A few days ago, Bruce Schneier launched the Sixth Movie Plot Contest, with the goal of creating catastrophic but plausible things that "cyberwarriors" and evil hackers could do to destroy America. There are some fascinating ones, that's for sure, but the real point is that if you try to defend against everything that could happen, you'll waste most of your efforts.
Supposedly there were some reforms in the process around 2000 which fixed most of the problems with H1Bs. I am led to understand that they did not, but it's hard to find a good explanation of exactly why those reforms didn't help enough.
The explanation is easy: After considerable lobbying by large tech companies such as IBM, Apple, EA, and Microsoft, those reforms have been repealed or rendered toothless by not being enforced.
Going a lot farther back Napoleon was ultimately done in by cold and hunger, not opposing weaponry.
Yes and no: Napoleon was done in by the Russian winter in 1812 combined with scorched earth and guerrilla-like tactics by the Russian partisan fighters, but it took Round 2 at Waterloo to actually finish him for good.
The government and the bank cartel known as the Federal Reserve can and do print insane amount of money every year to finance government spending, at the expense of the value of every other dollar in existence.
That is at least as questionable claim. The "insane amount of money" that the Federal Reserve "printed" (actually, just enters a number in a computer, but never mind that) was about $280 billion in 2012. Now, that's obviously not a small chunk of change, but it's not even remotely close to funding the $1,126 billion deficit in federal spending in that same year. Where most of that deficit spending money is actually coming from is private investors happily buying up US Treasury bonds (at very low interest rates to boot), which is probably caused by (a) investors fleeing Europe, and (b) record high profits for businesses and their owners that has to go somewhere.
Also important to think about: Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush spent more during their administrations (as a % GDP) than Barack Obama did in 2010-2 (2009 was a year he only had partial control over budget-wise), and is currently projected to go lower. The reason deficits are so high right now is that tax receipts are the lowest they've been (again, as a % GDP) since 1945.
The F35 cost us another 15 years worth so far. So we're up to 25 years worth without a single person feeling a pinch.
I generally agree with your sentiments, but this one isn't quite true: The people that would definitely feel the pinch if we killed the F35 are all the people who currently work on designing and building it. And that makes a difference, because a fair number of Congresscritters get their seats by promising to bring home the military pork spending. Even Congresscritters who's stated position is that we need to "cut spending".
Isn't that really what the basic function of a government is?
The basic functions of a government are supposed to be: - Prevent citizens from robbing, killing, raping, vandalizing, etc each other. - Prevent other countries from sending people to rob, kill, rape, vandalize, etc its citizens.
Neither of those require oppressing people who live in other countries.
Sarcasm, is my view: It was fighting over basically some useless rocks, with both sides doing so mostly to prove they were capable of fighting over useless rocks.
And I write this as someone who has family members buried in La Recoleta.
And how was Henry focused on winning? By sabotaging peace negotiations and prolonging the Vietnam war so Nixon could win in 1968?
In Kissinger's worldview, the Democrats were part of the ongoing effort of Communists to take over the US, so it was absolutely imperative that they not be allowed to win.
Sure, it's freedom, as explained by Richard M Nixon's head: "We enjoy so much freedom, it's almost sickening. We're free to chose which hand our sex-monitoring chip is implanted in. And if we don't want to pay our taxes, why, we're free to spend a week with the Pain Monster."
Twitter followers, like Facebook friends and similar sorts of social media, fool people into thinking that something is popular. A lot of the people who are fooled into thinking that something is popular are also gullible enough to think that because something is popular it must be good, and thus start buying the product / voting for the candidate / publicly praising the organization.
The people who hire companies like this see the world as a game of hype, illusion, and fakery with the goal of having the next "Gagnam Style".
Osama is one way it can return and bite you. The other way it can hurt you is with what the spooks call "blowback", as demonstrated most thoroughly in Iran and the US-supported Shah: We support the thugs, the people hate the thugs, so there's a popular revolt that replaces the thugs, and for some reason the new guys thoroughly hate us.
Some other examples of where this dynamic comes into play: - Chile (thanks to Pinochet) - Venezuela (after the botched coup against Chavez) - Nicaragua and Panama (thanks to Manuel Noriega, another CIA asset) - El Salvador (with US-sponsored death squads) - Cuba (the US strongly supported the brutal Batista, which is why Castro hated us so much) - Lebanon (our support of Israeli cluster bombs in Beirut and the like bolsters Hezbollah) - Vietnam (they still are mad about the "killing millions of them and leaving land mines and chemical weapons all over the place" thing) - Iraq (we thought they had WMDs because we had sold them the weapons in question) - in the near future, Afghanistan
Henry Kissinger How I'm missing yer You're the doctor of my dreams. With your crinkly hair and your glassy stare And your Machiavellian schemes I know they say that you are very vain And short and fat and pudgy but at least you're not insane! Henry Kissinger How I'm missing yer And wishing you were here!
Henry Kissinger How I'm missing yer You're so chubby and so neat. With your funny clothes and your squishy nose You're like a German parakeet. All right so people say that you don't care But you've got nicer legs than Hitler And bigger tits than Cher! Henry Kissinger How I'm missing yer And wishing you were here!
I also always remember Tom Lehrer's comment that political satire died when they gave Kissinger the Nobel Peace Prize.
Dennis: "You're fooling yourselves. We're living in a dictatorship, in which the working classes..." Old Woman: "Oh, there you go bringing class into it again." Dennis: "But that's what it's all about. If only people would see."
They are getting rid of tenure, just by replacing tenured faculty positions with non-tenure-track adjunct positions. Adjuncts are of course a fraction of the cost of a full tenured professor, which is part of the motivation, and the other part seems to be the business types who make up administrations sticking it to the academics because they can.
Of course, how they expect to have any university-affiliated distinguished scientists is a different question.
For the record, I'm personally sitting somewhere in the top 20% and could easily end up in the top 10% next year, so this isn't about self-interest for me.
Also, you're comparing apple to oranges by saying that "you could [...] save enough in about 4-5 years to stop working and still be making 10 times what your average American makes." No, because they already have the income they have, and they have a different lifestyle -- and guess what? They haven't done anything wrong.
My point is not that they've done something wrong, just that they're in a privileged position compared to those who don't earn that kind of cash. And I agree it's quite possible they earned that cash fair and square.
The place where anything that can be defined as actual unfair "abuse" is occurring is in the 0.01% and up, and it's not even all of those people. To wholesale target the "top 1/5/10%" as evil or the cause of our problems ignores the fact that the top 10% -- who themselves are making over $100,000/year -- are paying 70% of the federal income tax share.
The portion of the "1%" the Occupy types are upset with (at least as far as taxes go) are the ones that are working the various tax loopholes to pay 15% on 8-figure incomes while people making a fraction of that pay 28%.
Even if we could have the bottom, say, 50%, or even the bottom *90%* pay NO tax of any kind, including payroll, sales, or anything else, and shift that ENTIRE burden to the top 10% (which is absurd, but let's just roll with it for the sake of argument), there would still be a massive wealth disparity. The very poor would still be very poor.
There wouldn't be a massive wealth disparity, actually, because there's a good chance we just put the wealthiest people in the poorhouse. That's a large part of why no one is seriously suggesting doing that.
It's not your business how much someone else has. Surely you can do with less; shall we take it away? Of course not.
If it's a choice between taking away some of my income, when I can live on about 30% of what I earn (after taxes), or taking away some income from somebody who is having a tough time paying the rent, then yes, I'd say it's wise to take away more of my income rather than theirs. To pay its bills, the government needs to tax somebody, and it makes more sense to tax those with extra cash than those without.
What we should be targeting is actual ABUSE and people who are getting off scot-free...and hint, it's not the vast, vast, vast majority of people in the top 1%.
It's not just about "scot-free", it's also about those who are paying less than their share. For example, according to one study, almost 100,000 millionaires paid a lower percentage of their income in taxes than people in the 28% bracket. That makes no sense.
Here are a few more ideas, in a wide variety of genres: * I Shot the Sheriff - Bob Marley * London Calling - The Clash * Bloody Sunday - U2 (especially on a Sunday) * Psycho Killer - Talking Heads * Pretty Boy Floyd - Woodie Guthrie * Anything by Cheb Khaled, not because of anything particularly violent about his songs but just because they're partially in Arabic. * Onward Christian Soldiers
and last but not least: * The Star-Spangled Banner (all that talk about bombs bursting in air, rockets, etc)
Actually, they do care about the difference between the 1% and the 0.01%, but to say that there isn't a significant difference between the richest 1% and everyone else is also incorrect. If you are in the 1%, you are making at least $500K annually. That's obviously different from the Lloyd Blankfeins and Bill Gates's of the world, but it's still a staggeringly large amount of cash, and about 15 times the income of the average American. For example, if you're getting that $500K in a paycheck, you could, without any kind of attempt at frugality, save enough in about 4-5 years to stop working and still be making 10 times what your average American makes. You could buy a home outright on less than a year's income, while most Americans who buy a home spend most of their lives paying for it. You might not be in the private jet crowd, but you are definitely living in a world that is completely different from what, say, a middle class family in Peoria is living in.
Why do you think that extorting taxes from citizens is any more moral than sending people to die in a war?
For the same reason we give a lot more lenient punishment to thieves than to murderers: nearly everyone places a higher value on human life than on property.
Slashdot Mirror
A few days ago, Bruce Schneier launched the Sixth Movie Plot Contest, with the goal of creating catastrophic but plausible things that "cyberwarriors" and evil hackers could do to destroy America. There are some fascinating ones, that's for sure, but the real point is that if you try to defend against everything that could happen, you'll waste most of your efforts.
Supposedly there were some reforms in the process around 2000 which fixed most of the problems with H1Bs. I am led to understand that they did not, but it's hard to find a good explanation of exactly why those reforms didn't help enough.
The explanation is easy: After considerable lobbying by large tech companies such as IBM, Apple, EA, and Microsoft, those reforms have been repealed or rendered toothless by not being enforced.
"Mark Zuckerberg Lobbies for Cheaper Programmers Who Can't Quit"
Going a lot farther back Napoleon was ultimately done in by cold and hunger, not opposing weaponry.
Yes and no: Napoleon was done in by the Russian winter in 1812 combined with scorched earth and guerrilla-like tactics by the Russian partisan fighters, but it took Round 2 at Waterloo to actually finish him for good.
The government and the bank cartel known as the Federal Reserve can and do print insane amount of money every year to finance government spending, at the expense of the value of every other dollar in existence.
That is at least as questionable claim. The "insane amount of money" that the Federal Reserve "printed" (actually, just enters a number in a computer, but never mind that) was about $280 billion in 2012. Now, that's obviously not a small chunk of change, but it's not even remotely close to funding the $1,126 billion deficit in federal spending in that same year. Where most of that deficit spending money is actually coming from is private investors happily buying up US Treasury bonds (at very low interest rates to boot), which is probably caused by (a) investors fleeing Europe, and (b) record high profits for businesses and their owners that has to go somewhere.
Also important to think about: Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush spent more during their administrations (as a % GDP) than Barack Obama did in 2010-2 (2009 was a year he only had partial control over budget-wise), and is currently projected to go lower. The reason deficits are so high right now is that tax receipts are the lowest they've been (again, as a % GDP) since 1945.
The F35 cost us another 15 years worth so far. So we're up to 25 years worth without a single person feeling a pinch.
I generally agree with your sentiments, but this one isn't quite true: The people that would definitely feel the pinch if we killed the F35 are all the people who currently work on designing and building it. And that makes a difference, because a fair number of Congresscritters get their seats by promising to bring home the military pork spending. Even Congresscritters who's stated position is that we need to "cut spending".
For the record, I'm using slurs that could be and have been said targeting me. It's like Chris Rock saying the n-word.
Actually, Obama's Nobel Prize was for nothing in particular. They'd decided to give it to him before he went all drone-happy.
I thought it was:
1. Prophet
2. Get a bunch of followers.
3. ????
4. Profit!!!
No, "cracker" is a synonym for "honky", although it's arguably correctly spelled "cracka".
Isn't that really what the basic function of a government is?
The basic functions of a government are supposed to be:
- Prevent citizens from robbing, killing, raping, vandalizing, etc each other.
- Prevent other countries from sending people to rob, kill, rape, vandalize, etc its citizens.
Neither of those require oppressing people who live in other countries.
Sarcasm, is my view: It was fighting over basically some useless rocks, with both sides doing so mostly to prove they were capable of fighting over useless rocks.
And I write this as someone who has family members buried in La Recoleta.
And how was Henry focused on winning? By sabotaging peace negotiations and prolonging the Vietnam war so Nixon could win in 1968?
In Kissinger's worldview, the Democrats were part of the ongoing effort of Communists to take over the US, so it was absolutely imperative that they not be allowed to win.
Sure, it's freedom, as explained by Richard M Nixon's head:
"We enjoy so much freedom, it's almost sickening. We're free to chose which hand our sex-monitoring chip is implanted in. And if we don't want to pay our taxes, why, we're free to spend a week with the Pain Monster."
Twitter followers, like Facebook friends and similar sorts of social media, fool people into thinking that something is popular. A lot of the people who are fooled into thinking that something is popular are also gullible enough to think that because something is popular it must be good, and thus start buying the product / voting for the candidate / publicly praising the organization.
The people who hire companies like this see the world as a game of hype, illusion, and fakery with the goal of having the next "Gagnam Style".
This was of course extremely important: The Brits needed those islands for, as Eddie Izzard put it, strategic sheep purposes.
But at least Prince Andrew got some good press out of the whole thing.
Osama is one way it can return and bite you. The other way it can hurt you is with what the spooks call "blowback", as demonstrated most thoroughly in Iran and the US-supported Shah: We support the thugs, the people hate the thugs, so there's a popular revolt that replaces the thugs, and for some reason the new guys thoroughly hate us.
Some other examples of where this dynamic comes into play:
- Chile (thanks to Pinochet)
- Venezuela (after the botched coup against Chavez)
- Nicaragua and Panama (thanks to Manuel Noriega, another CIA asset)
- El Salvador (with US-sponsored death squads)
- Cuba (the US strongly supported the brutal Batista, which is why Castro hated us so much)
- Lebanon (our support of Israeli cluster bombs in Beirut and the like bolsters Hezbollah)
- Vietnam (they still are mad about the "killing millions of them and leaving land mines and chemical weapons all over the place" thing)
- Iraq (we thought they had WMDs because we had sold them the weapons in question)
- in the near future, Afghanistan
Henry Kissinger
How I'm missing yer
You're the doctor of my dreams.
With your crinkly hair and your glassy stare
And your Machiavellian schemes
I know they say that you are very vain
And short and fat and pudgy but at least you're not insane!
Henry Kissinger
How I'm missing yer
And wishing you were here!
Henry Kissinger
How I'm missing yer
You're so chubby and so neat.
With your funny clothes and your squishy nose
You're like a German parakeet.
All right so people say that you don't care
But you've got nicer legs than Hitler
And bigger tits than Cher!
Henry Kissinger
How I'm missing yer
And wishing you were here!
I also always remember Tom Lehrer's comment that political satire died when they gave Kissinger the Nobel Peace Prize.
Oh wait, America doesn't have class, right?
Dennis: "You're fooling yourselves. We're living in a dictatorship, in which the working classes ..."
Old Woman: "Oh, there you go bringing class into it again."
Dennis: "But that's what it's all about. If only people would see."
As the old joke goes: "civil lawyer" is an oxymoron, "criminal lawyer" is redundant.
They are getting rid of tenure, just by replacing tenured faculty positions with non-tenure-track adjunct positions. Adjuncts are of course a fraction of the cost of a full tenured professor, which is part of the motivation, and the other part seems to be the business types who make up administrations sticking it to the academics because they can.
Of course, how they expect to have any university-affiliated distinguished scientists is a different question.
For the record, I'm personally sitting somewhere in the top 20% and could easily end up in the top 10% next year, so this isn't about self-interest for me.
Also, you're comparing apple to oranges by saying that "you could [...] save enough in about 4-5 years to stop working and still be making 10 times what your average American makes." No, because they already have the income they have, and they have a different lifestyle -- and guess what? They haven't done anything wrong.
My point is not that they've done something wrong, just that they're in a privileged position compared to those who don't earn that kind of cash. And I agree it's quite possible they earned that cash fair and square.
The place where anything that can be defined as actual unfair "abuse" is occurring is in the 0.01% and up, and it's not even all of those people. To wholesale target the "top 1/5/10%" as evil or the cause of our problems ignores the fact that the top 10% -- who themselves are making over $100,000/year -- are paying 70% of the federal income tax share.
The portion of the "1%" the Occupy types are upset with (at least as far as taxes go) are the ones that are working the various tax loopholes to pay 15% on 8-figure incomes while people making a fraction of that pay 28%.
Even if we could have the bottom, say, 50%, or even the bottom *90%* pay NO tax of any kind, including payroll, sales, or anything else, and shift that ENTIRE burden to the top 10% (which is absurd, but let's just roll with it for the sake of argument), there would still be a massive wealth disparity. The very poor would still be very poor.
There wouldn't be a massive wealth disparity, actually, because there's a good chance we just put the wealthiest people in the poorhouse. That's a large part of why no one is seriously suggesting doing that.
It's not your business how much someone else has. Surely you can do with less; shall we take it away? Of course not.
If it's a choice between taking away some of my income, when I can live on about 30% of what I earn (after taxes), or taking away some income from somebody who is having a tough time paying the rent, then yes, I'd say it's wise to take away more of my income rather than theirs. To pay its bills, the government needs to tax somebody, and it makes more sense to tax those with extra cash than those without.
What we should be targeting is actual ABUSE and people who are getting off scot-free...and hint, it's not the vast, vast, vast majority of people in the top 1%.
It's not just about "scot-free", it's also about those who are paying less than their share. For example, according to one study, almost 100,000 millionaires paid a lower percentage of their income in taxes than people in the 28% bracket. That makes no sense.
Here are a few more ideas, in a wide variety of genres:
* I Shot the Sheriff - Bob Marley
* London Calling - The Clash
* Bloody Sunday - U2 (especially on a Sunday)
* Psycho Killer - Talking Heads
* Pretty Boy Floyd - Woodie Guthrie
* Anything by Cheb Khaled, not because of anything particularly violent about his songs but just because they're partially in Arabic.
* Onward Christian Soldiers
and last but not least:
* The Star-Spangled Banner (all that talk about bombs bursting in air, rockets, etc)
Of course, the Occupy folks don't care about this
Actually, they do care about the difference between the 1% and the 0.01%, but to say that there isn't a significant difference between the richest 1% and everyone else is also incorrect. If you are in the 1%, you are making at least $500K annually. That's obviously different from the Lloyd Blankfeins and Bill Gates's of the world, but it's still a staggeringly large amount of cash, and about 15 times the income of the average American. For example, if you're getting that $500K in a paycheck, you could, without any kind of attempt at frugality, save enough in about 4-5 years to stop working and still be making 10 times what your average American makes. You could buy a home outright on less than a year's income, while most Americans who buy a home spend most of their lives paying for it. You might not be in the private jet crowd, but you are definitely living in a world that is completely different from what, say, a middle class family in Peoria is living in.
Why do you think that extorting taxes from citizens is any more moral than sending people to die in a war?
For the same reason we give a lot more lenient punishment to thieves than to murderers: nearly everyone places a higher value on human life than on property.