And the report they come up with will say something along the lines of "Here are the assumptions that Congressman Blowhard requested we used:..." They will sometimes also say "Here are the assumptions that Congressman Blowhard requested we used:... Here's what we think is actually a realistic projection:..."
The CBO didn't lie: Their report said exactly what assumptions were made, what the conclusions were going to be if those assumptions were made, and hinted that the assumptions weren't valid. What happened there was that Paul Ryan lied twice: Once to the CBO about reasonable assumptions, and again to the public about what the report meant.
The poor people in east and south Asia aren't as desperate as they once were and are starting to demand better treatment and higher wages and the right to organize unions and such. The poor people in central Africa, on the other hand, are quite desperate for work, and the governments have things enough under control that it's relatively safe to set up a factory.
That's one of the effects of globalization: Manufacturing jobs move towards desperation, because that's the cheapest place to hire people and bribe the government into doing the company's bidding.
History shows us that it's not biased in the slightest to assume that politicians will lie, cheat, and steal their way to riches.
What is biased is to assume that the non-elected civil servants who actually do the math will not attempt to do their jobs to the best of their ability. For example, the staff at the Congressional Budget Office who actually do the math do not directly report to any politician. Similarly, the civil service laws exist specifically to prevent someone from, say, being fired by NOAA for coming up with the "wrong" climate data, or fired from the SSA for coming up with the "wrong" Social Security budget projections.
So you're right to assume that politicians lie, cheat, and steal. But that doesn't mean that a GS-11 actuary working in the bowels of a government agency is lying in his reports.
Yes, some stuff was almost definitely rigged. It shouldn't have been so close that the rigging mattered.
For example, if the voters in 2000 had weighed the answer to "Is this candidate an idiot?" as being more important than "Is this candidate running for the party I've supported for the last 30 years?", I'm reasonably certain the outcome would have been very different. You can see the reason why by making proper use of a Google fight.
I think he means "potentially bad for him". I mean, if some bad guys over in Afghanistan have AK-47s or IEDs, sure some soldiers are going to get wounded or killed, but Kaspersky will be sitting quite comfortably at home. But if a cyberweapon hits a company that happens to be one of his major stock holdings, that could severely hamper production for a couple of days, lowering the stock price and costing Kaspersky significant amounts of cash.
Same story with the many many people who think that the US, the UK, and France having more than enough nukes to blow up the planet is just fantastic, but the USSR, China, or North Korea having the same ability is a serious problem.
They may not say it, but yes, they do think that everybody in the world who is not French is inferior to them.
See, that's the difference between the Americans and the French: The Americans think that they're better than everyone else, and say it loudly and proudly!
As far as dumb political choices go, the Americans elected and re-elected George W Bush. Enough said.
My mother made several trips there in the 1990's, spending most of her time well outside of Havana, in private homes, and was not surrounded by government minders or anything like that.
There was a significant crisis after the collapse of the USSR, because before 1989 the Cuban economy had relied on trading sugar to the USSR in exchange for almost everything else including food. There were some food shortages - nothing like, say, Ethiopia's famines, but people were sometimes going hungry. The Cuban government responded to this by converting more of their farming towards food and loosening the restrictions on private sales of food (prior to that, the only legal way to get food was to buy it from the government-run stores). It still hasn't fully recovered, but it's definitely gotten better in the food department. Raul Castro is also significantly more pragmatic about such things than Fidel Castro was - Fidel was focused on pure ideological communism, Raul seems fine with limited market economies so long as nobody is getting overly rich or poor.
Health care was definitely readily available and quite innovative. Their model starts with the neighborhood doctor, who is not only the primary care physician but also acts as a public health advocate for residents. Doctors also were growing herb gardens and using them for natural remedies when the pills weren't available (e.g. camomile instead of sleeping pills). On the flip side, when pills were available, she noticed that people would frequently take very large doses, far more than an American would, all at once. Because of the difficulty in treating illness, Cuban medicine has always been focused on preventative care, and it seems to mostly work. The people she encountered were generally of sound health.
And as a sibling poster points out, your average Haitian or Dominican would see Cuba as a paradise by comparison. You would probably also be a lot happier living in Cuba than living in the worst part of Detroit.
Well, when the USSR revives itself from the grave, or the Cubans come up with nuclear missiles themselves, I'll consider that cause for concern. For much the same reason, I don't see much point in having US troops standing ready to bravely defend West Germany from Soviet expansionism.
The sit-in protesters actually didn't just expect to be arrested. They fully expected to be beaten senseless, and then arrested and jailed, then abused in jail for a while, then lose in court, then go back to jail for a while, then lose whatever college scholarships they had (many of them were students), then be saddled with a criminal record the rest of their life.
That might give you an idea of how ridiculously brave those people were. Just a thought for the upcoming Martin Luther King holiday.
Well, actually Thoreau's idea when he coined the term "civil disobedience" was to simply disobey such a law. It was Gandhi who noticed the publicity value of disobeying unjust laws and watching the authorities dish out beat-downs to enforce it.
What's also particularly interesting is that many acts widely seen as civil disobedience were acts that weren't legitimately against the law in the first place. For instance, Martin Luther King's crime in Birmingham was that he walked down a sidewalk in the front of a group of people singing songs (specifically protected by the First Amendment), following traffic laws, towards City Hall. He was arrested only because the local police chief had gotten a court order that said that Martin Luther King wasn't allowed to lead or participate in any act of protest in Birmingham, which wasn't a legitimate order for the court to give but gave the police the excuse they needed.
Also notable is that not all law-breaking that various political groups engage in is (in my view) civil disobedience. Some left-wing groups, for instance, like to commit crimes like trespassing in order to try to draw attention to a completely unrelated injustice. It usually doesn't work, because (a) the authorities don't do anything stupid like beat them up, (b) they pick targets that don't match what they're trying to protest, (c) their criminal acts don't do anything that would right the injustice, and (d) they don't do it in a way that attracts media attention.
Also relevant is that completely illegitimate and illegal use of force towards protesters now gets significant support from people who really should know better. For instance, the various cases of police pepper-spraying Occupy Wall Street protesters for the heinous crime of walking down a sidewalk holding signs actually had a lot of people saying how glad they were that the cops were doing that.
Typically not, actually. Among other things, fingerprints are immutable, whereas the outputs from RSA tokens are constantly changing.
In addition, generally speaking in order for biometrics to be relevant you need to be physically in the same location as the scanner. Which means you've already walked by human guards and a bunch of other people to get to whatever you're after. You're right that I can send any string of bits I want to your Ethernet port. Your USB port connected directly to whatever's controlling the lock, not so much.
It's not supposed to go in your finger, silly. The correct place for a bar code tattoo is on the right hand or on the forehead, as is described quite clearly in Revelations 14:9.
As you hint, passwords are both necessary and insufficient for real security. For anything important, you really ought to have 2/3 of the ID triangle: something you know (like a password), something you have (like an RSA token), or something you are (like fingerprints).
Yeah, you can't joke about a bomb! Well why is it just jokes? What about a riddle? How about a limerick? How about a bomb anecdote? You know, no punchline, just a really cute story. Or suppose you intended to remark, not as a joke, but as an ironic musing. Are they prepared to make that distinction? Why, I think NOT.
Are you sure they didn't just think she was hot? There have been documented cases of TSA agents putting people through scanners repeatedly and otherwise performing extra searches on good-looking people just for kicks.
If you refuse to vote for a party that "does not have a chance of winning", you deny them the opportunity of getting that chance.
I did just vote for a party last November that doesn't have a chance of winning. In a "swing state". It's the least I can do. I took a lot of flak for that from people who are worried that the wrong candidate might have won because of it.
As far as organizing to help the non-corrupt get more influence: I'm not a good political organizer. I know this from experience.
I'm going to guess its something like: "If we reveal our policies, then criminals will know our policies and figure out ways around them or loopholes to avoid them".
Some will think that. Others will think: "If we reveal our policies, the public will demand that many of us go to jail for breaking the law."
1. When a non-corrupt political party comes into existence with a chance of winning. 2. When those who commit serious crimes in official capacities are charged, prosecuted, and jailed for them. 3. When those who fund the politicians are charged, prosecuted, and jailed for their serious crimes.
I have hopes, but I have to get back to improving porcine aerodynamics first.
More specifically, some of my female classmates ended up being moms without planning on it, and the children's fathers refused to take responsibility for anything. And usually they didn't receive all their income from the state: Most of them dropped out of school and went to work anywhere they could, arranged for their moms to help with child care if they hadn't been kicked out of their parents' home, and did their best to keep a roof overhead and food in the fridge.
It's a less bad outcome than getting hooked on drugs, but it still meant that the best that these women could hope for was a lifetime of minimum-wage work and living on the edge of poverty at least until the child turned 18.
I'm pretty sure you thought that I was brown, unemployed, on welfare, uneducated, poor, and lazy. None of those are true: I'm white, I'm quite happily employed and making far more than I really need to survive, I've never taken a government handout of any kind and never really expected one, have a degree with honors from a fairly prestigious college, am quite wealthy, and have frequently worked 60-80 hours a week.
But I can acknowledge that slavery happened, that racism happened and continues to happen, and that there are people that specifically stoke bigotry and racism in the world who are frequently quite wealthy and almost universally white.
For about 300 years, rich white people have convinced a significant percentage of poor white people that they had more in common with the rich white people than with the poor brown people. This makes it easier for the rich white people to screw up the lives of both the poor white people and the poor brown people, which makes it easier for the rich white people to hire the poor white people and poor brown people really cheaply. The last thing those rich white people want is a society where everyone has a good education, no criminal history, a family they enjoy, a decent paycheck to support said family, and a home in a nice neighborhood.
I went to the closest thing my state had to an inner-city public school. Very occasional serious fights (I wasn't in the middle of them thank goodness), about a 30% dropout rate, and a wide range of results: Some kids went on to prestigious colleges, a lot of kids went to lower-tier schools, a lot of kids went basically nowhere and ended up working fast food or learning a skilled trade, and some kids got knocked up or hooked on drugs. The number 1 determining factor in how the kid ended up? Their parents' economic situation and education level. There were bright but poor kids who went nowhere, and some rich idiots who went to Ivy League schools.
My dad also worked for a while in an inner city school. He mentioned that the kids that really succeeded there were the ones enrolled in Junior ROTC: The combination of self-discipline and an attainable goal made all sorts of difference. The kids who were trouble were the ones who knew they were going nowhere in life.
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And the report they come up with will say something along the lines of "Here are the assumptions that Congressman Blowhard requested we used: ..." They will sometimes also say "Here are the assumptions that Congressman Blowhard requested we used: ... Here's what we think is actually a realistic projection: ..."
The CBO didn't lie: Their report said exactly what assumptions were made, what the conclusions were going to be if those assumptions were made, and hinted that the assumptions weren't valid. What happened there was that Paul Ryan lied twice: Once to the CBO about reasonable assumptions, and again to the public about what the report meant.
The poor people in east and south Asia aren't as desperate as they once were and are starting to demand better treatment and higher wages and the right to organize unions and such. The poor people in central Africa, on the other hand, are quite desperate for work, and the governments have things enough under control that it's relatively safe to set up a factory.
That's one of the effects of globalization: Manufacturing jobs move towards desperation, because that's the cheapest place to hire people and bribe the government into doing the company's bidding.
History shows us that it's not biased in the slightest to assume that politicians will lie, cheat, and steal their way to riches.
What is biased is to assume that the non-elected civil servants who actually do the math will not attempt to do their jobs to the best of their ability. For example, the staff at the Congressional Budget Office who actually do the math do not directly report to any politician. Similarly, the civil service laws exist specifically to prevent someone from, say, being fired by NOAA for coming up with the "wrong" climate data, or fired from the SSA for coming up with the "wrong" Social Security budget projections.
So you're right to assume that politicians lie, cheat, and steal. But that doesn't mean that a GS-11 actuary working in the bowels of a government agency is lying in his reports.
Yes, some stuff was almost definitely rigged. It shouldn't have been so close that the rigging mattered.
For example, if the voters in 2000 had weighed the answer to "Is this candidate an idiot?" as being more important than "Is this candidate running for the party I've supported for the last 30 years?", I'm reasonably certain the outcome would have been very different. You can see the reason why by making proper use of a Google fight.
I think he means "potentially bad for him". I mean, if some bad guys over in Afghanistan have AK-47s or IEDs, sure some soldiers are going to get wounded or killed, but Kaspersky will be sitting quite comfortably at home. But if a cyberweapon hits a company that happens to be one of his major stock holdings, that could severely hamper production for a couple of days, lowering the stock price and costing Kaspersky significant amounts of cash.
Same story with the many many people who think that the US, the UK, and France having more than enough nukes to blow up the planet is just fantastic, but the USSR, China, or North Korea having the same ability is a serious problem.
They may not say it, but yes, they do think that everybody in the world who is not French is inferior to them.
See, that's the difference between the Americans and the French: The Americans think that they're better than everyone else, and say it loudly and proudly!
As far as dumb political choices go, the Americans elected and re-elected George W Bush. Enough said.
My mother made several trips there in the 1990's, spending most of her time well outside of Havana, in private homes, and was not surrounded by government minders or anything like that.
There was a significant crisis after the collapse of the USSR, because before 1989 the Cuban economy had relied on trading sugar to the USSR in exchange for almost everything else including food. There were some food shortages - nothing like, say, Ethiopia's famines, but people were sometimes going hungry. The Cuban government responded to this by converting more of their farming towards food and loosening the restrictions on private sales of food (prior to that, the only legal way to get food was to buy it from the government-run stores). It still hasn't fully recovered, but it's definitely gotten better in the food department. Raul Castro is also significantly more pragmatic about such things than Fidel Castro was - Fidel was focused on pure ideological communism, Raul seems fine with limited market economies so long as nobody is getting overly rich or poor.
Health care was definitely readily available and quite innovative. Their model starts with the neighborhood doctor, who is not only the primary care physician but also acts as a public health advocate for residents. Doctors also were growing herb gardens and using them for natural remedies when the pills weren't available (e.g. camomile instead of sleeping pills). On the flip side, when pills were available, she noticed that people would frequently take very large doses, far more than an American would, all at once. Because of the difficulty in treating illness, Cuban medicine has always been focused on preventative care, and it seems to mostly work. The people she encountered were generally of sound health.
And as a sibling poster points out, your average Haitian or Dominican would see Cuba as a paradise by comparison. You would probably also be a lot happier living in Cuba than living in the worst part of Detroit.
Well, when the USSR revives itself from the grave, or the Cubans come up with nuclear missiles themselves, I'll consider that cause for concern. For much the same reason, I don't see much point in having US troops standing ready to bravely defend West Germany from Soviet expansionism.
They are in the United States - it's called the Democrat-Republican Party, also known as the Corporate Party.
As a resident in Cleveland: We're not Neanderthals, we're homo erectus, you insensitive clod!
So where does this methane come from?
Sorry, that was me.
The sit-in protesters actually didn't just expect to be arrested. They fully expected to be beaten senseless, and then arrested and jailed, then abused in jail for a while, then lose in court, then go back to jail for a while, then lose whatever college scholarships they had (many of them were students), then be saddled with a criminal record the rest of their life.
That might give you an idea of how ridiculously brave those people were. Just a thought for the upcoming Martin Luther King holiday.
Well, actually Thoreau's idea when he coined the term "civil disobedience" was to simply disobey such a law. It was Gandhi who noticed the publicity value of disobeying unjust laws and watching the authorities dish out beat-downs to enforce it.
What's also particularly interesting is that many acts widely seen as civil disobedience were acts that weren't legitimately against the law in the first place. For instance, Martin Luther King's crime in Birmingham was that he walked down a sidewalk in the front of a group of people singing songs (specifically protected by the First Amendment), following traffic laws, towards City Hall. He was arrested only because the local police chief had gotten a court order that said that Martin Luther King wasn't allowed to lead or participate in any act of protest in Birmingham, which wasn't a legitimate order for the court to give but gave the police the excuse they needed.
Also notable is that not all law-breaking that various political groups engage in is (in my view) civil disobedience. Some left-wing groups, for instance, like to commit crimes like trespassing in order to try to draw attention to a completely unrelated injustice. It usually doesn't work, because (a) the authorities don't do anything stupid like beat them up, (b) they pick targets that don't match what they're trying to protest, (c) their criminal acts don't do anything that would right the injustice, and (d) they don't do it in a way that attracts media attention.
Also relevant is that completely illegitimate and illegal use of force towards protesters now gets significant support from people who really should know better. For instance, the various cases of police pepper-spraying Occupy Wall Street protesters for the heinous crime of walking down a sidewalk holding signs actually had a lot of people saying how glad they were that the cops were doing that.
Typically not, actually. Among other things, fingerprints are immutable, whereas the outputs from RSA tokens are constantly changing.
In addition, generally speaking in order for biometrics to be relevant you need to be physically in the same location as the scanner. Which means you've already walked by human guards and a bunch of other people to get to whatever you're after. You're right that I can send any string of bits I want to your Ethernet port. Your USB port connected directly to whatever's controlling the lock, not so much.
It's not supposed to go in your finger, silly. The correct place for a bar code tattoo is on the right hand or on the forehead, as is described quite clearly in Revelations 14:9.
As you hint, passwords are both necessary and insufficient for real security. For anything important, you really ought to have 2/3 of the ID triangle: something you know (like a password), something you have (like an RSA token), or something you are (like fingerprints).
Yeah, you can't joke about a bomb! Well why is it just jokes? What about a riddle? How about a limerick? How about a bomb anecdote? You know, no punchline, just a really cute story. Or suppose you intended to remark, not as a joke, but as an ironic musing. Are they prepared to make that distinction? Why, I think NOT.
-George Carlin
Are you sure they didn't just think she was hot? There have been documented cases of TSA agents putting people through scanners repeatedly and otherwise performing extra searches on good-looking people just for kicks.
If you refuse to vote for a party that "does not have a chance of winning", you deny them the opportunity of getting that chance.
I did just vote for a party last November that doesn't have a chance of winning. In a "swing state". It's the least I can do. I took a lot of flak for that from people who are worried that the wrong candidate might have won because of it.
As far as organizing to help the non-corrupt get more influence: I'm not a good political organizer. I know this from experience.
I'm going to guess its something like: "If we reveal our policies, then criminals will know our policies and figure out ways around them or loopholes to avoid them".
Some will think that. Others will think: "If we reveal our policies, the public will demand that many of us go to jail for breaking the law."
1. When a non-corrupt political party comes into existence with a chance of winning.
2. When those who commit serious crimes in official capacities are charged, prosecuted, and jailed for them.
3. When those who fund the politicians are charged, prosecuted, and jailed for their serious crimes.
I have hopes, but I have to get back to improving porcine aerodynamics first.
More specifically, some of my female classmates ended up being moms without planning on it, and the children's fathers refused to take responsibility for anything. And usually they didn't receive all their income from the state: Most of them dropped out of school and went to work anywhere they could, arranged for their moms to help with child care if they hadn't been kicked out of their parents' home, and did their best to keep a roof overhead and food in the fridge.
It's a less bad outcome than getting hooked on drugs, but it still meant that the best that these women could hope for was a lifetime of minimum-wage work and living on the edge of poverty at least until the child turned 18.
I'm pretty sure you thought that I was brown, unemployed, on welfare, uneducated, poor, and lazy. None of those are true: I'm white, I'm quite happily employed and making far more than I really need to survive, I've never taken a government handout of any kind and never really expected one, have a degree with honors from a fairly prestigious college, am quite wealthy, and have frequently worked 60-80 hours a week.
But I can acknowledge that slavery happened, that racism happened and continues to happen, and that there are people that specifically stoke bigotry and racism in the world who are frequently quite wealthy and almost universally white.
The answer isn't really a mystery:
For about 300 years, rich white people have convinced a significant percentage of poor white people that they had more in common with the rich white people than with the poor brown people. This makes it easier for the rich white people to screw up the lives of both the poor white people and the poor brown people, which makes it easier for the rich white people to hire the poor white people and poor brown people really cheaply. The last thing those rich white people want is a society where everyone has a good education, no criminal history, a family they enjoy, a decent paycheck to support said family, and a home in a nice neighborhood.
I went to the closest thing my state had to an inner-city public school. Very occasional serious fights (I wasn't in the middle of them thank goodness), about a 30% dropout rate, and a wide range of results: Some kids went on to prestigious colleges, a lot of kids went to lower-tier schools, a lot of kids went basically nowhere and ended up working fast food or learning a skilled trade, and some kids got knocked up or hooked on drugs. The number 1 determining factor in how the kid ended up? Their parents' economic situation and education level. There were bright but poor kids who went nowhere, and some rich idiots who went to Ivy League schools.
My dad also worked for a while in an inner city school. He mentioned that the kids that really succeeded there were the ones enrolled in Junior ROTC: The combination of self-discipline and an attainable goal made all sorts of difference. The kids who were trouble were the ones who knew they were going nowhere in life.