Gentlemen, it has come to my attention that a breakaway Russian Republic called Kazakhstan will be transferring nuclear fuel to the United Nations in a few days. Here's the plan. We get the fuel and we hold the world ransom for... ONE MILLION DOLLARS!
Can we now dispense with the myth of the 2-party system? There is one party -- the party of you're going to get fucked and you're going to like it.
That's actually not true at all. The problem is that the 2 parties in Congress aren't Democrats and Republicans. They're the Bribed Party, and People's Party. The Bribed Party is focused on getting their next round of campaign contributions and paying off the industries that get them into office. The People's Party, on the other hand, actually tries to figure out good policy.
The challenge of this sort of system is that since no reasonable ordinary citizen would vote for the Bribed Party, the Bribed candidates spend a ton of money trying to convince you that they're actually part of the People's Party. And because both the Democratic and Republican Parties are heavily controlled by the Bribed Party, the role of primaries is almost always to try to ensure that members of the People's Party don't make it to a general election or gain national prominence. So by the time you get to a general election, the reason the two purported major parties are fielding identical-sounding candidates is because they're actually both part of the Bribed Party. (As proof of what the goal of the primaries really is: People's Party candidate Ned Lamont beats Bribed Party candidate Joe Lieberman in a primary, and the Democratic Party leadership enthusiastically supports Joe Lieberman.)
The good news is that occasionally a People's Party candidate slips through, and some have established themselves quite well in Washington. A couple of examples of those guys are Dennis Kucinich and Ron Paul, who led the effort to vote against the Patriot Act renewal just last week. There by all appearances are at least 148 members of the People's Party in the House, and they definitely deserve support even if they're hopelessly outnumbered and even more hopelessly outfunded.
Last I checked, that makes Amazon tax evaders. They broke the law, and are now fugitives from justice. So I assume the state of Washington will be aggressively tracking them down and extraditing them to Texas for trial. Or maybe the state of New York will seize their assets on Wall St to pay the bill. Or maybe the feds will be getting involved and garnishing their profits.
Oh, wait. Sorry. That would be if a real person didn't pay a $269,000 tax bill. This is a corporation not paying a $269,000,000 tax bill, so they might get a slap on the wrist.
There's an even bigger advantage for tech folks: Let's say you're out for a nice walk in the park on a warm and sunny Saturday afternoon, and enjoying yourself, and the boss calls and says "Help, the email server is down!" If you have a dumb phone, you can truthfully say "Sorry, mate, but I'm 2 hours away from anything with Internet access. If you call Bill and he can't figure it out, I'm willing to help him over the phone, but I can't solve your problem on my own." If you have a smart phone with a nice data plan and ssh access (and the boss knows about it), you have to stop what you're doing to keep the boss happy.
And here I was thinking you were going to say "Scooter Libby". Picking a fall guy to obstruct justice is a long and time-honored tradition among crooks.
* I get the feeling that the NIMBY crowd will start getting bitch-slapped once the masses realize that either we build the solar/wind farm on that Western Cross-Eyed Spotted Dormouse habitat, or you start putting up with brownouts.
The NIMBY crowd and the Cute Fuzzy Animal Lovers are two entirely different constituencies. NIMBY generally comes from folks who think that whatever it is that's being proposed will decrease the value of their property, so it's basically about money, which means there's the possibility of buying them off. Cute Fuzzy Animal Lovers have the impression that there's value in preserving wild species, so it's about principles, which means there's no buying them off. There are a lot more NIMBY folks than CFALs, but the CFALs have disproportionate ability to stop these sorts of efforts because they travel around a lot more and are more organized.
It depends somewhat on which Protestant group you're talking about. The English Reformation was all about where Henry VIII could put his wing-wang and didn't focus all that much on the issue of confession. The Calvinists were very clear that it didn't matter how you confessed, you had no control over whether you were saved or not.
There already is rail service to Cleveland and Philadelphia from Pittsburgh that is typically somewhat faster (although not massively faster) than driving. The trouble is that just due to the geography between Washington DC and Chicago, stops in Cleveland and Pittsburgh happen in the wee hours.
You don't even need to go to Egypt for evidence of your second point. The "USA Patriot Act" has already been widely abused, according to reports from the GAO among other places.
Another way of describing the same problem: Assuming no government interference, when there are only a few sellers in a market, prices become artificially high, and when there's only 1 seller in the market in question, prices become higher still. This is fairly well-established microeconomics, read all about oligopoly and monopoly to learn the details. An example of this is that an major factor in the cost of an airplane ticket to a particular location is how many other airlines fly to the same airport (or in some cases close enough to the same airport to be easily reachable by ground transportation).
Similarly, if there's only a few or only 1 buyer in a market, the prices end up artificially low. This condition is oligopsony or monopsony. A common place where this happens is the US corn market, where most industrial farmers only have a couple of places they can sell their crop, so the price ends up artificially low, so many of them depend on agricultural subsidies to make ends meet.
The basic issue in those kinds of markets is that the established players will do everything they can to prevent another entrant into the marketplace (because that will lower their profit margin), and are effectively in a tacit agreement that having a price higher or lower than it should really be is more profitable than actually competing for market share based on price.
In a lot of state legislatures, 2 reps with a good idea go nowhere. For comparison's sake, in Texas they're too busy playing chicken with the state budget to get anything done. In Rhode Island, most state official's primary concern is ensuring that there's a high-paying job for their no-good brother-in-law. In California, the ballot initiatives mean that there's absolutely no way to balance the budget within the bounds of the state constitution.
Kudos to you (assuming you were one of the two reps), I'm just saying also kudos to the guys who wrote the NH constitution, and the many many people who've worked hard to keep the system working as well as it does.
There are a lot of problems with that view on things: 1. If you're taking classes on jazz history, literary analysis, political science, etc, I sincerely hope you're interested in it, because it's probably costing you something on the order of $200 per class session. If you wanted to attend a school with practically no requirements beyond technical work, you should be looking to transfer to a school that has that. 2. Being able to digest information about non-engineering topics matters more than you'd think in engineering. For instance, if you were designing 'green architecture' buildings, wouldn't it help you to be able to make sense of all the political, scientific, and economic discussions around green architecture? 3. Being able to write well really matters, because part of your job as an engineer is being able to describe your designs. 4. Why would your life possibly be worse off by knowing something about jazz history or literary analysis?
If they're overworked and under-rested, they need to find a way to lower their courseload or get some more rest, not find a way to cheat. Although I went through a pretty rigorous program myself, my solution to the rest problem was to get to sleep at more-or-less the same time every day, get up at more-or-less the same time every day, and work on schoolwork from about 9 to 4:30 unless I was in class. The result was that I found myself getting projects and papers in good-enough shape well before the due date, and would spend a few hours refining the results, and could devote my evenings and weekends to fun stuff and frequently ending up with it being 2:30 on a Friday afternoon and nothing to worry about until Monday morning.
Complementing people on their time management when their solution is to not get something done is a bad idea.
I don't recommend everything Joel Spolsky writes, but his college advice is pretty good.
As mentioned in my sorta-sibling post, the wonderful thing about NH's state government is that the legislature in particular is made up of motivated ordinary people rather than professional politicians. The entire professional political class in NH generally consists of: 1. The governor. 2. 2 US senators and 2 US representatives. 3. 5 executive council members (a check on the power of the governor). 4. 24 state senators, who generally also hold other jobs. 5. A few mayors in major cities like Manchester and Nashua.
That's it. Judges are appointed, rather than elected, so they're generally insulated from the political fray. The rest of the state and municipal government is run by amateurs, and they do at least as good a job as the professionals do in other states. It's a system that among other things is extremely resistant to the sorts of common bribery that's going on in state capitals almost everywhere else in the country (not to mention Washington DC).
As someone born and raised in NH, this probably has very little to do with the Free State Project. There a bunch of other reasons NH would implement this kind of thing:
* The Republican base in NH are generally very libertarian-leaning. That's a major reason why the Free Staters picked NH as the place to go in the first place.
* The NH Democrats agree with the Republicans on personal liberty issues and ensuring that the citizens control the government rather than the other way around.
* The state takes great pride in its citizen legislature, and there's very few professional politicians. To give you an idea, the Speaker of the NH house spends a lot of her time running a day care center, and another state rep works as an elevator operator. Each rep only represents about 3000 constituents. That means they really need to listen to even small groups of citizens.
* The longtime secretary of the state of NH, Bill Gardner, is probably one of the most non-partisan public officials in the country. He has a well-deserved reputation for fairness and competence, and as a result has been kept in office despite several changes in both the legislative majority and the governor's party affiliation. He knows a good idea when he sees one, and has a lot of trust from both Republicans and Democrats, so if he supports a good common-sense proposal it's likely to get implemented.
The state has its flaws, but its state government is very responsive to good ideas.
3) That was a military propaganda operation executed as part of a war -- it was not done to effect anything in the US
Are you telling me this image wasn't widely reported in the US? There's little question it was staged by the army, the only question would be who the target audience was.
4).Lynch's propaganda was formulated by the administration. The military merely executed their orders. 5) The Tillman propaganda was formulated by the administration. The military merely executed their orders.
Last I checked, US military personnel were expected to refuse to execute illegal orders if doing so would not endanger their life (e.g. if the president ordered a soldier to summarily execute a US citizen, the soldier is not supposed to follow that order.) Engaging in psyops in the US is illegal under 10 USC 167, ergo the military should not have carried out those orders.
2000 bps would be enough to pass around 140-byte messages reasonably quickly though. Also likely good for packets of doom designed to take down an enemy computer service.
Well, here's a few: 1. There were retired generals who were being questioned as if they were neutral observers of the war, and it turned out that they were getting paid to do so out of the Pentagon's public relations office. 2. There were instances of reports that were taped and produced by the Pentagon shown in the US as if they were independent news broadcasts. 3. The "crowd of cheerful citizens pulling down a statue of Saddam" shot - the only accurate part of that picture was that the statue was taken down. The civilians were paid to show up and look cheerful, the size of the crowd a fraction of what it appears in the picture, and the people taking down the statue were US military personnel. 4. Pvt Jessica Lynch, who was 'rescued' from a hospital where she was being treated for her wounds. 5. Pfc Pat Tillman, who was killed by friendly fire in Afghanistan but had his death rewritten as killed by enemy action for PR purposes.
I could go on. In war, the first casualty is always the truth.
Why do you think it is only in Europe that US reputation has suffered as a result of its actions over the past decade?
For example, in Egypt, where the US-trained police force engaged in oppressive tactics against mostly peaceful demonstrators, attempting to disperse them with teargas canisters marked "Made in the USA". Or Yemen and Pakistan, where we're regularly blowing up apartment complexes with drone strikes in the hopes of getting the 1 bad guy we believe to be in there. For some strange reason, people get upset when they head home to spend some quality time with their family only to find dead bodies in a pile of rubble.
Slashdot Mirror
Gentlemen, it has come to my attention that a breakaway Russian Republic called Kazakhstan will be transferring nuclear fuel to the United Nations in a few days. Here's the plan. We get the fuel and we hold the world ransom for... ONE MILLION DOLLARS!
Can we now dispense with the myth of the 2-party system? There is one party -- the party of you're going to get fucked and you're going to like it.
That's actually not true at all. The problem is that the 2 parties in Congress aren't Democrats and Republicans. They're the Bribed Party, and People's Party. The Bribed Party is focused on getting their next round of campaign contributions and paying off the industries that get them into office. The People's Party, on the other hand, actually tries to figure out good policy.
The challenge of this sort of system is that since no reasonable ordinary citizen would vote for the Bribed Party, the Bribed candidates spend a ton of money trying to convince you that they're actually part of the People's Party. And because both the Democratic and Republican Parties are heavily controlled by the Bribed Party, the role of primaries is almost always to try to ensure that members of the People's Party don't make it to a general election or gain national prominence. So by the time you get to a general election, the reason the two purported major parties are fielding identical-sounding candidates is because they're actually both part of the Bribed Party. (As proof of what the goal of the primaries really is: People's Party candidate Ned Lamont beats Bribed Party candidate Joe Lieberman in a primary, and the Democratic Party leadership enthusiastically supports Joe Lieberman.)
The good news is that occasionally a People's Party candidate slips through, and some have established themselves quite well in Washington. A couple of examples of those guys are Dennis Kucinich and Ron Paul, who led the effort to vote against the Patriot Act renewal just last week. There by all appearances are at least 148 members of the People's Party in the House, and they definitely deserve support even if they're hopelessly outnumbered and even more hopelessly outfunded.
We actually went up to 120% back during WWII.
As to who's fault it is that we're inching back up to those kind of levels, I'll refer you to this graph.
This is for the times when you weren't supposed to be on call, but the boss called you anyways.
Last I checked, that makes Amazon tax evaders. They broke the law, and are now fugitives from justice. So I assume the state of Washington will be aggressively tracking them down and extraditing them to Texas for trial. Or maybe the state of New York will seize their assets on Wall St to pay the bill. Or maybe the feds will be getting involved and garnishing their profits.
Oh, wait. Sorry. That would be if a real person didn't pay a $269,000 tax bill. This is a corporation not paying a $269,000,000 tax bill, so they might get a slap on the wrist.
There's an even bigger advantage for tech folks:
Let's say you're out for a nice walk in the park on a warm and sunny Saturday afternoon, and enjoying yourself, and the boss calls and says "Help, the email server is down!" If you have a dumb phone, you can truthfully say "Sorry, mate, but I'm 2 hours away from anything with Internet access. If you call Bill and he can't figure it out, I'm willing to help him over the phone, but I can't solve your problem on my own." If you have a smart phone with a nice data plan and ssh access (and the boss knows about it), you have to stop what you're doing to keep the boss happy.
And here I was thinking you were going to say "Scooter Libby". Picking a fall guy to obstruct justice is a long and time-honored tradition among crooks.
* I get the feeling that the NIMBY crowd will start getting bitch-slapped once the masses realize that either we build the solar/wind farm on that Western Cross-Eyed Spotted Dormouse habitat, or you start putting up with brownouts.
The NIMBY crowd and the Cute Fuzzy Animal Lovers are two entirely different constituencies. NIMBY generally comes from folks who think that whatever it is that's being proposed will decrease the value of their property, so it's basically about money, which means there's the possibility of buying them off. Cute Fuzzy Animal Lovers have the impression that there's value in preserving wild species, so it's about principles, which means there's no buying them off. There are a lot more NIMBY folks than CFALs, but the CFALs have disproportionate ability to stop these sorts of efforts because they travel around a lot more and are more organized.
It depends somewhat on which Protestant group you're talking about. The English Reformation was all about where Henry VIII could put his wing-wang and didn't focus all that much on the issue of confession. The Calvinists were very clear that it didn't matter how you confessed, you had no control over whether you were saved or not.
Look for the space aliens in Pasadena. Judging by Californians in general, I'm sure they could find a few.
There already is rail service to Cleveland and Philadelphia from Pittsburgh that is typically somewhat faster (although not massively faster) than driving. The trouble is that just due to the geography between Washington DC and Chicago, stops in Cleveland and Pittsburgh happen in the wee hours.
You don't even need to go to Egypt for evidence of your second point. The "USA Patriot Act" has already been widely abused, according to reports from the GAO among other places.
You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.
Another way of describing the same problem: Assuming no government interference, when there are only a few sellers in a market, prices become artificially high, and when there's only 1 seller in the market in question, prices become higher still. This is fairly well-established microeconomics, read all about oligopoly and monopoly to learn the details. An example of this is that an major factor in the cost of an airplane ticket to a particular location is how many other airlines fly to the same airport (or in some cases close enough to the same airport to be easily reachable by ground transportation).
Similarly, if there's only a few or only 1 buyer in a market, the prices end up artificially low. This condition is oligopsony or monopsony. A common place where this happens is the US corn market, where most industrial farmers only have a couple of places they can sell their crop, so the price ends up artificially low, so many of them depend on agricultural subsidies to make ends meet.
The basic issue in those kinds of markets is that the established players will do everything they can to prevent another entrant into the marketplace (because that will lower their profit margin), and are effectively in a tacit agreement that having a price higher or lower than it should really be is more profitable than actually competing for market share based on price.
In a lot of state legislatures, 2 reps with a good idea go nowhere. For comparison's sake, in Texas they're too busy playing chicken with the state budget to get anything done. In Rhode Island, most state official's primary concern is ensuring that there's a high-paying job for their no-good brother-in-law. In California, the ballot initiatives mean that there's absolutely no way to balance the budget within the bounds of the state constitution.
Kudos to you (assuming you were one of the two reps), I'm just saying also kudos to the guys who wrote the NH constitution, and the many many people who've worked hard to keep the system working as well as it does.
There are a lot of problems with that view on things:
1. If you're taking classes on jazz history, literary analysis, political science, etc, I sincerely hope you're interested in it, because it's probably costing you something on the order of $200 per class session. If you wanted to attend a school with practically no requirements beyond technical work, you should be looking to transfer to a school that has that.
2. Being able to digest information about non-engineering topics matters more than you'd think in engineering. For instance, if you were designing 'green architecture' buildings, wouldn't it help you to be able to make sense of all the political, scientific, and economic discussions around green architecture?
3. Being able to write well really matters, because part of your job as an engineer is being able to describe your designs.
4. Why would your life possibly be worse off by knowing something about jazz history or literary analysis?
If they're overworked and under-rested, they need to find a way to lower their courseload or get some more rest, not find a way to cheat. Although I went through a pretty rigorous program myself, my solution to the rest problem was to get to sleep at more-or-less the same time every day, get up at more-or-less the same time every day, and work on schoolwork from about 9 to 4:30 unless I was in class. The result was that I found myself getting projects and papers in good-enough shape well before the due date, and would spend a few hours refining the results, and could devote my evenings and weekends to fun stuff and frequently ending up with it being 2:30 on a Friday afternoon and nothing to worry about until Monday morning.
Complementing people on their time management when their solution is to not get something done is a bad idea.
I don't recommend everything Joel Spolsky writes, but his college advice is pretty good.
As mentioned in my sorta-sibling post, the wonderful thing about NH's state government is that the legislature in particular is made up of motivated ordinary people rather than professional politicians. The entire professional political class in NH generally consists of:
1. The governor.
2. 2 US senators and 2 US representatives.
3. 5 executive council members (a check on the power of the governor).
4. 24 state senators, who generally also hold other jobs.
5. A few mayors in major cities like Manchester and Nashua.
That's it. Judges are appointed, rather than elected, so they're generally insulated from the political fray. The rest of the state and municipal government is run by amateurs, and they do at least as good a job as the professionals do in other states. It's a system that among other things is extremely resistant to the sorts of common bribery that's going on in state capitals almost everywhere else in the country (not to mention Washington DC).
As someone born and raised in NH, this probably has very little to do with the Free State Project. There a bunch of other reasons NH would implement this kind of thing:
* The Republican base in NH are generally very libertarian-leaning. That's a major reason why the Free Staters picked NH as the place to go in the first place.
* The NH Democrats agree with the Republicans on personal liberty issues and ensuring that the citizens control the government rather than the other way around.
* The state takes great pride in its citizen legislature, and there's very few professional politicians. To give you an idea, the Speaker of the NH house spends a lot of her time running a day care center, and another state rep works as an elevator operator. Each rep only represents about 3000 constituents. That means they really need to listen to even small groups of citizens.
* The longtime secretary of the state of NH, Bill Gardner, is probably one of the most non-partisan public officials in the country. He has a well-deserved reputation for fairness and competence, and as a result has been kept in office despite several changes in both the legislative majority and the governor's party affiliation. He knows a good idea when he sees one, and has a lot of trust from both Republicans and Democrats, so if he supports a good common-sense proposal it's likely to get implemented.
The state has its flaws, but its state government is very responsive to good ideas.
1) Retired generals don't count as official military spokesmen.
They do if they're being paid as spokesman or being handed a list of what they're supposed to say by the Pentagon. read all about it.
2) No idea what this is referring to. It's sufficiently vague as to be meaningless.
Here's some of it
3) That was a military propaganda operation executed as part of a war -- it was not done to effect anything in the US
Are you telling me this image wasn't widely reported in the US? There's little question it was staged by the army, the only question would be who the target audience was.
4).Lynch's propaganda was formulated by the administration. The military merely executed their orders.
5) The Tillman propaganda was formulated by the administration. The military merely executed their orders.
Last I checked, US military personnel were expected to refuse to execute illegal orders if doing so would not endanger their life (e.g. if the president ordered a soldier to summarily execute a US citizen, the soldier is not supposed to follow that order.) Engaging in psyops in the US is illegal under 10 USC 167, ergo the military should not have carried out those orders.
I was actually giving a serious response to a serious point, but your subject line inspired me to make the response in a silly way.
Ja, ze autorun ist stupid ze way zey currently do it.
But methinks zey could reduce ze risk by jailing ze autorun processes, maybe in a chroot environment or virtual komputermachine.
2000 bps would be enough to pass around 140-byte messages reasonably quickly though. Also likely good for packets of doom designed to take down an enemy computer service.
Well, here's a few:
1. There were retired generals who were being questioned as if they were neutral observers of the war, and it turned out that they were getting paid to do so out of the Pentagon's public relations office.
2. There were instances of reports that were taped and produced by the Pentagon shown in the US as if they were independent news broadcasts.
3. The "crowd of cheerful citizens pulling down a statue of Saddam" shot - the only accurate part of that picture was that the statue was taken down. The civilians were paid to show up and look cheerful, the size of the crowd a fraction of what it appears in the picture, and the people taking down the statue were US military personnel.
4. Pvt Jessica Lynch, who was 'rescued' from a hospital where she was being treated for her wounds.
5. Pfc Pat Tillman, who was killed by friendly fire in Afghanistan but had his death rewritten as killed by enemy action for PR purposes.
I could go on. In war, the first casualty is always the truth.
Why do you think it is only in Europe that US reputation has suffered as a result of its actions over the past decade?
For example, in Egypt, where the US-trained police force engaged in oppressive tactics against mostly peaceful demonstrators, attempting to disperse them with teargas canisters marked "Made in the USA". Or Yemen and Pakistan, where we're regularly blowing up apartment complexes with drone strikes in the hopes of getting the 1 bad guy we believe to be in there. For some strange reason, people get upset when they head home to spend some quality time with their family only to find dead bodies in a pile of rubble.
What makes you think Bill Clinton was in charge? About the only evidence I see of that was the ongoing effort to bring him down using a sex scandal.