It's incredible how anti-Assange the US media is. They even try to create this pseudo-opinion of "I am really progressive and don't like war and all that, but Assange is just not right not to come clean about this."
The US media is anti-Assange because the US government is anti-Assange. US news organizations have basically declared themselves tools of the government. Some examples of this: - There was recently a dust-up over the New York Times revealing the existence of a drone base in Saudi Arabia, a drone base that several news organizations had known about for 2 years but never reported on, even though its existence had been covered in other media. In other words, there was no legitimate reason to keep its existence secret, because any bad guys would have been able to find out about it using a sophisticated tool known as "Google", but media organizations in the US didn't say a word about it because the government asked them to keep it a secret.
- Cenk Uygur was hired at MSNBC because of his successful online news program. He does a few shows, but then one of the network execs pulls him aside and tells him that some politicians in Washington don't like his reporting, so he needs to change it. Cenk didn't change it, and was promptly fired.
- Several news organizations sat on a story that provided significant evidence of a massive illegal domestic surveillance program run by the Bush administration. For a year and a half. For the sole reason that the Bush administration had asked them to. It just so happened that that year and a half gave Bush enough time to be re-elected in the interim.
Also, there's no major news organization that doesn't like war. War is exciting and entertaining. War draws in viewers and readers. War sells ads for the armed forces and cool guns and fast cars and action-packed movie extravaganzas. Remember, if it's white and bleeds, it leads (not-white and bleeds may be acceptable if no white victims are available).
This is just a subset of the basic rule: If a for-profit company is going to a lot of trouble to provide you a free service, the service is not the product, you are the product. Some examples: broadcast media, social networks, and hosted email.
Look, anybody who wants to see anything different has got to tell me how we de-centralize.
Something the Occupy Wall St folks did was organize a "Move your Money Day", which was a mass effort to have people close out their accounts at the big banks and put the money into local banks and credit unions. They claim to have pulled $50 million out of the big banks and put it into small banks. These were the same people talking about "Too Big to Fail" - they were actually trying to decentralize, exactly as you suggested.
And I wouldn't blame a few individual bankers, I think this was coordinated a bit higher up.
Who or what was coordinating it? The Bavarian Illuminati? An invisible man living in the sky? His Noodlyness? Inquiring minds want to know.
My impression of the whole mess: 1. It was fraud on a massive scale. 2. It was very very profitable to engage in. Anyone at a major bank who had even remotely suggested that this was a bad idea tended to be first laughed out of the room and then fired shortly thereafter. 3. For the last 15-20 years at least, the SEC and the Feds basically made the decision to look the other way with regards to Wall St crimes. The Bush administration in particular was notoriously lax, but Obama has done nothing to put a stop to it. 4. When it hit the fan, all the people involved got bailed out because the US Treasury Department was either (a) in on it, or (b) was scared of what would happen to the economy if that didn't happen.
None of this required any kind of coordination, all it took was somebody committing this kind of fraud and getting away with it. As a rule, if left unchecked crooked business drives out honest business because the crooks have higher profit margins.
Am I being dishonest because I don't tell my future employers exactly what I did with my girlfriend last night? Because really, the only people that need to know about that are me and her.
Am I being dishonest because I don't tell the NSA exactly which completely legal political gatherings I'm attending? Because I should be able to do that without the NSA caring about it.
The logic goes like this: 1. Manipulator with a large amount of cash to blow through places a large bet on Intrade and similar sites in favor of a candidate. 2. Media dutifully report that Intrade is giving odds in favor of the preferred candidate. 3. Voters mindlessly vote for whoever does best on Intrade.
The thing is, step 3 is wrong. Very wrong. What your average voter hears when media talking heads are talking about Intrade is "Shut up and tell me how the Knicks did last night!".
There have been people arguing against the NC clause for CC licenses for some time now, and almost all of them are basically saying "We want to take the stuff that these people have given away under CC-NC, maybe repackage it, and sell it." In other words, "Why can't I profit from other people's hard work without even talking to them about my project and paying them if they demand it?"
If you want to repackage or resell something that's CC-NC, you can contact the person who wrote it, and get the rights to do your commercial project. That can be difficult if you're talking about, say, an image uploaded to a public digital art gallery, but it's not at all difficult when it's a journal article that says who wrote the article and what institutions they're affiliated with. That person may ask you to pay royalties or a flat fee, which is only fair, since you're trying to profit from their work.
And yes, this makes CC-NC a more restrictive license for commercial work than, say, the GPL (which explicitly allows selling copies if you want). Tough.
These days I think these goals could be accomplished far more effectively by just having government-issued email addresses for official correspondence.
There are at least 3 major flaws in this plan: 1. You are aware that not all people in this country have easy access to email, right? There are millions of people who's only access to any kind of computer (including smartphones) is by going to a public library and waiting in line (potentially for hours) for a chance to use one.
2. Email is never guaranteed to be delivered. You've set up a specific requirement that recipients are legally accountable for messages sent, but there's no guarantee whatsoever that they actually received the message, whereas there is with certified mail.
3. Intercepting and reading someone else's email without being noticed is easy. Intercepting and reading someone else's mail without being noticed is much harder.
Imagine that: unions, affirmative action and compliance with well-intentioned government programs do make you anti-competitive after all.
The USPS is the most efficient system for moving things from one place to the other on the planet. Seriously. Its private competitors cost far more to move the same amount of stuff in a similar amount of time, and its international counterparts don't come close to dealing with the kinds of requirements the USPS has to deal with. Their systems and procedures are designed so that practically anybody can get hired, follow the manual, and do the job correctly, and are also capable of working under a wide variety of conditions ranging from tiny towns in the middle of Alaska to lower Manhattan.
It's not that they aren't competitive. It's that the demand for their entire industry has dropped, and their bosses are actively trying to screw them up.
Actually, you're misunderstanding the purpose of that move by Congress: it wasn't about gaining $5 billion a year, it was about gutting the USPS. There are many people in Congress (mostly Tea Party types) that want the USPS to be a relic of the past, some because that would benefit FedEx and UPS and other companies, and some because their philosophy is that the federal government can't possibly do anything useful so the USPS must be by definition useless.
So let's say you travel those 14 light-years, and get there to find that some holographic guy named Arnold J Rimmer has been exiled there for being a complete smeghead. I mean, that's worse than merely a wasted trip!
Here's part of the problem with that proposal: What about inventions that include multiple kinds of components? For example, if you have a software modification to a medical device that makes it more accurately detect and respond to changes in the patient's body, is that a medical device invention, or a software invention?
See, you're misunderstanding: The spending tons of money on useless counter-measures is big profits to the politically-connected seller who's just happened to provide appropriate amounts of graft to the government folks.
The goal isn't (and generally has never been) to fix the problem, the goal is to maximize profits.
I can think of 3 reasons why not: 1. OMG, shiny! 2. Apple did it, so it must be awesome! 3. All those executives bought them, and they can't all be wrong, right?
Now, of course, none of those are good reasons, but this is all about marketing, and marketing doesn't aim for good reasons.
In the absence of government interference why couldn't third party deposit insurance exist?
You're right, it could in theory exist. There are 2 easy counters to that: 1. Before the FDIC existed, no product like that ever emerged on the marketplace, despite plenty of real evidence that this was a problem. Ergo, whether or not such insurance could exist, it wouldn't without FDIC (or the equivalent system for credit unions).
2. All you accomplish with private depositor insurance is that now your fate is tied to 2 corporations, and both of them have to go bust for you to lose your deposit. This makes you safer only if (a) the 2 corporations don't have partial ownership of each other, (b) the 2 corporations don't both depend on a third corporation that could also go bust, (c) the insurance company has significant sources of revenue other than the bank so that it won't immediately go bust if the bank goes bust.
You're missing the point, quite intentionally I might add. The difference is in what the lying is about: receiving oral sex is not a crime. Burglary is a crime, wiretapping is a crime, aggression (meaning attacking another country for reasons other than defending yourself) is a war crime, and torture is a war crime.
The goal of a political donor like this is to have undue influence on whoever ends up holding the office. In other words, it's a bet on the candidate winning. Most companies hedge their bets a bit - for example AT&T gave $241K to Romney, and $215K to Obama, so either way they win, but their only real allegiance is to themselves.
So the reason Gary Johnson doesn't get that kind of cash is because he isn't perceived as being likely to win. It has nothing to do with ideology, and everything to do with bribery.
in a Libertarian-run country all the other things would not be equal
Ok, then - name the libertarian-run country either past or present you want to use for comparison. Otherwise, any example I provide you will answer with "well, they aren't libertarians" a.k.a. No True Scotsman.
The years leading up to 1929 wasn't a libertarian paradise like you claim
1929 was hardly the first time people fell victim to bank runs: They were a common feature of the banking panics that occurred approximately every 15 years up until then. The first US banking crisis (complete with bank runs) was in 1796, so unless Washington administration had introduced some sort of heavy-handed regulation that caused bank runs, it's safe to say that there was a cause other than federal regulation.
There can still be runs on banks, and they will still run out of reserves before every depositor is paid.
The key difference is that with deposit insurance, the depositors didn't lose their life savings.
There's even more cause for condemnation of Obama on this score: The Bush policy was a stay at Gitmo until guilt or innocence could be determined. The Obama policy, in the case of about 2/3 of the people currently in Gitmo, is that you stay there even if you've been declared innocent (they recently shut down the office that was handling sending innocent prisoners back to their homes).
Oh, and you'll notice I call them prisoners. Calling them "detainees" was nonsense, when they've been locked up for over a decade.
Here are some presidential statements now known to be lies. Which one is the most serious crime? Which one is the least serious crime?
1. "I did not have sexual relations with that woman, Miss Lewinsky." (Body count: 0. US crimes committed: 0. War crimes committed: 0) 2. "You must pursue this investigation of Watergate even if it leads to the president. I`m innocent." (Body count: 0. US crimes committed: several. War crimes committed: 0) 3. "There is no doubt that the regime of Saddam Hussein possesses weapons of mass destruction." (Body count: 600000. US crimes committed: several. War crimes committed: several)
The US government should authorize the killing of US citizens when: 1. Resisting arrest with deadly force. 2. Attempting to escape from lawful imprisonment. 3. In the process of attacking another citizen.
A Libertarian vote is a vote for banks and the health care industry because both of those industries can and do take advantage of ordinary citizens when given the chance, and libertarians generally want to give them that chance by reducing government oversight and regulation.
Some examples: A) Imagine a totally deregulated bank that is running short of funds. Their solution: Take money from their depositors in order to cover their current expenses. Sure, it's illegal, but the only thing that anyone can do is sue or prosecute the bank, and since the bank is going bust anyways they're going to take the risk. This kind of thing happened in 1929, which is why many ordinary people not only lost their jobs but also anything they had in their bank. And if you had banked at Bank of America or any of its subsidiaries, the same thing would have happened to you about 4 years ago.
B) Imagine that you're lying in a hospital bed, and your doctor tells you that you need and appendectomy right now or you're going to die. What price would be too high to pay for that appendectomy?
C) Imagine that you've been prescribed some medication by your doctor, and you go to the pharmacy to buy it. What guarantee do you have that the medication you got is anything remotely similar to what was advertised?
Slashdot Mirror
It's incredible how anti-Assange the US media is. They even try to create this pseudo-opinion of "I am really progressive and don't like war and all that, but Assange is just not right not to come clean about this."
The US media is anti-Assange because the US government is anti-Assange. US news organizations have basically declared themselves tools of the government. Some examples of this:
- There was recently a dust-up over the New York Times revealing the existence of a drone base in Saudi Arabia, a drone base that several news organizations had known about for 2 years but never reported on, even though its existence had been covered in other media. In other words, there was no legitimate reason to keep its existence secret, because any bad guys would have been able to find out about it using a sophisticated tool known as "Google", but media organizations in the US didn't say a word about it because the government asked them to keep it a secret.
- Cenk Uygur was hired at MSNBC because of his successful online news program. He does a few shows, but then one of the network execs pulls him aside and tells him that some politicians in Washington don't like his reporting, so he needs to change it. Cenk didn't change it, and was promptly fired.
- Several news organizations sat on a story that provided significant evidence of a massive illegal domestic surveillance program run by the Bush administration. For a year and a half. For the sole reason that the Bush administration had asked them to. It just so happened that that year and a half gave Bush enough time to be re-elected in the interim.
Also, there's no major news organization that doesn't like war. War is exciting and entertaining. War draws in viewers and readers. War sells ads for the armed forces and cool guns and fast cars and action-packed movie extravaganzas. Remember, if it's white and bleeds, it leads (not-white and bleeds may be acceptable if no white victims are available).
This is just a subset of the basic rule: If a for-profit company is going to a lot of trouble to provide you a free service, the service is not the product, you are the product. Some examples: broadcast media, social networks, and hosted email.
Look, anybody who wants to see anything different has got to tell me how we de-centralize.
Something the Occupy Wall St folks did was organize a "Move your Money Day", which was a mass effort to have people close out their accounts at the big banks and put the money into local banks and credit unions. They claim to have pulled $50 million out of the big banks and put it into small banks. These were the same people talking about "Too Big to Fail" - they were actually trying to decentralize, exactly as you suggested.
And I wouldn't blame a few individual bankers, I think this was coordinated a bit higher up.
Who or what was coordinating it? The Bavarian Illuminati? An invisible man living in the sky? His Noodlyness? Inquiring minds want to know.
My impression of the whole mess:
1. It was fraud on a massive scale.
2. It was very very profitable to engage in. Anyone at a major bank who had even remotely suggested that this was a bad idea tended to be first laughed out of the room and then fired shortly thereafter.
3. For the last 15-20 years at least, the SEC and the Feds basically made the decision to look the other way with regards to Wall St crimes. The Bush administration in particular was notoriously lax, but Obama has done nothing to put a stop to it.
4. When it hit the fan, all the people involved got bailed out because the US Treasury Department was either (a) in on it, or (b) was scared of what would happen to the economy if that didn't happen.
None of this required any kind of coordination, all it took was somebody committing this kind of fraud and getting away with it. As a rule, if left unchecked crooked business drives out honest business because the crooks have higher profit margins.
All it takes is an episode of "Single Female Lawyer" blacking out and sooner or later we'll get invaded by aliens.
privacy = dishonesty
Am I being dishonest because I don't tell my future employers exactly what I did with my girlfriend last night? Because really, the only people that need to know about that are me and her.
Am I being dishonest because I don't tell the NSA exactly which completely legal political gatherings I'm attending? Because I should be able to do that without the NSA caring about it.
I could go on, but I think you get the point.
The logic goes like this:
1. Manipulator with a large amount of cash to blow through places a large bet on Intrade and similar sites in favor of a candidate.
2. Media dutifully report that Intrade is giving odds in favor of the preferred candidate.
3. Voters mindlessly vote for whoever does best on Intrade.
The thing is, step 3 is wrong. Very wrong. What your average voter hears when media talking heads are talking about Intrade is "Shut up and tell me how the Knicks did last night!".
There have been people arguing against the NC clause for CC licenses for some time now, and almost all of them are basically saying "We want to take the stuff that these people have given away under CC-NC, maybe repackage it, and sell it." In other words, "Why can't I profit from other people's hard work without even talking to them about my project and paying them if they demand it?"
If you want to repackage or resell something that's CC-NC, you can contact the person who wrote it, and get the rights to do your commercial project. That can be difficult if you're talking about, say, an image uploaded to a public digital art gallery, but it's not at all difficult when it's a journal article that says who wrote the article and what institutions they're affiliated with. That person may ask you to pay royalties or a flat fee, which is only fair, since you're trying to profit from their work.
And yes, this makes CC-NC a more restrictive license for commercial work than, say, the GPL (which explicitly allows selling copies if you want). Tough.
These days I think these goals could be accomplished far more effectively by just having government-issued email addresses for official correspondence.
There are at least 3 major flaws in this plan:
1. You are aware that not all people in this country have easy access to email, right? There are millions of people who's only access to any kind of computer (including smartphones) is by going to a public library and waiting in line (potentially for hours) for a chance to use one.
2. Email is never guaranteed to be delivered. You've set up a specific requirement that recipients are legally accountable for messages sent, but there's no guarantee whatsoever that they actually received the message, whereas there is with certified mail.
3. Intercepting and reading someone else's email without being noticed is easy. Intercepting and reading someone else's mail without being noticed is much harder.
Imagine that: unions, affirmative action and compliance with well-intentioned government programs do make you anti-competitive after all.
The USPS is the most efficient system for moving things from one place to the other on the planet. Seriously. Its private competitors cost far more to move the same amount of stuff in a similar amount of time, and its international counterparts don't come close to dealing with the kinds of requirements the USPS has to deal with. Their systems and procedures are designed so that practically anybody can get hired, follow the manual, and do the job correctly, and are also capable of working under a wide variety of conditions ranging from tiny towns in the middle of Alaska to lower Manhattan.
It's not that they aren't competitive. It's that the demand for their entire industry has dropped, and their bosses are actively trying to screw them up.
Actually, you're misunderstanding the purpose of that move by Congress: it wasn't about gaining $5 billion a year, it was about gutting the USPS. There are many people in Congress (mostly Tea Party types) that want the USPS to be a relic of the past, some because that would benefit FedEx and UPS and other companies, and some because their philosophy is that the federal government can't possibly do anything useful so the USPS must be by definition useless.
So let's say you travel those 14 light-years, and get there to find that some holographic guy named Arnold J Rimmer has been exiled there for being a complete smeghead. I mean, that's worse than merely a wasted trip!
Here's part of the problem with that proposal: What about inventions that include multiple kinds of components? For example, if you have a software modification to a medical device that makes it more accurately detect and respond to changes in the patient's body, is that a medical device invention, or a software invention?
Hey, don't forget Rush Limbaugh's contributions too.
See, you're misunderstanding: The spending tons of money on useless counter-measures is big profits to the politically-connected seller who's just happened to provide appropriate amounts of graft to the government folks.
The goal isn't (and generally has never been) to fix the problem, the goal is to maximize profits.
I can think of 3 reasons why not:
1. OMG, shiny!
2. Apple did it, so it must be awesome!
3. All those executives bought them, and they can't all be wrong, right?
Now, of course, none of those are good reasons, but this is all about marketing, and marketing doesn't aim for good reasons.
In the absence of government interference why couldn't third party deposit insurance exist?
You're right, it could in theory exist. There are 2 easy counters to that:
1. Before the FDIC existed, no product like that ever emerged on the marketplace, despite plenty of real evidence that this was a problem. Ergo, whether or not such insurance could exist, it wouldn't without FDIC (or the equivalent system for credit unions).
2. All you accomplish with private depositor insurance is that now your fate is tied to 2 corporations, and both of them have to go bust for you to lose your deposit. This makes you safer only if (a) the 2 corporations don't have partial ownership of each other, (b) the 2 corporations don't both depend on a third corporation that could also go bust, (c) the insurance company has significant sources of revenue other than the bank so that it won't immediately go bust if the bank goes bust.
You're missing the point, quite intentionally I might add. The difference is in what the lying is about: receiving oral sex is not a crime. Burglary is a crime, wiretapping is a crime, aggression (meaning attacking another country for reasons other than defending yourself) is a war crime, and torture is a war crime.
Mathematics may not deal in disputed definitions, but Wikipedia certainly does.
[citation needed]
The goal of a political donor like this is to have undue influence on whoever ends up holding the office. In other words, it's a bet on the candidate winning. Most companies hedge their bets a bit - for example AT&T gave $241K to Romney, and $215K to Obama, so either way they win, but their only real allegiance is to themselves.
So the reason Gary Johnson doesn't get that kind of cash is because he isn't perceived as being likely to win. It has nothing to do with ideology, and everything to do with bribery.
in a Libertarian-run country all the other things would not be equal
Ok, then - name the libertarian-run country either past or present you want to use for comparison. Otherwise, any example I provide you will answer with "well, they aren't libertarians" a.k.a. No True Scotsman.
The years leading up to 1929 wasn't a libertarian paradise like you claim
1929 was hardly the first time people fell victim to bank runs: They were a common feature of the banking panics that occurred approximately every 15 years up until then. The first US banking crisis (complete with bank runs) was in 1796, so unless Washington administration had introduced some sort of heavy-handed regulation that caused bank runs, it's safe to say that there was a cause other than federal regulation.
There can still be runs on banks, and they will still run out of reserves before every depositor is paid.
The key difference is that with deposit insurance, the depositors didn't lose their life savings.
There's even more cause for condemnation of Obama on this score: The Bush policy was a stay at Gitmo until guilt or innocence could be determined. The Obama policy, in the case of about 2/3 of the people currently in Gitmo, is that you stay there even if you've been declared innocent (they recently shut down the office that was handling sending innocent prisoners back to their homes).
Oh, and you'll notice I call them prisoners. Calling them "detainees" was nonsense, when they've been locked up for over a decade.
Here are some presidential statements now known to be lies. Which one is the most serious crime? Which one is the least serious crime?
1. "I did not have sexual relations with that woman, Miss Lewinsky." (Body count: 0. US crimes committed: 0. War crimes committed: 0)
2. "You must pursue this investigation of Watergate even if it leads to the president. I`m innocent." (Body count: 0. US crimes committed: several. War crimes committed: 0)
3. "There is no doubt that the regime of Saddam Hussein possesses weapons of mass destruction." (Body count: 600000. US crimes committed: several. War crimes committed: several)
The US government should authorize the killing of US citizens when:
1. Resisting arrest with deadly force.
2. Attempting to escape from lawful imprisonment.
3. In the process of attacking another citizen.
A Libertarian vote is a vote for banks and the health care industry because both of those industries can and do take advantage of ordinary citizens when given the chance, and libertarians generally want to give them that chance by reducing government oversight and regulation.
Some examples:
A) Imagine a totally deregulated bank that is running short of funds. Their solution: Take money from their depositors in order to cover their current expenses. Sure, it's illegal, but the only thing that anyone can do is sue or prosecute the bank, and since the bank is going bust anyways they're going to take the risk. This kind of thing happened in 1929, which is why many ordinary people not only lost their jobs but also anything they had in their bank. And if you had banked at Bank of America or any of its subsidiaries, the same thing would have happened to you about 4 years ago.
B) Imagine that you're lying in a hospital bed, and your doctor tells you that you need and appendectomy right now or you're going to die. What price would be too high to pay for that appendectomy?
C) Imagine that you've been prescribed some medication by your doctor, and you go to the pharmacy to buy it. What guarantee do you have that the medication you got is anything remotely similar to what was advertised?