Then use Employment-population ratio: The US dropped from 70.9% to 66.6% for a 4.3% loss, while Spain went from 65.3% to 58.5%, or a 6.8% loss. Some of that is people aging out of the work force, but a lot of it is people who are looking for work but can't get it.
Any way you look at it, Spain is in worse shape than the US, and it started with a slight budget surplus when the crisis hit.
So, if I read you correctly, you're basically saying that the money spent to educate minority teenagers is a waste? I'm sure folks like Colin Powell, Barack Obama, and Herman Cain would not agree with you.
The Fed can and has printed a ton of money. There's no question about that.
But because the banks aren't lending that money out to consumers, the overall money supply hasn't gone up, and inflation rates have been historically low, not high. If you believe, like almost all economists, that inflation and employment are inversely related, then you want to be doing exactly what the Fed is doing, because that will create jobs that people desperately need, and will have no negative effects on savings (because inflation has been almost 0% for years). This is the Fed doing exactly what they should do in a deep recession.
And if you want to see what not to do in a financial crisis, look at the central bank that steadfastly refused to print money like crazy during the recession: the European Central Bank. The result is Spain with a 26.9% unemployment rate, compared to the 7.4% just reported in the US.
In the US, work-to-rule and slowdown are 2 different but similar actions: - In work-to-rule, union members follow all procedures perfectly, including the stupidly contradicting ones as a way of slowing up the works. This is the least risky union tactic, because any time management calls union members on it they can point out that they are correctly and diligently following the procedures that management put in place, and that if there's a problem it's with the procedures rather than the workers following them.
- In a slowdown, union members simply work more slowly (letting some of the product get ruined if needed). This is obviously a bit more risky, but it is a common escalation if a work-to-rule doesn't solve the union's problem.
Both tactics can wreak havoc with productivity, but are significantly less messy than a all-out strike.
The EU is much better equipped than Russia when they work together: They have over 2000 combat aircraft (second only to the US), a navy that is somewhat larger than the US complete with 4 carriers, 6000 main battle tanks and plenty of other hardware, giving them approximately 3:2 superiority over what Russia has in most areas.
Anyone thinking seriously of attacking Europe with conventional weapons is asking for a serious smackdown: They could probably take on China or the US if they had to.
European governments depend on the US for protection both militarily (NATO)
Really?
The biggest conventional military threat to EU nations would be Russia, which has about 1 million active duty military personnel. If France, Italy, Germany, and the UK combine, they have forces roughly even with Russia. If things get bad enough, the rest of the EU would certainly be interested in defending themselves, so you'd have Greece, Spain, Poland, and Romania putting in another 400,000 or so into action, plus a lot of smaller countries fielding forces of around 30-40,000 troops. Even if you look at nukes, then yes, Russia could blow up Europe, but the UK and France could also blow up Russia. And if everyone mobilizes their reserves, that doesn't change the math much.
As far as spying goes, I'm sure that the Europeans have significant investments in it. Sure, they probably work with the US to get their hands on the latest and greatest, but there's no reason to think they're slouches in that department. And in counter-terrorism, the UK and Spain have had lots of practice at dealing with terrorists (the IRA and Basque separatists) and would be able to lead the effort if they needed to.
So I'm not convinced that the EU depends on the US to defend itself. It cooperates with the US for the cost reasons you've mentioned, but the "we need the Americans to be able to defend ourselves" argument isn't valid.
There have been people trying to use the power of the US government to oppress segments of the population since at least 1798 when the Federalists passed laws targeting the Democratic-Republican opposition (including arresting and convicting a Congressman for writing editorials critical of John Adams). When they get told they can't do that anymore, they simply make whatever they were doing more secret than it was earlier, and continue doing what they were doing.
If we were going to have a Tianamin Square incident, it would have happened at Occupy Wall Street.
The government didn't need tanks, but it sure put down Occupy Wall Street by force.
The end of the protest in the park in New York was riot police blocking all entrances and exits to the area around the protest (including physically preventing several New York City Council members from observing), barging into the park at 3 AM when most of the protesters were asleep and beating anyone who didn't leave quickly enough, followed by destroying the private property that was left behind. This was after they had tried arresting everyone involved, pepper-spraying protesters (and some non-protesters who just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time) for the crime of standing on a sidewalk holding a sign, running over protesters with motorcycles, all with the full support of police chief Ray Kelly and mayor Michael Bloomberg.
In other cities, particularly Oakland, police also used force to end the protests as well.
Oh yes, "freedom fighters". But, as George Carlin once pointed out, if firefighters fight fires and crime fighters fight crime, what do freedom fighters fight?
It remains fact that students pre WWII were better educated in every discipline.
It remains a *fact* that in the 1930s 1 in 20 adults were completely illiterate. By 2000, that number was closer to 1 in 1000, and concentrated among people who are over 65 years old. In the 1930s, well over half of all teenagers dropped out of school, in 2013 that number was down to 22%.
The US has sunk billions of dollars over the decades to fix education, and as a result the population is much better educated today than it was 75 years ago. That's part of why the US has the most productive workforce on the planet. It was arguably one of the best investments the US has ever made. And it's cost us peanuts compared to the 3 big-ticket items in the US budget, which are (and have been for decades) Social Security, Medicare, and the military.
That's a common argument that is told to conservatives to convince them that the ACLU is an evil liberal organization who should be hated. It was, as you point out, originally created to defend Communists from unconstitutional harassment, but that had a lot to do with the fact that Communists and people with communist ideas were unconstitutionally targeted by the US government from about 1880 until about 1990.
If your goal is to improve traffic flow, you don't use EZPass, you use traffic counters that get laid down on the street (or use the pole-mounted radar counters) that are probably cheaper than the RFID devices they're using. Those don't identify each individual vehicle's path, but they do make it really clear where people are going (e.g. "the exit ramp has a count of 400 per hour, and and there's 350 more just to the right of that ramp than there was coming from the other way you can get to that spot.").
Alternately, you can ask yourself how many major construction projects have occurred in Manhattan to improve traffic flow in response to the data from this program. I'd be really surprised if New York City even considered, say, rerouting 5th Avenue.
Ergo, traffic flow isn't the problem NYC is trying to solve.
Racial profiling works well because believe it or not, terrorists are often from countries that have either a government, a population, or both that have a beef with the United States.
Or sometimes not. For instance, Dzhokhar and Tamerlan Tsarnaev, the Boston Marathon bombers, were white guys. The population of their home country of Chechnya has no particular problem with the US (and loads of problems with Russia). And even if, say, Arabs were twice as likely to bomb and aircraft as white people, then all you'd accomplish is increased screening of people who are 99.9998% likely to be completely innocent instead of 99.9999% likely to be completely innocent.
What most people who are in favor of racial profiling really mean when you get down to it is: "Don't harass me, because that's something I don't want to deal with. But harass those other kind of people, because those people scare me! And since I'm in the dominant racial group, I have a chance of getting away with this position being adopted."
Actually, 6 of the 20 people executed in Salem MA were men. And one of them (Giles Corey) wasn't even convicted, he just refused to plead and at the time torturing to force a plea was legal.
The Social Network Website Cycle: 1. New social network site (SNS) starts, targeting a very small group of individuals. It's small, it's clean, it's easy to use, it helps people stay in touch with their friends, so a significant percentage of that target group joins up. 2. SNS targets a bunch of other similar groups, and the site starts growing. 3. SNS targets progressively wider groups until it's now millions of users. 4. Now, it opens itself to the public. 5. Once the user base is sufficiently large, it sells out, either via an IPO or a private sale. 6. The people who just bought it try to "monetize" those users by selling them advertising, related apps, etc. 7. Eventually, the users start getting fed up because the ads are too intrusive, the related apps are expensive and not useful or fun, and of course the SNS is taking people's personal information for their own use. 8. A new SNS starts with some small target audience to rectify the bloated annoyance of the dominant SNS, and the cycle begins again.
We've been through this a couple of times, already, and Facebook is somewhere around step 7. They'd like to stay in stages 6-7 for as long as possible.
Exposing secret information that is evidence of crime (in this case, about 300 million violations of wiretapping laws) is in fact the very definition of whistleblowing.
Here's Obama's fault as president, in a nutshell: If the Democratic and Republican leadership in Congress both agree on something, Obama assumes the issue is settled and does nothing about it.
And this isn't a 2013 phenomenon or even a 2011 phenomenon: That kind of thinking started showing up in Obama's actions as president-elect, both with his choice of cabinet nominees and with his decisions regarding the giant bank bailouts with little-to-no strings attached. What Obama has exposed is that the 2 major parties have widespread agreement regarding: - civil liberties (they'd rather we didn't have 'em) - the rights of foreigners (will always be trumped by requests of business or convenience) - the rights of citizens (to be violated when it's convenient) - international law (to be violated with impunity because the US has a military that's on par with the rest of the world combined) - equal justice under the law (there are documented cases of rich and powerful people literally getting away with murder, and US citizens executed by the US government with no legal proof that they were engaged in any kind of criminal act) - privacy (to be ignored) - war (it's good for business) - banking (banks should be allowed to do whatever they want)
Both parties have some backbenchers that disagree with these views (more Democrats than Republicans, because the Democratic Party culture allows for more questioning and dissent without a primary challenge), but both parties are controlled by people who believe fully in all the ideas I just listed.
Where're the prosecutors with the balls to hold the watchers accountable?
In private practice, most likely. It's not that they were fired from the DoJ per se, but they were told that it would be better for everyone if they just went away quietly.
Either there's government enforcing at least basic rules about how the market operates (e.g. no "offers you can't refuse"), or there's non-market influences on the decisions of actors in that market (e.g. "I'm bleeding to death, it doesn't matter that the hospital in the next town offers cheaper service").
What Libertarians tend to actually want is the ability for the more powerful private actor to take advantage of the less powerful private actor with impunity. The more powerful private actor has a key advantage: They have a better ability to research and organize alternative transactions. That allows them to control the pricing in a way that the less powerful actor cannot.
For a concrete example, consider farmer Bob deciding whether to sell his corn to Archer Daniels Midland for $4.75 per bushel. Look at his options: - Sell at the offered price. - Not sell at all. That will probably cause him to lose his farm, because without this sale, he doesn't pay off the bank. - Try to sell to someone else. But since there's no one besides ADM who buys corn in his area, the only way Bob could pull this off is to invent his own transport and distribution network, from scratch. So what you have is not a free market, but a ADM-controlled market that is only free to ADM.
Slashdot Mirror
8.03%
Then use Employment-population ratio: The US dropped from 70.9% to 66.6% for a 4.3% loss, while Spain went from 65.3% to 58.5%, or a 6.8% loss. Some of that is people aging out of the work force, but a lot of it is people who are looking for work but can't get it.
Any way you look at it, Spain is in worse shape than the US, and it started with a slight budget surplus when the crisis hit.
So, if I read you correctly, you're basically saying that the money spent to educate minority teenagers is a waste? I'm sure folks like Colin Powell, Barack Obama, and Herman Cain would not agree with you.
The Fed can and has printed a ton of money. There's no question about that.
But because the banks aren't lending that money out to consumers, the overall money supply hasn't gone up, and inflation rates have been historically low, not high. If you believe, like almost all economists, that inflation and employment are inversely related, then you want to be doing exactly what the Fed is doing, because that will create jobs that people desperately need, and will have no negative effects on savings (because inflation has been almost 0% for years). This is the Fed doing exactly what they should do in a deep recession.
And if you want to see what not to do in a financial crisis, look at the central bank that steadfastly refused to print money like crazy during the recession: the European Central Bank. The result is Spain with a 26.9% unemployment rate, compared to the 7.4% just reported in the US.
Wait, what happened to "Spawn More Overlords!"?
In the US, work-to-rule and slowdown are 2 different but similar actions:
- In work-to-rule, union members follow all procedures perfectly, including the stupidly contradicting ones as a way of slowing up the works. This is the least risky union tactic, because any time management calls union members on it they can point out that they are correctly and diligently following the procedures that management put in place, and that if there's a problem it's with the procedures rather than the workers following them.
- In a slowdown, union members simply work more slowly (letting some of the product get ruined if needed). This is obviously a bit more risky, but it is a common escalation if a work-to-rule doesn't solve the union's problem.
Both tactics can wreak havoc with productivity, but are significantly less messy than a all-out strike.
The EU is much better equipped than Russia when they work together: They have over 2000 combat aircraft (second only to the US), a navy that is somewhat larger than the US complete with 4 carriers, 6000 main battle tanks and plenty of other hardware, giving them approximately 3:2 superiority over what Russia has in most areas.
Anyone thinking seriously of attacking Europe with conventional weapons is asking for a serious smackdown: They could probably take on China or the US if they had to.
European governments depend on the US for protection both militarily (NATO)
Really?
The biggest conventional military threat to EU nations would be Russia, which has about 1 million active duty military personnel. If France, Italy, Germany, and the UK combine, they have forces roughly even with Russia. If things get bad enough, the rest of the EU would certainly be interested in defending themselves, so you'd have Greece, Spain, Poland, and Romania putting in another 400,000 or so into action, plus a lot of smaller countries fielding forces of around 30-40,000 troops. Even if you look at nukes, then yes, Russia could blow up Europe, but the UK and France could also blow up Russia. And if everyone mobilizes their reserves, that doesn't change the math much.
As far as spying goes, I'm sure that the Europeans have significant investments in it. Sure, they probably work with the US to get their hands on the latest and greatest, but there's no reason to think they're slouches in that department. And in counter-terrorism, the UK and Spain have had lots of practice at dealing with terrorists (the IRA and Basque separatists) and would be able to lead the effort if they needed to.
So I'm not convinced that the EU depends on the US to defend itself. It cooperates with the US for the cost reasons you've mentioned, but the "we need the Americans to be able to defend ourselves" argument isn't valid.
There have been people trying to use the power of the US government to oppress segments of the population since at least 1798 when the Federalists passed laws targeting the Democratic-Republican opposition (including arresting and convicting a Congressman for writing editorials critical of John Adams). When they get told they can't do that anymore, they simply make whatever they were doing more secret than it was earlier, and continue doing what they were doing.
If we were going to have a Tianamin Square incident, it would have happened at Occupy Wall Street.
The government didn't need tanks, but it sure put down Occupy Wall Street by force.
The end of the protest in the park in New York was riot police blocking all entrances and exits to the area around the protest (including physically preventing several New York City Council members from observing), barging into the park at 3 AM when most of the protesters were asleep and beating anyone who didn't leave quickly enough, followed by destroying the private property that was left behind. This was after they had tried arresting everyone involved, pepper-spraying protesters (and some non-protesters who just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time) for the crime of standing on a sidewalk holding a sign, running over protesters with motorcycles, all with the full support of police chief Ray Kelly and mayor Michael Bloomberg.
In other cities, particularly Oakland, police also used force to end the protests as well.
Oh yes, "freedom fighters". But, as George Carlin once pointed out, if firefighters fight fires and crime fighters fight crime, what do freedom fighters fight?
It remains fact that students pre WWII were better educated in every discipline.
It remains a *fact* that in the 1930s 1 in 20 adults were completely illiterate. By 2000, that number was closer to 1 in 1000, and concentrated among people who are over 65 years old. In the 1930s, well over half of all teenagers dropped out of school, in 2013 that number was down to 22%.
The US has sunk billions of dollars over the decades to fix education, and as a result the population is much better educated today than it was 75 years ago. That's part of why the US has the most productive workforce on the planet. It was arguably one of the best investments the US has ever made. And it's cost us peanuts compared to the 3 big-ticket items in the US budget, which are (and have been for decades) Social Security, Medicare, and the military.
That's a common argument that is told to conservatives to convince them that the ACLU is an evil liberal organization who should be hated. It was, as you point out, originally created to defend Communists from unconstitutional harassment, but that had a lot to do with the fact that Communists and people with communist ideas were unconstitutionally targeted by the US government from about 1880 until about 1990.
Some examples of causes the ACLU has helped protect their civil rights:
- National Socialist Party of America.
- Westboro Baptist Church
- atheist Michael Newdow
- NAMBLA
- Anyone who drives
- Anyone who wants to be able to view adult images on the Internet
- Senator Mitch McConnell (R-KT)
- An ISP that didn't want to spy for the government
If I had to guess, a large number of people put in a large amount of effort. A really fine cross-compiler probably helps immensely.
initiative to improve traffic flow in Manhattan
If your goal is to improve traffic flow, you don't use EZPass, you use traffic counters that get laid down on the street (or use the pole-mounted radar counters) that are probably cheaper than the RFID devices they're using. Those don't identify each individual vehicle's path, but they do make it really clear where people are going (e.g. "the exit ramp has a count of 400 per hour, and and there's 350 more just to the right of that ramp than there was coming from the other way you can get to that spot.").
Alternately, you can ask yourself how many major construction projects have occurred in Manhattan to improve traffic flow in response to the data from this program. I'd be really surprised if New York City even considered, say, rerouting 5th Avenue.
Ergo, traffic flow isn't the problem NYC is trying to solve.
Racial profiling works well because believe it or not, terrorists are often from countries that have either a government, a population, or both that have a beef with the United States.
Or sometimes not. For instance, Dzhokhar and Tamerlan Tsarnaev, the Boston Marathon bombers, were white guys. The population of their home country of Chechnya has no particular problem with the US (and loads of problems with Russia). And even if, say, Arabs were twice as likely to bomb and aircraft as white people, then all you'd accomplish is increased screening of people who are 99.9998% likely to be completely innocent instead of 99.9999% likely to be completely innocent.
What most people who are in favor of racial profiling really mean when you get down to it is: "Don't harass me, because that's something I don't want to deal with. But harass those other kind of people, because those people scare me! And since I'm in the dominant racial group, I have a chance of getting away with this position being adopted."
Well, actually the names got accidentally reversed by a city clerk: The guy's real name was Microsoft Bob.
Actually, 6 of the 20 people executed in Salem MA were men. And one of them (Giles Corey) wasn't even convicted, he just refused to plead and at the time torturing to force a plea was legal.
The Social Network Website Cycle:
1. New social network site (SNS) starts, targeting a very small group of individuals. It's small, it's clean, it's easy to use, it helps people stay in touch with their friends, so a significant percentage of that target group joins up.
2. SNS targets a bunch of other similar groups, and the site starts growing.
3. SNS targets progressively wider groups until it's now millions of users.
4. Now, it opens itself to the public.
5. Once the user base is sufficiently large, it sells out, either via an IPO or a private sale.
6. The people who just bought it try to "monetize" those users by selling them advertising, related apps, etc.
7. Eventually, the users start getting fed up because the ads are too intrusive, the related apps are expensive and not useful or fun, and of course the SNS is taking people's personal information for their own use.
8. A new SNS starts with some small target audience to rectify the bloated annoyance of the dominant SNS, and the cycle begins again.
We've been through this a couple of times, already, and Facebook is somewhere around step 7. They'd like to stay in stages 6-7 for as long as possible.
Exposing secret information that is evidence of crime (in this case, about 300 million violations of wiretapping laws) is in fact the very definition of whistleblowing.
Here's Obama's fault as president, in a nutshell: If the Democratic and Republican leadership in Congress both agree on something, Obama assumes the issue is settled and does nothing about it.
And this isn't a 2013 phenomenon or even a 2011 phenomenon: That kind of thinking started showing up in Obama's actions as president-elect, both with his choice of cabinet nominees and with his decisions regarding the giant bank bailouts with little-to-no strings attached. What Obama has exposed is that the 2 major parties have widespread agreement regarding:
- civil liberties (they'd rather we didn't have 'em)
- the rights of foreigners (will always be trumped by requests of business or convenience)
- the rights of citizens (to be violated when it's convenient)
- international law (to be violated with impunity because the US has a military that's on par with the rest of the world combined)
- equal justice under the law (there are documented cases of rich and powerful people literally getting away with murder, and US citizens executed by the US government with no legal proof that they were engaged in any kind of criminal act)
- privacy (to be ignored)
- war (it's good for business)
- banking (banks should be allowed to do whatever they want)
Both parties have some backbenchers that disagree with these views (more Democrats than Republicans, because the Democratic Party culture allows for more questioning and dissent without a primary challenge), but both parties are controlled by people who believe fully in all the ideas I just listed.
Where're the prosecutors with the balls to hold the watchers accountable?
In private practice, most likely. It's not that they were fired from the DoJ per se, but they were told that it would be better for everyone if they just went away quietly.
That is insufficient, as Ken Thompson demonstrated decades ago.
So, you were never taught about "Ice Ages" in school?
What, are we're talking about 3500 BCE, when Noah was chillin' with dinosaurs?
There ain't no such thing as a free market.
Either there's government enforcing at least basic rules about how the market operates (e.g. no "offers you can't refuse"), or there's non-market influences on the decisions of actors in that market (e.g. "I'm bleeding to death, it doesn't matter that the hospital in the next town offers cheaper service").
What Libertarians tend to actually want is the ability for the more powerful private actor to take advantage of the less powerful private actor with impunity. The more powerful private actor has a key advantage: They have a better ability to research and organize alternative transactions. That allows them to control the pricing in a way that the less powerful actor cannot.
For a concrete example, consider farmer Bob deciding whether to sell his corn to Archer Daniels Midland for $4.75 per bushel. Look at his options:
- Sell at the offered price.
- Not sell at all. That will probably cause him to lose his farm, because without this sale, he doesn't pay off the bank.
- Try to sell to someone else. But since there's no one besides ADM who buys corn in his area, the only way Bob could pull this off is to invent his own transport and distribution network, from scratch.
So what you have is not a free market, but a ADM-controlled market that is only free to ADM.