way more than that, but a lot of people make less.
- I'd be pushing for the richest of the rich taking home about 50% of their salary, and 80% of their investment income. That's the combined effect 3 proposals: (a) return income and capital gains taxes to the rates they were at in the 1990's, (b) apply FICA taxes to incomes between $106K and $250K, and (c) create a 44% income tax bracket for incomes above $1 million.
Here's another way of looking at it:
Imagine a society in which only a couple of you know has anything beyond a high school education. This could be in the inner city, it could be in Appalachia, it could be in the middle of rural Kansas. There's basically no difference in expected income between those who made the effort to get a high school degree and those who didn't, because most everybody who can get a job is working at about $6-10 an hour (retail, fast food, etc).
Now, when a kid in that society gets into high school, they have 3 basic options:
1. Work their butt off and hope that their grades and community work and the like are enough to get them some scholarships so they can get out of the 'hood / town / middle of nowhere.
2. Muddle their way through with mid-to-low-level grades, work part time if possible, and hope that their diploma will get them to the point where they can get closer to the $10-15 per hour level rather than the $6-10 per hour level.
3. Get a job when they're 16 and stop going to school, maybe picking up a GED somewhere along the line.
Now, for a very few very smart kids, option 1 is viable. But most of the rest will have a choice between 2 and 3. Now, the long-term prospects for a kid who chooses to finish high school are somewhat better, but the short-term prospects are better for the kid who starts working full time because their family almost definitely needs the money. So just based on rational economic choices, it's not surprising that investing heavily in studying is not something that most kids in this situation will do.
What, and make the government responsive to the uneducated masses? I'll bet you're also one of those nutcases that supports Americans getting out on the streets and making their views known, or taking the time to chat with their neighbors about upcoming local elections. A few more like you and the place might turn into some sort of democracy.
And the worst part of that: The people might vote for candidates end up taxing the rich and using the extra cash to hire the unemployed to build highways and the like. And of course one side effect of this is that it would get workers thinking they could demand a minimum wage so that they can survive on a 40-hour work week. Any moves in that direction would quite obviously lead to socialism!
More specifically, send him to med school
(A) Test scores are heavily correlated with demographic factors such as race and social class. In fact, there's some evidence that they're correlated more with those sorts of demographics than they are with factors like time spent studying. So whether it was intended or not, it's quite possible that the effect of this would have been to separate out, with official sanction, the generally wealthier white and Asian-American kids from the mostly poorer black and Hispanic kids, and treat the first group better than the second group.
(B) For kids who's friends are generally anti-intellectual, they might be more embarrassed to be in the "smart" line rather than the "stupid" line. If you're in a crowd where most everybody is heading nowhere in life and knows it, they will often single out the people who are going somewhere for bullying to try to make themselves feel better about their utter lack of prospects.
(C) Threats only get kids to fake learning, not to really learn stuff. You can get kids to pretend to go to study groups but really just hang out with friends. You can get kids to cram for the next exam and promptly forget everything the next day. You can get kids to cheat on their test to avoid school or parental consequences. But you can't get kids to really learn and internalize what they're supposed to know with threats - for that you need to actually give them a goal that their learning will help accomplish.
"It's better to keep people poor, so they can be more environmentally friendly." Is that a fair summary of what you're trying to say ? This is generally not true poorer countries are generally not as environmentally friendly as rich ones.
The reason poor countries tend to have environmental problems is because of the stuff they make for export to the US. The reason you can't drink the water in, say, Honduras, has a lot to do with the US moving the production of stuff for Americans to consume from the US over to Honduras. So the question is, do you describe Honduras as not environmental friendly because they've endured all sorts of environmental damage to make prices in the US cheaper, or do you describe the US as not environmentally friendly because instead of polluting our own land we're now polluting somebody else's?
What GP seems to be saying is that when the right incentives are in place to embrace conservation, rich societies can in fact embrace conservation and adapt. For instance, in Europe, oil-based products are much more expensive than in the US, and so people have adjusted by using public transit frequently, pushing for more insulated homes, making smaller cars, and using fewer plastic bags (among other things).
For your basic corporate conservative, the only things that have value are those things that are owned by somebody. And that's a private owner, not a government.
So, for instance, breathable air is worthless under this philosophy. Worthless, that is, unless you can charge people to breathe it, maybe put it in cans. I wish this were a joke, but the corporations, with the World Bank practically forcing the government's hand, already tried to do the same thing to rainwater.
The US Supreme Court has found on at least two occasions that collecting fingerprints constitutes a search, and that the government must therefor produce probable cause before being allowed to do so.
Especially when you consider that for kids under the age of 16, attendance at High School is required by law, they are now in the ridiculous position of requiring a search without probable cause for failing to break the law.
If you've pissed off the military enough for them to launch a rocket at you, being a citizen isn't a concern.
So say you're Ron Paul or Dennis Kucinich or Cindy Sheehan, all of whom have definitely pissed off the military quite a bit by advocating significantly reducing their funding or ordering them to stop engaging the enemy. Some of those military guys might think it's OK to launch a rocket at them to eliminate the problem of anti-military activity in the US. Does them all being US citizens make it a concern? Do you still see no problem?
The whole point of having a court system is that we can't trust the executive branch to decide who's a Good Guy and who's a Bad Guy.
I would not rule out the chance to preserve a nucleus of human specimens. It would be quite easy at the bottom of some of our deeper mine shafts. The radioactivity would never penetrate a mine some thousands of feet deep. And in a matter of weeks, sufficient improvements in dwelling space could easily be provided. Nuclear reactors could provide power almost indefinitely. Greenhouses could maintain plantlife. Animals could be bred and slaughtered. A quick survey would have to be made of all the available mine sites in the country. But I would guess that dwelling space for several hundred thousands of our people could easily be provided. With the proper breeding techniques and a ratio of say, ten females to each male, I would guess that they could then work their way back to the present gross national product within say, twenty years.
This time though, unlike the Evil Communists, the Evil Terrorists can't just call it quits and screw up the whole program. That's because if Al Qaida announced, today, that "Hey everyone, we're giving up trying to attack the US", they'd just find some other group of people to call the Evil Terrorists, and all the oppressive tactics can continue unabated.
There are, generally speaking, 4 basic ways musicians have managed the survival problem:
1. connect with a religious group. The religious group pays the musician so the musician can help draw in the JS Bach would be the best known example of this - a huge percentage of what he wrote was for worship services for the Lutheran Church.
2. make themselves either formally or informally to the household of a noble or ruler. Basically, the noble helps pay for the upkeep of the musician in exchange for the prestige of having them. Beethoven, for instance, had several noble patrons that paid him a regular stipend, and he repaid them by performing at their parties and dedicating some of his works to them.
3. do a completely different job and making music for the sheer fun of it. This would be most of the folk and pub musicians that have ever existed.
4. teach the children of the rich to make music of their own. Sometimes that was in conjunction with being attached to their household.
Modern times aren't much different, except that instead of attaching themselves to nobility, some are now attached to major labels. Only a very small number of musicians are actually able to make a living by performing music.
No, it's not a big risk. See, as the Arrogant Worms explains when introducing the Mounted Animal Nature Trail, there's only 1 girl per 30 guys in that area (she's really popular, that's for sure). So no real risk of a baby boom.
Oh, and more stories about ponies.
Can we also have more stories about Natalie Portman?
One reason abusive mods prefer Overrated to Troll or Flamebait is that they aren't (or at least weren't at some point) subject to meta-moderation. This allowed somebody with a bunch of mod points, particularly somebody with a load of mod points on multiple sock-puppet accounts, to downmod to oblivion any comment they disagreed with.
And it's worth pointing out the majority of mods seem pretty fair, except that they don't tend to follow the rule about browsing at -1 to help keep their other mods in check.
Can we PLEASE overhaul / ditch copyright law already?
No, we can't. Not because it's a bad idea, but because on the side of copyright as it is we have all the big media companies which every single politician depends on for a successful campaign.
You are in fact quite incorrect - I specifically referenced the well-documented fact that police and courts tend to treat white men better than they do non-white men.