The cutoff date was also the end of the third quarter of 2013, and budgets have to be overrun or it would get cut next year (provided Congress and the President ever came up with a budget). My guess is that there's a flurry of spending on 9/30 (or the Friday directly before then if 9/30 falls on a weekend) every single year going back a couple of decades.
It's sort of like Neil DeGrasse Tyson's argument against one of the 2012 scares about planetary alignment: The planetary alignment the worrywarts were claiming was a disaster was going to happen on December 21, 2012, but it also happened on the winter solstice in every year before that.
Unfortunately, he lost interest in Microsoft years ago.. That's why he allowed a close personal friend (Steve Ballmer) to remain CEO for 13 years with no regard for how well he did the job.
I would lose interest in business too, if I were worth $50 billion. At this point, he doesn't really have any reason to care about Microsoft, except as a nostalgia thing.
But generally speaking, I'd say BillG would be the person most capable of turning the ship around, just because the markets, the employees, and management would all respect him (deservedly or not).
As much as I disagree with his business tactics over the years, Gates is a freaking genius.
I'm not sure whether he's a genius, but I had a lot more respect for him once I read this, which is Joel Spolsky's first-hand account of working for the man. He wasn't necessarily a genius, but he was a very effective combination of ruthless businessman and smart technical guy.
Reasonable people can disagree over, say, whether the federal government ought to be engaged in any kind of emergency management at all. That's not the thrust of the argument: My point is that once the politicians have decided to do emergency management at the federal level, you want that job to be done competently. You can decide, at a later date, that you don't want it done at all, but nobody benefits from having it done badly.
and they share a passion for their craft that rises above the desire to make more money
Yes, I like quality work and good coworkers, but that doesn't mean that I'm going to happily accept pay below what I have good reason to believe I'm worth. But thanks to rhetoric and belief that I will, that changes what the markets will bear, even while companies are complaining about a shortage of developers.
It's not surprising that a little over half of congress supports the NSA spying, since that's approximately the percentage of voters that support it too.
Actually, that would be surprising! Look at what they think about, say, marijuana laws or tax rates, and compare that to what polls say voters want.
Senator Warren already has done something: The CFPB. Which, until the shutdown started, was issuing reports on the bad banks and credit card companies were for anyone who cared to read them, taken a few regulatory actions against the really egregious offenders, and other steps that were exactly what she said it was going to do.
She also recently blocked the nomination of Larry Summers for Fed Chairman. Given that most outside observers saw Larry Summers as an incompetent sexist blowhard who's primary skill is sucking up to important people, this is a good thing.
And look at the other candidates who actually led Mr Romney at some point in the race:
- Newt Gingrich, who among other things divorced his wife in the hospital because he wanted to marry someone prettier that he had been banging on the side, at exactly the same time he was leading the effort to impeach Bill Clinton for getting a little action on the side.
- Herman Cain, who, as far as I can tell, had no clue what the job of President of the United States actually entailed.
- Rick Santorum, who's a religious nutjob. - Michelle Bachmann. Ditto.
- Rick Perry, who seemed surprised at the idea that naming your family's country estate "N*****head" was seen as racist. Also, given his last job, and given how much recent success the country had had with former Texas governors being in charge, Obama would have had an easy win.
- Ron Paul, who has some really great ideas, and some really lousy ones. We tried things like bank-issued currency, and stopped because those practices caused all kinds of problems.
And who didn't ever come close to winning? Jon Huntsman, the candidate that the Obama people were actually worried about, because he's a moderate good-governance-get-things-done politician who had previously been a successful and highly popular governor in his state, and was saying sensible things on the campaign trail.
There's no difference between the two parties that run America.
I'm going to have to sort of... uhh... disagree with you there.
There's a big difference that actually matters: One of those rich right-wing religious parties believes that government cannot function properly. Not just that it doesn't function properly (any idiot can see that that's at least partially true), but that there is absolutely no way to make it so that government agencies do their job efficiently and well. That kind of belief means that when they're in charge, they think it's a good idea to put the head of the Arabian Horse Association in charge of emergency management: Sure, they might screw things up, but that won't make things any worse for real people, right?
By contrast, the other party at least wants government to do their job properly, so for the very same role of heading up emergency management they'll put in people like the current guy, who had started as a firefighter and paramedic and worked his way up to running emergency management for Florida. In other words, somebody who was at least reasonably qualified to do the job.
TL;DR;: Republicans believe government can't work. When in office, they try to prove their point.
Relevant quote from Little Miss Sunshine: "When you're young, you're crazy to do that shit [heroin]. Me?! I'm old! You get to be my age -- you're crazy not to do it."
AFAICT, Big Money is behind the traditional Republicans, not behind the tea party Republicans.
Some big money is behind the traditional Republicans: Scaife et al, gun industry, defense industry, oil industry, financial industry (Mitt Romney's top 5 contributors, according to opensecrets.org, were Goldman, BofA, JP Morgan, Morgan Stanley, and Wells Fargo).
Some big money is also behind the Tea Party Republicans: Koch Industries, News Corporation.
Some big money is also behind the mainstream Democrats: software industry, telecom industry, entertainment industry, casinos, education industry, hospitals.
Generally speaking, mainstream Republicans are the best funded, followed by the mainstream Democrats, followed by the Tea Party. Left-wing Democrats basically don't have much big money behind them, and the policies they've gotten through in the last 20 years or so reflect that (they don't have any).
Strangely, neither party, once in power, actually reduces spending.
If you go by %GDP, there were 3 presidents who managed to do it exactly that pretty consistently in the last 40 years: Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton, and Barack Obama. Also, the federal government employment peaked somewhere around 1990, with Bill Clinton cutting the federal workforce by about 400,000 people over his term.
If you look at nominal spending, that no longer holds true because inflation is always ticking up the numbers by a couple of percentage points a year. But by a lot of measurements, the government has in fact been cut back.
No, if I understand correctly, they're refusing to raise the borrowing limit again. I don't think Congress has been able to agree on an actual budget since Bush was in office.
They're doing both. The last "continuing resolution" that allowed Obama to keep the staff paid and the lights on ran out yesterday, which is why the government is shut down today. They also plan on refusing to raise the borrowing limit again in about 2 weeks. Because they believe, as far as I can tell, that allowing poor people to get decent health care is tantamount to Antichrist Obama taking over the world in preparation for the apocalypse or something.
And the worst part of that story, from my perspective, was that Mitt Romney spent most of his presidential campaign trying to pretend that it didn't happen. If you want to see why I really really don't like Republicans these days, that's a big part of the answer: When they do something that's actually worked out really well for their constituents, they're embarrassed by it.
For another example, the right-wing noise machine was unhappy in the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy because Chris Christie got on TV and said, fairly truthfully, that federal, state, and local government agencies were working effectively together in an organized disaster relief effort. As if that competence was something to be afraid of!
Unbelievable. I really can't understand this reasoning. You ADMIT that the government is incompetent in how they spend the public's money ('while not providing any healthcare") while wanting to take a well working health care system and dismantle it and give it to the government to control!
Actually, quite the opposite: The government is in fact more effective at spending health care money than the private sector. The portion of the health care system in the US that has by far the most bang for the buck is the VA, followed by Medicare.
I can think of a few very logical reasons why that would be so: 1. The private health care sector spends gobs of money making sure that somebody else gets stuck with the cost of care. Hospitals try to make patients' insurers pay (with bills and collections), patients' insurers try to make patients pay (by denying coverage), patients try to make doctors pay (with malpractice suits), doctors try to make sure malpractice insurance pays (that's part of why they have coverage), malpractice insurers try to make patients pay (with legal defense teams), etc, etc. A government-run system, by contrast, has at most 1 bureaucracy set up to deny care they see as unnecessary.
2. Part of the other job of hospital billing departments is that they have to dealing with the red tape put up by each of the different health insurance companies in their state. In a government-run system, they have to deal with 1 variety of red tape from 1 department, cutting their workload by about 80%.
3. Hospitals and health care providers spend money advertising. In a government-run system, government can't effectively compete against itself, so that would go away pretty quickly.
4. Hospitals and health care providers sometimes recommend completely unnecessary treatments and tests in order to boost their own profits. Again, government-run health care, where the same organization is both providing the service and paying the bills, has no reason to do this, and wouldn't.
Closest would be Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT), who's been a socialist his whole career.
But yeah, some folks think Obama is a Kenyan Muslim socialist, and no amount of facts to the contrary on any of those points will convince them otherwise. And some folks think that the government doing anything other than having a military leads immediately and inexorably to Stalin sending millions to their deaths in Siberia.
No, if you're talking about the "value of a brand" it's basically marketing, nothing more.
Absolutely. My point is that you can measure it by noticing how much more people will pay for an identical product just by slapping the label "Brooks Brothers" on it.
The value of the brand does not equal the market cap of the company.
Basically, the value of a brand is the difference in price between a generic product and a basically identical branded product. For example, a generic 2-button blazer goes for about $120, whereas Brooks Brothers brand goes for $650, making the value of the Brooks Brothers brand $530. Multiply that by the estimated size of the market, and you have an idea of what the value of the brand is.
No wonder he's in trouble. Didn't he learn never to marry them? Especially since he had something like a dozen teenaged girls acting as his "personal servants" before he went on the lam.
I learned reading, counting, and addition before kindergarten, but my folks also put me in a top-notch kindergarten program, so by first grade I was comfortable with multi-digit addition and some subtraction as well. The point of that is just that I was years ahead of my classmates before I really could make any decisions for myself, and it wasn't because I was some kind of genius.
Slashdot Mirror
The cutoff date was also the end of the third quarter of 2013, and budgets have to be overrun or it would get cut next year (provided Congress and the President ever came up with a budget). My guess is that there's a flurry of spending on 9/30 (or the Friday directly before then if 9/30 falls on a weekend) every single year going back a couple of decades.
It's sort of like Neil DeGrasse Tyson's argument against one of the 2012 scares about planetary alignment: The planetary alignment the worrywarts were claiming was a disaster was going to happen on December 21, 2012, but it also happened on the winter solstice in every year before that.
Unfortunately, he lost interest in Microsoft years ago.. That's why he allowed a close personal friend (Steve Ballmer) to remain CEO for 13 years with no regard for how well he did the job.
I would lose interest in business too, if I were worth $50 billion. At this point, he doesn't really have any reason to care about Microsoft, except as a nostalgia thing.
But generally speaking, I'd say BillG would be the person most capable of turning the ship around, just because the markets, the employees, and management would all respect him (deservedly or not).
As much as I disagree with his business tactics over the years, Gates is a freaking genius.
I'm not sure whether he's a genius, but I had a lot more respect for him once I read this, which is Joel Spolsky's first-hand account of working for the man. He wasn't necessarily a genius, but he was a very effective combination of ruthless businessman and smart technical guy.
Also, at the risk of Godwinning the thread, a certain vegetarian German politician died at 56.
Vegetarians and vegans aren't necessarily any healthier than anyone else: It all depends on a lot more than what somebody eats or doesn't eat.
Reasonable people can disagree over, say, whether the federal government ought to be engaged in any kind of emergency management at all. That's not the thrust of the argument: My point is that once the politicians have decided to do emergency management at the federal level, you want that job to be done competently. You can decide, at a later date, that you don't want it done at all, but nobody benefits from having it done badly.
Yep, keeping those Trojans out is a vital security measure, as discovered the hard way by King Menelaus of Sparta.
and they share a passion for their craft that rises above the desire to make more money
Yes, I like quality work and good coworkers, but that doesn't mean that I'm going to happily accept pay below what I have good reason to believe I'm worth. But thanks to rhetoric and belief that I will, that changes what the markets will bear, even while companies are complaining about a shortage of developers.
It's not surprising that a little over half of congress supports the NSA spying, since that's approximately the percentage of voters that support it too.
Actually, that would be surprising! Look at what they think about, say, marijuana laws or tax rates, and compare that to what polls say voters want.
There's a reason why Congress currently has a 10% approval rating and an 87% disapproval rating.
Senator Warren already has done something: The CFPB. Which, until the shutdown started, was issuing reports on the bad banks and credit card companies were for anyone who cared to read them, taken a few regulatory actions against the really egregious offenders, and other steps that were exactly what she said it was going to do.
She also recently blocked the nomination of Larry Summers for Fed Chairman. Given that most outside observers saw Larry Summers as an incompetent sexist blowhard who's primary skill is sucking up to important people, this is a good thing.
And look at the other candidates who actually led Mr Romney at some point in the race:
- Newt Gingrich, who among other things divorced his wife in the hospital because he wanted to marry someone prettier that he had been banging on the side, at exactly the same time he was leading the effort to impeach Bill Clinton for getting a little action on the side.
- Herman Cain, who, as far as I can tell, had no clue what the job of President of the United States actually entailed.
- Rick Santorum, who's a religious nutjob.
- Michelle Bachmann. Ditto.
- Rick Perry, who seemed surprised at the idea that naming your family's country estate "N*****head" was seen as racist. Also, given his last job, and given how much recent success the country had had with former Texas governors being in charge, Obama would have had an easy win.
- Ron Paul, who has some really great ideas, and some really lousy ones. We tried things like bank-issued currency, and stopped because those practices caused all kinds of problems.
And who didn't ever come close to winning? Jon Huntsman, the candidate that the Obama people were actually worried about, because he's a moderate good-governance-get-things-done politician who had previously been a successful and highly popular governor in his state, and was saying sensible things on the campaign trail.
There's no difference between the two parties that run America.
I'm going to have to sort of ... uhh ... disagree with you there.
There's a big difference that actually matters: One of those rich right-wing religious parties believes that government cannot function properly. Not just that it doesn't function properly (any idiot can see that that's at least partially true), but that there is absolutely no way to make it so that government agencies do their job efficiently and well. That kind of belief means that when they're in charge, they think it's a good idea to put the head of the Arabian Horse Association in charge of emergency management: Sure, they might screw things up, but that won't make things any worse for real people, right?
By contrast, the other party at least wants government to do their job properly, so for the very same role of heading up emergency management they'll put in people like the current guy, who had started as a firefighter and paramedic and worked his way up to running emergency management for Florida. In other words, somebody who was at least reasonably qualified to do the job.
TL;DR;: Republicans believe government can't work. When in office, they try to prove their point.
Relevant quote from Little Miss Sunshine:
"When you're young, you're crazy to do that shit [heroin]. Me?! I'm old! You get to be my age -- you're crazy not to do it."
AFAICT, Big Money is behind the traditional Republicans, not behind the tea party Republicans.
Some big money is behind the traditional Republicans: Scaife et al, gun industry, defense industry, oil industry, financial industry (Mitt Romney's top 5 contributors, according to opensecrets.org, were Goldman, BofA, JP Morgan, Morgan Stanley, and Wells Fargo).
Some big money is also behind the Tea Party Republicans: Koch Industries, News Corporation.
Some big money is also behind the mainstream Democrats: software industry, telecom industry, entertainment industry, casinos, education industry, hospitals.
Generally speaking, mainstream Republicans are the best funded, followed by the mainstream Democrats, followed by the Tea Party. Left-wing Democrats basically don't have much big money behind them, and the policies they've gotten through in the last 20 years or so reflect that (they don't have any).
Strangely, neither party, once in power, actually reduces spending.
If you go by %GDP, there were 3 presidents who managed to do it exactly that pretty consistently in the last 40 years: Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton, and Barack Obama. Also, the federal government employment peaked somewhere around 1990, with Bill Clinton cutting the federal workforce by about 400,000 people over his term.
If you look at nominal spending, that no longer holds true because inflation is always ticking up the numbers by a couple of percentage points a year. But by a lot of measurements, the government has in fact been cut back.
No, if I understand correctly, they're refusing to raise the borrowing limit again. I don't think Congress has been able to agree on an actual budget since Bush was in office.
They're doing both. The last "continuing resolution" that allowed Obama to keep the staff paid and the lights on ran out yesterday, which is why the government is shut down today. They also plan on refusing to raise the borrowing limit again in about 2 weeks. Because they believe, as far as I can tell, that allowing poor people to get decent health care is tantamount to Antichrist Obama taking over the world in preparation for the apocalypse or something.
And the worst part of that story, from my perspective, was that Mitt Romney spent most of his presidential campaign trying to pretend that it didn't happen. If you want to see why I really really don't like Republicans these days, that's a big part of the answer: When they do something that's actually worked out really well for their constituents, they're embarrassed by it.
For another example, the right-wing noise machine was unhappy in the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy because Chris Christie got on TV and said, fairly truthfully, that federal, state, and local government agencies were working effectively together in an organized disaster relief effort. As if that competence was something to be afraid of!
Unbelievable. I really can't understand this reasoning. You ADMIT that the government is incompetent in how they spend the public's money ('while not providing any healthcare") while wanting to take a well working health care system and dismantle it and give it to the government to control!
Actually, quite the opposite: The government is in fact more effective at spending health care money than the private sector. The portion of the health care system in the US that has by far the most bang for the buck is the VA, followed by Medicare.
I can think of a few very logical reasons why that would be so:
1. The private health care sector spends gobs of money making sure that somebody else gets stuck with the cost of care. Hospitals try to make patients' insurers pay (with bills and collections), patients' insurers try to make patients pay (by denying coverage), patients try to make doctors pay (with malpractice suits), doctors try to make sure malpractice insurance pays (that's part of why they have coverage), malpractice insurers try to make patients pay (with legal defense teams), etc, etc. A government-run system, by contrast, has at most 1 bureaucracy set up to deny care they see as unnecessary.
2. Part of the other job of hospital billing departments is that they have to dealing with the red tape put up by each of the different health insurance companies in their state. In a government-run system, they have to deal with 1 variety of red tape from 1 department, cutting their workload by about 80%.
3. Hospitals and health care providers spend money advertising. In a government-run system, government can't effectively compete against itself, so that would go away pretty quickly.
4. Hospitals and health care providers sometimes recommend completely unnecessary treatments and tests in order to boost their own profits. Again, government-run health care, where the same organization is both providing the service and paying the bills, has no reason to do this, and wouldn't.
Closest would be Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT), who's been a socialist his whole career.
But yeah, some folks think Obama is a Kenyan Muslim socialist, and no amount of facts to the contrary on any of those points will convince them otherwise. And some folks think that the government doing anything other than having a military leads immediately and inexorably to Stalin sending millions to their deaths in Siberia.
That link is to what is known in the trade as a "joke", which means that the laws of reality can be bent in order to make things funny.
According to August Strindberg, Iron and Sulfur.
Sarkozy would have gotten away with it too, if it weren't for those meddling Belgians!
No, if you're talking about the "value of a brand" it's basically marketing, nothing more.
Absolutely. My point is that you can measure it by noticing how much more people will pay for an identical product just by slapping the label "Brooks Brothers" on it.
The value of the brand does not equal the market cap of the company.
Basically, the value of a brand is the difference in price between a generic product and a basically identical branded product. For example, a generic 2-button blazer goes for about $120, whereas Brooks Brothers brand goes for $650, making the value of the Brooks Brothers brand $530. Multiply that by the estimated size of the market, and you have an idea of what the value of the brand is.
supporting his ex-stripper bride
No wonder he's in trouble. Didn't he learn never to marry them? Especially since he had something like a dozen teenaged girls acting as his "personal servants" before he went on the lam.
I learned reading, counting, and addition before kindergarten, but my folks also put me in a top-notch kindergarten program, so by first grade I was comfortable with multi-digit addition and some subtraction as well. The point of that is just that I was years ahead of my classmates before I really could make any decisions for myself, and it wasn't because I was some kind of genius.