That works for some people, but not everyone. There are a lot of people out there who, by eating when hungry and stopping when they aren't hungry, will eat more than they burn and thus gain weight slowly.
In my experience, all the various diets run into the same problem: whatever you cut out of your diet, you crave, eventually eat, and then yo-yo right back to where you were. That makes complete sense from an evolutionary standpoint - someone who is obese can survive famines and still manage to reproduce despite their obesity-related medical problems, whereas someone who is starving can't manage to do that. Whatever you aren't eating is exactly what your body will start to crave in the hopes that you'll make the extra effort to find that particular nutrient.
Some things that have so far helped me stay disciplined: - Shop for food immediately after eating a meal. By not being hungry, it's a lot easier to stay disciplined about it. Also, having a shopping list prevents impulse buying of junk. - Make your own food, don't eat out or have it delivered. - Take your time, and don't try to lose the weight too quickly. 1 pound a week is much more effective and sustainable loss rate than trying for 5 pounds in a week. - Still eat the variety of non-junk food you ate when you weren't dieting. That prevents the cravings for particular kinds of food. - Expect to screw up at least once. Go right back to doing what you were doing. - For snacks, raw vegetables are the way to go. For example, 1 cookie has more calories than an entire cucumber. Also, not very much raw onion will stop your appetite right up.
The concept is pretty simple: To lose weight, eat fewer calories than you burn. To not gain weight, eat only as much as you burn. You can increase how much you burn with exercise, or you can decrease how much you eat, or both. Anything else as far as dieting is concerned is window dressing.
They told us don't you ever try to make new fuel Don't want a lower price, you better like your gruel The law is on their side, and their policies are cruel So beet it, just beet it!
Alternately, it's the definition of science which states that no matter what happens I never have to change what I'm doing or inconvenience myself with such silly activities as taking the bus (or even *gasp* walking somewhere), wearing a sweater indoors in the winter, or improving the insulation of my home.
And remember that their definition of "ordinary people" is people who are further than three degrees of separation from someone they think is a terrorist. So, for example, you go to a doctor who also had a guy named Ahmed as a patient, and Ahmed had a buddy who got involved in terrorism, congratulations, you (and your doctor) are now being spied on.
To use an example from/., it's not at all uncommon to see a comment go completely unnoticed from moderators for an hour, and then get a +1 from somebody, and within 30 minutes have gone from Score:1 or Score:2 to Score:5.
Bandwagon effects are quite well-known. After all, all your friends are paying attention to them! It seems to be a useful psychological reaction: If all your friends and family are jumping off the bridge, chances are you will too on the theory that they probably have a good reason to do so.
There are several other skills that definitely matter:
Knowing when and how to fire people.
Making sure that the engineers have what they need to do their jobs.
Keeping other departments from making stupid or useless or distracting requests to the engineers
Making sure the bigwigs know about the valuable work the department is doing so they can get raises, promotions, etc.
Management is easy to make fun of, but there's a definite difference between good management and bad management.
Software management positions in a company are useful as a place to put the bad people on the development team, without having demoralizing layoffs.
Yeah, umm, I'm gonna have to go ahead and sort of... disagree with you there. The trouble is the Dunning-Kruger Effect: If the boss is a lousy developer, then he'll have no way of determining which of his employees are good developers and which aren't. If you want to keep a well-performing team from being demoralized by a bad developer, first coach, then reprimand, and then if nothing else works fire the bad developer. If you want to kill a good team, promote a clueless person, because that sends the clear message that the path to career advancement is being clueless rather than being successful.
And last time I checked the US economy still leads the world by a very wide margin.
You must have checked a long time ago, because by many measurements the US economy does not lead the world: - If you go by total GDP, then the US produces more than any single country, but produces less than the EU countries combined, and China is catching up rapidly. - If you go by GDP per capita, US is somewhere around 6-8th in the world, so if you mean "We produce the most stuff per person". Places that have a higher GDP per capita include Luxemburg, Norway, U.A.E., Qatar, Singapore, and Brunei, and possibly Switzerland. - If you go by median household income, then the US loses to Luxemburg, Norway, and Switzerland. - If you go by median wealth, then the US loses to approximately 14 other countries. - If you go by GDP growth, then we're not even close to the top of the list.
It's not clear that the US has the best economy in the world. It is doing a heck of a lot better than a lot of other places, but it's not doing exceptionally well among other First World countries.
We nearly hanged Nixon (and Ford for pardoning him) for Watergate.
More precisely, the Democrats in Congress nearly impeached and removed Nixon from office with the expectation that this would be followed up by criminal charges. It wasn't going to hang Nixon, but it was going to lock him up for a while. Gerald Ford's pardon was a damn shame, because it cemented the idea in Washington that the president is above the law (no matter what Stephen Seagal does). I'm reasonably certain part of the story was that the Clinton impeachment scared Democrats into making a tacit agreement with Republicans: Don't go after our crimes, we won't go after yours. And because there is no other party with any real power, the result is that both Democratic and Republican presidents can commit crimes with impunity. The intelligence agencies happily collect / create enough dirt on anyone else who might challenge them as well.
It's not about the citizens accepting what's going on. It's about the citizens hating what's going on, but seeing no viable paths to changing it. If you elect new congresscritters or a new president, that will simply change which don is currently in charge. If you protest on the street, your protest will be ignored by the media and you may well get your ass kicked by police. If you petition your government, you will get a form letter in response. If you file a lawsuit, it will be dismissed out of hand because of state secrets privilege. If you try a criminal approach, you'll be shot down by a heavily militarized police force. If you form an organization that starts having any kind of real effects, then you and your group will have assets frozen, and if you're truly effective then you will be the target of a worldwide manhunt regardless of the law or treaties or diplomatic concerns.
If we go by life expectancy, the UK citizen: They live about 18 months longer (80 years rather than 78.5 years). France and Canada do even better, around 81.5 years.
Anecdotal evidence which is easily trumped by, you know, actual research (key chart starts on page 18). It turns out that by any objective measure, the NHS gets better results than the US does: The UK is in the top 20, the US is competing with Costa Rica, Cuba, and Slovenia. And if you want to see really all-out socialized medicine, check out France, sitting comfortably as the best in the world.
A big part of what's going on is that your perception of health care is coming from your own experiences using it as someone who probably has a good job and decent insurance. It completely ignores the experiences of those who have a bad job and no insurance. The US has a health care underclass, and you aren't in it, so you don't notice how badly the people in it are treated.
Seriously. Rich people could definitely come up with $1 trillion if they really wanted to. So if they wanted to, they could definitely hire a bunch of engineers and scientists to make them their paradise in the sky, and then say "So long, suckers!"
Why don't they? Probably because they would rather have lots of minions around to boss - otherwise, what's the point of being rich?
So if you want socialized medicine... this will only make your idea appear stupid or your political allies too inept to execute such a plan.
If you don't want socialized medical care this will effectively give it to you anyway... but it will be even more expensive... badly run... and generally all the negatives will be more negative.
Too bad RomneyObamacare (the Romney MA plan and Obama's plan are basically identical) isn't actually socialized medicine, eh? I wonder what would have happened had Obama created a National Health Service like other civilized countries.
My overall take is that it will suck, but it will suck somewhat less than if it hadn't been created. There is every indication that there will be fewer people without insurance, fewer medical bankruptcies, and less insurance company shenanigans. It's far from perfect, but shouldn't we at least try it to find out?
Does that mean the supporters will have to ACTUALLY get support for their program this time instead of sneaking it through?
Please explain how a measure that was front-page news for months, was discussed in a presidential election, and had massive ad campaigns about it was in any way snuck through. Unless you're complaining about the process in the Senate that allowed 58 of 100 votes to constitute a majority.
But causing American insurance premiums to double is not in any one's interest.
RomneyObamacare doesn't cause insurance premiums to double for everybody, it causes insurance premiums to go up for richer and younger and healthier people to pay for the health care of poorer and older and sicker people. That's definitely in the interests of poorer and older and sicker people, and is better for them than no health insurance at all, which is what they have now.
My point is that indifferent to all that, Obamacare is unfixable. It needs to be put down like a rabid dog and THEN we can evaluate what our options are after that.
Again, the counterargument here is not "RomneyObamacare is great, it solves everything". It's "It sucks less than pre-RomneyObamacare, so we should try living with it while we come up with something better." The something better may well be completely different from RomneyObamacare, but in the meantime you'll have fewer people refusing transportation to a hospital after a heart attack (yes, this really happens).
Sort of. Hiring H1-B applicants is a pretty expensive process and definitely a pain in the butt. Granted, the workers don't get to see as much of the cost of hiring them, but there are a lot more middlemen involved who each take their cut.
What's really going on is replacing "free labor" citizens with what amount to indentured workers who basically can't quit. It means that when you decide "The entire tech department will now work 85 hours a week", you don't have the exodus of employees that you will get from citizen workers who (rightfully IMHO) won't stand for that sort of thing.
It's not just about money, it's also about control and convenience for management.
At least 2 problems with your argument: 1. In order to win, Ms Koehler needs to prove that she was rejected because of her national origin rather than her qualifications and merits. Since we don't know what evidence she has, we don't know if she's right, but if she wins her case it will be because she has demonstrated by a preponderance of the evidence that Infosys basically hung out a sign that said "Help Wanted. No Americans need apply" (similar to this). What she is claiming is that she could be the best worker in existence and still not be hired or even seriously considered solely because she is a US citizen.
2. You seem to be suggesting that if you're the victim of injustice, the right thing to do is to accept it and move on. Historically speaking, that never works. For example, Booker T Washington argued that African-Americans should basically accept the injustices aimed at them and try to improve themselves with education and entrepreneurship. The result was more injustices, particularly aimed at those who had become educated and/or entrepreneurs. By contrast, Medger Evers wanted to fight for African-American rights, and that strategy ultimately succeeded (but not for Evers, who was killed for his stance).
In the case of a cataclysmic event that could displace thousands, if not millions, of people, the availability of emergency shelter becomes a pressing concern.
The things that will actually make a difference in your ability to survive a cataclysmic event have very little to do with simple products you can buy. Some things that will make a huge difference: - How much warning you get: The more time you have, the more survivable the mess is. - Your willingness to believe the warning: If you don't believe it (not uncommon at all), you won't react in time to do anything useful. - Whether you have the resources to get to somewhere else in between the warning and the actual cataclysm: If you don't have anywhere to go, don't have a car, etc, then leaving is much more difficult. - Your willingness to lose most of your stuff: Many people have died going for their valuables rather than going to a safer place. - Whether you have any chronic medical conditions: A lot of deaths in disaster areas are people not getting the medication they need to treat chronic illness. - Your age: Elderly and young children will get the worst of it. - Your physical fitness: If you're hale and hardy, you can consider options like loading up everything you need in a backpack and walking out of the disaster area. If you're morbidly obese, you can't.
Basically, the standard strategy for dealing with a serious but localized disaster is (1) Try to get everyone out of there before it strikes. (2) After it strikes, bring as many supplies into the area as you can while getting as many people out of the area as you can as quickly as possible. (3) As the people are leaving, start fixing the underlying problems to the degree possible. (4) As the disaster area recovers, people start trickling back in.
The goal of most of these sorts of projects is self-sufficiency on Mars, which fits your ideal of a colony. Indeed, you'd have to have self-sufficiency, given that the nearest source of help is 2 years away at best if anything goes wrong.
Pulling this off would be the most difficult exploration or colonization effort humans had ever attempted, for precisely that reason of sheer distance. By comparison, colonizing the Americas was ridiculously easy.
But given Obama promised to close gitmo in his first campaign for President, I'm assuming there's a very good reason why he hasn't done it. Again, I don't know what that reason is.
I can take an educated guess as to what that real reason is: There are spooks who would be in front of the Hague right now on war crimes if the witnesses currently locked up in Gitmo ever were in a position to give testimony. Those same spooks are able to tell the president anything they want, and the president has no way to verify if they are lying to him. So they spin a yarn to the politicians in classified briefings about how they're extracting all sorts of vital information from the prisoners, even the ones that are there for no legitimate reason whatsoever, and the politicians are too scared to risk another 9/11 so they go along with it. As an added bonus, the spooks don't discriminate based on party affiliation, which means that what they tell the politicians becomes the "Washington consensus" and therefor unchallengeable.
Jimmy Carter was probably the last guy who tried to rein in the "intelligence" agencies, so the people in those agencies worked with the Reagan campaign to undermine Carter by arranging the Iran hostage crisis.
Name something pertinent that was done differently than Bush. Go ahead and look, but outside of lies and fabrications you won't find anything.
- Obama ordered US citizens killed with a drone strike. Bush merely locked up US citizens without charges. - The Bush administration leaked classified information intentionally as a way to push the case for war and to punish political opponents. Obama severely punishes anyone who leaks classified information.
Those are changes in policy. Probably not the changes that citizens who are paying attention wanted to see, but changes nonetheless.
Slashdot Mirror
That works for some people, but not everyone. There are a lot of people out there who, by eating when hungry and stopping when they aren't hungry, will eat more than they burn and thus gain weight slowly.
In my experience, all the various diets run into the same problem: whatever you cut out of your diet, you crave, eventually eat, and then yo-yo right back to where you were. That makes complete sense from an evolutionary standpoint - someone who is obese can survive famines and still manage to reproduce despite their obesity-related medical problems, whereas someone who is starving can't manage to do that. Whatever you aren't eating is exactly what your body will start to crave in the hopes that you'll make the extra effort to find that particular nutrient.
Some things that have so far helped me stay disciplined:
- Shop for food immediately after eating a meal. By not being hungry, it's a lot easier to stay disciplined about it. Also, having a shopping list prevents impulse buying of junk.
- Make your own food, don't eat out or have it delivered.
- Take your time, and don't try to lose the weight too quickly. 1 pound a week is much more effective and sustainable loss rate than trying for 5 pounds in a week.
- Still eat the variety of non-junk food you ate when you weren't dieting. That prevents the cravings for particular kinds of food.
- Expect to screw up at least once. Go right back to doing what you were doing.
- For snacks, raw vegetables are the way to go. For example, 1 cookie has more calories than an entire cucumber. Also, not very much raw onion will stop your appetite right up.
The Hacker's Diet did this quite a while ago.
The concept is pretty simple: To lose weight, eat fewer calories than you burn. To not gain weight, eat only as much as you burn. You can increase how much you burn with exercise, or you can decrease how much you eat, or both. Anything else as far as dieting is concerned is window dressing.
When I see beets I say "beat it, beet."
They told us don't you ever try to make new fuel
Don't want a lower price, you better like your gruel
The law is on their side, and their policies are cruel
So beet it, just beet it!
Alternately, it's the definition of science which states that no matter what happens I never have to change what I'm doing or inconvenience myself with such silly activities as taking the bus (or even *gasp* walking somewhere), wearing a sweater indoors in the winter, or improving the insulation of my home.
Actually, Hell freezes over fairly regularly in the winter.
And remember that their definition of "ordinary people" is people who are further than three degrees of separation from someone they think is a terrorist. So, for example, you go to a doctor who also had a guy named Ahmed as a patient, and Ahmed had a buddy who got involved in terrorism, congratulations, you (and your doctor) are now being spied on.
To use an example from /., it's not at all uncommon to see a comment go completely unnoticed from moderators for an hour, and then get a +1 from somebody, and within 30 minutes have gone from Score:1 or Score:2 to Score:5.
Bandwagon effects are quite well-known. After all, all your friends are paying attention to them! It seems to be a useful psychological reaction: If all your friends and family are jumping off the bridge, chances are you will too on the theory that they probably have a good reason to do so.
What about Sting, formerly of The Police? After all, isn't the motto "Every step you take, I'll be watching you"?
There are several other skills that definitely matter:
Management is easy to make fun of, but there's a definite difference between good management and bad management.
Software management positions in a company are useful as a place to put the bad people on the development team, without having demoralizing layoffs.
Yeah, umm, I'm gonna have to go ahead and sort of... disagree with you there. The trouble is the Dunning-Kruger Effect: If the boss is a lousy developer, then he'll have no way of determining which of his employees are good developers and which aren't. If you want to keep a well-performing team from being demoralized by a bad developer, first coach, then reprimand, and then if nothing else works fire the bad developer. If you want to kill a good team, promote a clueless person, because that sends the clear message that the path to career advancement is being clueless rather than being successful.
Have you ever heard of flouridation of water, Mandrake?
And last time I checked the US economy still leads the world by a very wide margin.
You must have checked a long time ago, because by many measurements the US economy does not lead the world:
- If you go by total GDP, then the US produces more than any single country, but produces less than the EU countries combined, and China is catching up rapidly.
- If you go by GDP per capita, US is somewhere around 6-8th in the world, so if you mean "We produce the most stuff per person". Places that have a higher GDP per capita include Luxemburg, Norway, U.A.E., Qatar, Singapore, and Brunei, and possibly Switzerland.
- If you go by median household income, then the US loses to Luxemburg, Norway, and Switzerland.
- If you go by median wealth, then the US loses to approximately 14 other countries.
- If you go by GDP growth, then we're not even close to the top of the list.
It's not clear that the US has the best economy in the world. It is doing a heck of a lot better than a lot of other places, but it's not doing exceptionally well among other First World countries.
We nearly hanged Nixon (and Ford for pardoning him) for Watergate.
More precisely, the Democrats in Congress nearly impeached and removed Nixon from office with the expectation that this would be followed up by criminal charges. It wasn't going to hang Nixon, but it was going to lock him up for a while. Gerald Ford's pardon was a damn shame, because it cemented the idea in Washington that the president is above the law (no matter what Stephen Seagal does). I'm reasonably certain part of the story was that the Clinton impeachment scared Democrats into making a tacit agreement with Republicans: Don't go after our crimes, we won't go after yours. And because there is no other party with any real power, the result is that both Democratic and Republican presidents can commit crimes with impunity. The intelligence agencies happily collect / create enough dirt on anyone else who might challenge them as well.
It's not about the citizens accepting what's going on. It's about the citizens hating what's going on, but seeing no viable paths to changing it. If you elect new congresscritters or a new president, that will simply change which don is currently in charge. If you protest on the street, your protest will be ignored by the media and you may well get your ass kicked by police. If you petition your government, you will get a form letter in response. If you file a lawsuit, it will be dismissed out of hand because of state secrets privilege. If you try a criminal approach, you'll be shot down by a heavily militarized police force. If you form an organization that starts having any kind of real effects, then you and your group will have assets frozen, and if you're truly effective then you will be the target of a worldwide manhunt regardless of the law or treaties or diplomatic concerns.
If we go by life expectancy, the UK citizen: They live about 18 months longer (80 years rather than 78.5 years). France and Canada do even better, around 81.5 years.
Awesome health care, indeed.
Anecdotal evidence which is easily trumped by, you know, actual research (key chart starts on page 18). It turns out that by any objective measure, the NHS gets better results than the US does: The UK is in the top 20, the US is competing with Costa Rica, Cuba, and Slovenia. And if you want to see really all-out socialized medicine, check out France, sitting comfortably as the best in the world.
A big part of what's going on is that your perception of health care is coming from your own experiences using it as someone who probably has a good job and decent insurance. It completely ignores the experiences of those who have a bad job and no insurance. The US has a health care underclass, and you aren't in it, so you don't notice how badly the people in it are treated.
Seriously. Rich people could definitely come up with $1 trillion if they really wanted to. So if they wanted to, they could definitely hire a bunch of engineers and scientists to make them their paradise in the sky, and then say "So long, suckers!"
Why don't they? Probably because they would rather have lots of minions around to boss - otherwise, what's the point of being rich?
So if you want socialized medicine... this will only make your idea appear stupid or your political allies too inept to execute such a plan.
If you don't want socialized medical care this will effectively give it to you anyway... but it will be even more expensive... badly run... and generally all the negatives will be more negative.
Too bad RomneyObamacare (the Romney MA plan and Obama's plan are basically identical) isn't actually socialized medicine, eh? I wonder what would have happened had Obama created a National Health Service like other civilized countries.
My overall take is that it will suck, but it will suck somewhat less than if it hadn't been created. There is every indication that there will be fewer people without insurance, fewer medical bankruptcies, and less insurance company shenanigans. It's far from perfect, but shouldn't we at least try it to find out?
Does that mean the supporters will have to ACTUALLY get support for their program this time instead of sneaking it through?
Please explain how a measure that was front-page news for months, was discussed in a presidential election, and had massive ad campaigns about it was in any way snuck through. Unless you're complaining about the process in the Senate that allowed 58 of 100 votes to constitute a majority.
But causing American insurance premiums to double is not in any one's interest.
RomneyObamacare doesn't cause insurance premiums to double for everybody, it causes insurance premiums to go up for richer and younger and healthier people to pay for the health care of poorer and older and sicker people. That's definitely in the interests of poorer and older and sicker people, and is better for them than no health insurance at all, which is what they have now.
My point is that indifferent to all that, Obamacare is unfixable. It needs to be put down like a rabid dog and THEN we can evaluate what our options are after that.
Again, the counterargument here is not "RomneyObamacare is great, it solves everything". It's "It sucks less than pre-RomneyObamacare, so we should try living with it while we come up with something better." The something better may well be completely different from RomneyObamacare, but in the meantime you'll have fewer people refusing transportation to a hospital after a heart attack (yes, this really happens).
Kid, have you rehabilitated yourself?
This bill is going to do nothing but help those Hollywood liberals that are destroying America. You want nothing to do with it.
(just trying to help kill this thing)
It's all a scam to save money.
Sort of. Hiring H1-B applicants is a pretty expensive process and definitely a pain in the butt. Granted, the workers don't get to see as much of the cost of hiring them, but there are a lot more middlemen involved who each take their cut.
What's really going on is replacing "free labor" citizens with what amount to indentured workers who basically can't quit. It means that when you decide "The entire tech department will now work 85 hours a week", you don't have the exodus of employees that you will get from citizen workers who (rightfully IMHO) won't stand for that sort of thing.
It's not just about money, it's also about control and convenience for management.
At least 2 problems with your argument:
1. In order to win, Ms Koehler needs to prove that she was rejected because of her national origin rather than her qualifications and merits. Since we don't know what evidence she has, we don't know if she's right, but if she wins her case it will be because she has demonstrated by a preponderance of the evidence that Infosys basically hung out a sign that said "Help Wanted. No Americans need apply" (similar to this). What she is claiming is that she could be the best worker in existence and still not be hired or even seriously considered solely because she is a US citizen.
2. You seem to be suggesting that if you're the victim of injustice, the right thing to do is to accept it and move on. Historically speaking, that never works. For example, Booker T Washington argued that African-Americans should basically accept the injustices aimed at them and try to improve themselves with education and entrepreneurship. The result was more injustices, particularly aimed at those who had become educated and/or entrepreneurs. By contrast, Medger Evers wanted to fight for African-American rights, and that strategy ultimately succeeded (but not for Evers, who was killed for his stance).
In the case of a cataclysmic event that could displace thousands, if not millions, of people, the availability of emergency shelter becomes a pressing concern.
The things that will actually make a difference in your ability to survive a cataclysmic event have very little to do with simple products you can buy. Some things that will make a huge difference:
- How much warning you get: The more time you have, the more survivable the mess is.
- Your willingness to believe the warning: If you don't believe it (not uncommon at all), you won't react in time to do anything useful.
- Whether you have the resources to get to somewhere else in between the warning and the actual cataclysm: If you don't have anywhere to go, don't have a car, etc, then leaving is much more difficult.
- Your willingness to lose most of your stuff: Many people have died going for their valuables rather than going to a safer place.
- Whether you have any chronic medical conditions: A lot of deaths in disaster areas are people not getting the medication they need to treat chronic illness.
- Your age: Elderly and young children will get the worst of it.
- Your physical fitness: If you're hale and hardy, you can consider options like loading up everything you need in a backpack and walking out of the disaster area. If you're morbidly obese, you can't.
Basically, the standard strategy for dealing with a serious but localized disaster is (1) Try to get everyone out of there before it strikes. (2) After it strikes, bring as many supplies into the area as you can while getting as many people out of the area as you can as quickly as possible. (3) As the people are leaving, start fixing the underlying problems to the degree possible. (4) As the disaster area recovers, people start trickling back in.
The goal of most of these sorts of projects is self-sufficiency on Mars, which fits your ideal of a colony. Indeed, you'd have to have self-sufficiency, given that the nearest source of help is 2 years away at best if anything goes wrong.
Pulling this off would be the most difficult exploration or colonization effort humans had ever attempted, for precisely that reason of sheer distance. By comparison, colonizing the Americas was ridiculously easy.
But given Obama promised to close gitmo in his first campaign for President, I'm assuming there's a very good reason why he hasn't done it. Again, I don't know what that reason is.
I can take an educated guess as to what that real reason is: There are spooks who would be in front of the Hague right now on war crimes if the witnesses currently locked up in Gitmo ever were in a position to give testimony. Those same spooks are able to tell the president anything they want, and the president has no way to verify if they are lying to him. So they spin a yarn to the politicians in classified briefings about how they're extracting all sorts of vital information from the prisoners, even the ones that are there for no legitimate reason whatsoever, and the politicians are too scared to risk another 9/11 so they go along with it. As an added bonus, the spooks don't discriminate based on party affiliation, which means that what they tell the politicians becomes the "Washington consensus" and therefor unchallengeable.
Jimmy Carter was probably the last guy who tried to rein in the "intelligence" agencies, so the people in those agencies worked with the Reagan campaign to undermine Carter by arranging the Iran hostage crisis.
Name something pertinent that was done differently than Bush. Go ahead and look, but outside of lies and fabrications you won't find anything.
- Obama ordered US citizens killed with a drone strike. Bush merely locked up US citizens without charges.
- The Bush administration leaked classified information intentionally as a way to push the case for war and to punish political opponents. Obama severely punishes anyone who leaks classified information.
Those are changes in policy. Probably not the changes that citizens who are paying attention wanted to see, but changes nonetheless.