... because, in at least some cases, they are the cartels. For example, Time Warner Cable is a subsidiary of AOL Time Warner, which owns numerous media companies.
No, don't teach people to think! Thinking people are much much harder to control, and we need to control them to ensure they'll take lousy jobs, take on lots of debt, vote for politicians that won't change anything, and blame themselves for not getting anywhere in life. Why, this "thinking" would even convince some people that the corporate leadership isn't really all that smart, and that idea is downright dangerous.
- This message brought to you by the US Chamber of Commerce
I don't see it as particularly a public/private difference, but a difference of well-run and poorly-run organizations.
Assuming that the private sector is always efficient is wrong, because anyone who's worked in large private sector companies knows full well that it's not. For example, most of the "management consulting" industry shouldn't really exist, because it's entire reason for existing is so that some manager Smith can hire an outside firm to tell their boss that Smith's plan is better than Jones' plan and thus secure Smith that promotion. One of the things that's becoming clear in corporate governance is that an employee of a corporation faced with making a decision that benefits themselves versus a decision that benefits the organization will pick themselves almost every time.
Assuming that the public sector is always inefficient is also wrong. There are public agencies that are ridiculously efficient at what they do. For example, the administrative overhead of Social Security is approximately 0.9%. The VA gets more bang for the health care buck than Medicaid, Medicare, and private medical insurance. The CFPB is doing a pretty good job on a shoestring budget. The National Park Service costs about $3 billion a year, which sounds like a lot but is actually about $10 per American, and in return it serves 280 million visitors a year, which certainly seems like a pretty good value.
More to the point, assuming the public sector inherently sucks means we stop rewarding those public servants that do a really good job, which will reduce their motivation and pretty much guarantee that they'll do it badly. And assuming the private sector inherently is efficient means we stop holding private organizations accountable when they screw up. Doing either is really stupid.
It's risk management. In short, no one wants to be the director of the next Logan International Airport -- the takeoff location for two of the four planes involved in the 9/11 terrorist attacks.
The real kicker: There was no failure of security at Logan. The security people at Logan had no indication that the terrorists were bad news, and the box-cutters the terrorists had were at the time allowed on board.
Actually, in the case of Rapiscan machines, one of the people that were going to profit from the decision was Michael Chertoff, the Secretary of Homeland Security at the time that he was deciding whether to use them. No, nothing corrupt there.
The complaint that it 'removed the need for the enhanced pat-down' was from Cindi Martin, not Ron Mercer. So it's quite possible that you've pinned the wrong motive on him.
Another factor in this: I've noticed that we've been getting a spate of "Linus blew up at an innocent coder, waaaa!" stories on/., where as soon as we look closer it becomes clear that the person Linus is flaming turns out to be legitimately wrong. That strongly suggests that either there's somebody (or some group) out there who wants to create an image of Linus as an angry jerk, whether or not that's justified.
My impression is that Linus doesn't suffer fools, and that's actually a quality I'd want in a position he's currently occupying. And unfortunately, the fools outnumber him. I just hope he's not changing his mind because of these stories.
The War of the Worlds didn't take any inspiration from the Nazis, given that H G Wells wrote it in the 1800s.
Specifically, it was actually a very obvious metaphor for the various conquests of peoples living in Africa, Asia, and America by much more modern European armies. The basic musket was as alien to the first North Americans to encounter them as the Martian machines were to the Victorian Brits, and part of the point of Wells' novel was to give those respectable Victorian Brits the same emotional response as, say, the Arawaks.
That's what a lot of good sci-fi does: It examines a contemporary problem by changing the setting so they can get away with looking at it.
I want to stress, by the way, that this isn't a republican or democrat thing and I'd hope to nip those blame games in the bud.
Absolutely, it's not a Democrat thing nor a Republican thing. What it is is an entrenched corruption thing. For instance, a freshman congressman can show up bright-eyed and bushy-tailed for their first session, ready to debate the issues of the day, and will promptly find out that their own party leadership (who controls the agenda) will ignore them unless they raise $5 million for the party's congressional campaign fund. If they don't play the game, they don't get any kind of serious say in what's going on, and are doomed to life as a backbencher who's bills never make it into a committee hearing, much less a floor vote, and all the federal pork will move out of their district (creating unemployment), until they either give up and decide not to run again, or play ball.
That's the game in Washington, and everyone is playing it, except possibly Bernie Sanders (I-VT) and Angus King (I-ME). For those of you wondering why I left out Joe Lieberman (I-CT), it's because he may be nominally independent, but he's a major fundraiser for the Democrats, so they protect him from even the primary voters from Connecticut.
"Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. This is not a way of life at all in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron."
Just a bit of wisdom on this subject from some pacifist coward named Dwight Eisenhower.
Another way of describing the problem: The loans from Social Security to the general treasury had the real goal of shifting the tax burden from the somewhat progressive income taxes to the completely regressive payroll taxes.
There's been a solution to any problems with Social Security available for some time: raise or eliminate the cap of income subject to the Social Security tax. As it stands, Lloyd Blankfein pays the same amount into Social Security as your average middle manager pays in. Not the same percentage, the same amount. And that's ridiculous.
9/11 was over 11 years ago. Osama bin Laden has been dead for almost 2 years. Under what conditions do we declare victory and go home?
If you don't have conditions of victory, then it's a fight that will never, ever, end - they hate us and want to kill us, we kill them to prevent them from killing us, they hate us because we just killed their friends and family, so they want to kill us, so we kill them to prevent them from killing us...
Hey now, if the FBI can track you legally without a warrant, why should the car companies not have that power? (Yes, I know that SCOTUS took a similar case, but all they had to say about it was that the FBI couldn't trespass onto your property to install the device. If you, say, park your car on the street, it's fair game.)
Not really. Ronald Reagan started it by busting up the domestic unions so that US labor couldn't fight back, Bill Clinton (and particularly his Treasury Secretary Larry Summers) continued it by doing everything they could to open up international labor markets for US companies, Bush expanded the H-1B program, and Obama has quietly cemented and expanded all of these policies.
For the moment, let's put aside the argument of whether or not drone strikes create terrorists overall. They might, but I'm betting that we can build missiles faster than they can recruit people.
Putting aside that argument is stupid, because it's quite important to know how likely it is that drone strikes create terrorists. If your average drone strike kills 15 bad guys but convinces 20 not-yet-bad guys to join the bad guys, then the drone strikes are completely counterproductive, and should not be done. If your average drone strike kills 15 bad guys but only recruits 10, then it's a different story entirely.
Worth remembering: According to the US government, if you're male, over the age of about 16, and live in Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iraq, or Yemen, then you are a "militant" and are not counted among the civilian casualties.
The best way to not be killed by a drone strike when you are a member of al-Qaeda is to NOT be a member of al-Qaeda.
What's the best way to not be killed by a drone strike when a bunch of Al Qaeda people move into your neighborhood even though you want nothing to do with them?
Telcos are oligopolies; the worst form of business for the consumers.
Close, but not quite: The worst form of business for consumers isn't an oligopoly, but a monopoly on a product that is essential to modern living and has no government regulation. Think along the lines of an electric company that could charge whatever they wanted without any kind of interference from the government.
The reason those aren't common in the US is because there are anti-trust laws out there specifically to prevent it. Before the Sherman Act, it was completely legal and not uncommon for, say, Standard Oil to locally undercut all its competitors by operating at a loss for a while, then sharply raise their prices as soon as all the competitors were out of business, and repeat this process until they had complete control of the oil markets in a lot of the country.
Don't worry: I'm sure clueless politicians will happily race to create all sorts of stupid laws in any season.
George Carlin had an important point on this particular issue: These politicians want to take away all the toy guns from kids, but let them keep the real ones! My personal advice to any parent who owns guns is to not only teach kids basic gun safety (assume it's always loaded, don't point at anything you don't plan to shoot, etc), but to also keep your guns locked up so that kids can't take your guns and experiment in really stupid and dangerous ways.
I want users to be suspicious and skeptical of emails with strange links. I want them to not completely trust emails that purport to be from their system administrator.
In other words, the portion that didn't immediately follow the email's instructions are to be praised, not harangued.
Slashdot Mirror
Of course they're siding with the cartels...
... because, in at least some cases, they are the cartels. For example, Time Warner Cable is a subsidiary of AOL Time Warner, which owns numerous media companies.
No, don't teach people to think! Thinking people are much much harder to control, and we need to control them to ensure they'll take lousy jobs, take on lots of debt, vote for politicians that won't change anything, and blame themselves for not getting anywhere in life. Why, this "thinking" would even convince some people that the corporate leadership isn't really all that smart, and that idea is downright dangerous.
- This message brought to you by the US Chamber of Commerce
That way, he'd be able to claim that he's a Nobel-holding doctor, rather than just a doctor!
I don't see it as particularly a public/private difference, but a difference of well-run and poorly-run organizations.
Assuming that the private sector is always efficient is wrong, because anyone who's worked in large private sector companies knows full well that it's not. For example, most of the "management consulting" industry shouldn't really exist, because it's entire reason for existing is so that some manager Smith can hire an outside firm to tell their boss that Smith's plan is better than Jones' plan and thus secure Smith that promotion. One of the things that's becoming clear in corporate governance is that an employee of a corporation faced with making a decision that benefits themselves versus a decision that benefits the organization will pick themselves almost every time.
Assuming that the public sector is always inefficient is also wrong. There are public agencies that are ridiculously efficient at what they do. For example, the administrative overhead of Social Security is approximately 0.9%. The VA gets more bang for the health care buck than Medicaid, Medicare, and private medical insurance. The CFPB is doing a pretty good job on a shoestring budget. The National Park Service costs about $3 billion a year, which sounds like a lot but is actually about $10 per American, and in return it serves 280 million visitors a year, which certainly seems like a pretty good value.
More to the point, assuming the public sector inherently sucks means we stop rewarding those public servants that do a really good job, which will reduce their motivation and pretty much guarantee that they'll do it badly. And assuming the private sector inherently is efficient means we stop holding private organizations accountable when they screw up. Doing either is really stupid.
So... how many confirmed terrorist attacks have these scanners actually stopped
That's easy: Zero. We don't even have to compare them to the previous procedures - they haven't caught one yet.
It's risk management. In short, no one wants to be the director of the next Logan International Airport -- the takeoff location for two of the four planes involved in the 9/11 terrorist attacks.
The real kicker: There was no failure of security at Logan. The security people at Logan had no indication that the terrorists were bad news, and the box-cutters the terrorists had were at the time allowed on board.
Actually, in the case of Rapiscan machines, one of the people that were going to profit from the decision was Michael Chertoff, the Secretary of Homeland Security at the time that he was deciding whether to use them. No, nothing corrupt there.
The complaint that it 'removed the need for the enhanced pat-down' was from Cindi Martin, not Ron Mercer. So it's quite possible that you've pinned the wrong motive on him.
Another factor in this: I've noticed that we've been getting a spate of "Linus blew up at an innocent coder, waaaa!" stories on /., where as soon as we look closer it becomes clear that the person Linus is flaming turns out to be legitimately wrong. That strongly suggests that either there's somebody (or some group) out there who wants to create an image of Linus as an angry jerk, whether or not that's justified.
My impression is that Linus doesn't suffer fools, and that's actually a quality I'd want in a position he's currently occupying. And unfortunately, the fools outnumber him. I just hope he's not changing his mind because of these stories.
The War of the Worlds didn't take any inspiration from the Nazis, given that H G Wells wrote it in the 1800s.
Specifically, it was actually a very obvious metaphor for the various conquests of peoples living in Africa, Asia, and America by much more modern European armies. The basic musket was as alien to the first North Americans to encounter them as the Martian machines were to the Victorian Brits, and part of the point of Wells' novel was to give those respectable Victorian Brits the same emotional response as, say, the Arawaks.
That's what a lot of good sci-fi does: It examines a contemporary problem by changing the setting so they can get away with looking at it.
I want to stress, by the way, that this isn't a republican or democrat thing and I'd hope to nip those blame games in the bud.
Absolutely, it's not a Democrat thing nor a Republican thing. What it is is an entrenched corruption thing. For instance, a freshman congressman can show up bright-eyed and bushy-tailed for their first session, ready to debate the issues of the day, and will promptly find out that their own party leadership (who controls the agenda) will ignore them unless they raise $5 million for the party's congressional campaign fund. If they don't play the game, they don't get any kind of serious say in what's going on, and are doomed to life as a backbencher who's bills never make it into a committee hearing, much less a floor vote, and all the federal pork will move out of their district (creating unemployment), until they either give up and decide not to run again, or play ball.
That's the game in Washington, and everyone is playing it, except possibly Bernie Sanders (I-VT) and Angus King (I-ME). For those of you wondering why I left out Joe Lieberman (I-CT), it's because he may be nominally independent, but he's a major fundraiser for the Democrats, so they protect him from even the primary voters from Connecticut.
"Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. This is not a way of life at all in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron."
Just a bit of wisdom on this subject from some pacifist coward named Dwight Eisenhower.
Another way of describing the problem: The loans from Social Security to the general treasury had the real goal of shifting the tax burden from the somewhat progressive income taxes to the completely regressive payroll taxes.
There's been a solution to any problems with Social Security available for some time: raise or eliminate the cap of income subject to the Social Security tax. As it stands, Lloyd Blankfein pays the same amount into Social Security as your average middle manager pays in. Not the same percentage, the same amount. And that's ridiculous.
9/11 was over 11 years ago. Osama bin Laden has been dead for almost 2 years. Under what conditions do we declare victory and go home?
If you don't have conditions of victory, then it's a fight that will never, ever, end - they hate us and want to kill us, we kill them to prevent them from killing us, they hate us because we just killed their friends and family, so they want to kill us, so we kill them to prevent them from killing us ...
The CIA has in fact hit weddings and funerals with drone strikes. Sometimes they claim it wasn't intentional.
Hey now, if the FBI can track you legally without a warrant, why should the car companies not have that power? (Yes, I know that SCOTUS took a similar case, but all they had to say about it was that the FBI couldn't trespass onto your property to install the device. If you, say, park your car on the street, it's fair game.)
Bush started it*, and it's still rolling along.
Not really. Ronald Reagan started it by busting up the domestic unions so that US labor couldn't fight back, Bill Clinton (and particularly his Treasury Secretary Larry Summers) continued it by doing everything they could to open up international labor markets for US companies, Bush expanded the H-1B program, and Obama has quietly cemented and expanded all of these policies.
For the moment, let's put aside the argument of whether or not drone strikes create terrorists overall. They might, but I'm betting that we can build missiles faster than they can recruit people.
Putting aside that argument is stupid, because it's quite important to know how likely it is that drone strikes create terrorists. If your average drone strike kills 15 bad guys but convinces 20 not-yet-bad guys to join the bad guys, then the drone strikes are completely counterproductive, and should not be done. If your average drone strike kills 15 bad guys but only recruits 10, then it's a different story entirely.
Worth remembering: According to the US government, if you're male, over the age of about 16, and live in Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iraq, or Yemen, then you are a "militant" and are not counted among the civilian casualties.
The best way to not be killed by a drone strike when you are a member of al-Qaeda is to NOT be a member of al-Qaeda.
What's the best way to not be killed by a drone strike when a bunch of Al Qaeda people move into your neighborhood even though you want nothing to do with them?
Can we get a kill switch for attention-seeking asshats who want to take away our rights?
There already is one: The next election. Unfortunately, it takes a while to operate and go into effect.
Telcos are oligopolies; the worst form of business for the consumers.
Close, but not quite: The worst form of business for consumers isn't an oligopoly, but a monopoly on a product that is essential to modern living and has no government regulation. Think along the lines of an electric company that could charge whatever they wanted without any kind of interference from the government.
The reason those aren't common in the US is because there are anti-trust laws out there specifically to prevent it. Before the Sherman Act, it was completely legal and not uncommon for, say, Standard Oil to locally undercut all its competitors by operating at a loss for a while, then sharply raise their prices as soon as all the competitors were out of business, and repeat this process until they had complete control of the oil markets in a lot of the country.
It's only going to get worse so long as we do not seek meaningful solutions.
It might even get so bad that we'll be overrun with encyclopedia salesmen.
Don't worry: I'm sure clueless politicians will happily race to create all sorts of stupid laws in any season.
George Carlin had an important point on this particular issue: These politicians want to take away all the toy guns from kids, but let them keep the real ones! My personal advice to any parent who owns guns is to not only teach kids basic gun safety (assume it's always loaded, don't point at anything you don't plan to shoot, etc), but to also keep your guns locked up so that kids can't take your guns and experiment in really stupid and dangerous ways.
I want users to be suspicious and skeptical of emails with strange links. I want them to not completely trust emails that purport to be from their system administrator.
In other words, the portion that didn't immediately follow the email's instructions are to be praised, not harangued.