Another way of putting it: all the stuff we remember Newton for was for him a fun hobby project. Not only was alchemy a big focus of his, he also played around with religion and magical ritual (as did several other British academics in his time).
Same story with Rene Descartes, a couple generations earlier: His focus was first and foremost on his philosophical works, the algebra work (including inventing exponents and analytic geometry) was just for fun.
It gives you an idea of how ridiculously smart these guys were. I mean, it's one thing to have a lasting impact on something you've devoted your life to, but it's even more amazing to be just saying "Hey, I think I'll do some genius level work in math today". Especially because they were living in a time when there was plenty of superstition screwing up science - for comparison's sake, Newton was about 50 years old when the Salem Witch Trials were going on.
In other words, the Amtrak Auto-Train. It's not only possible to do this, we've been doing it for a while, and there are many happy customers.
The challenges: - Loading and unloading currently takes a while. - It currently takes 17.5 hours by auto-train to cover the same distance as an 11.5 hour drive. To be competitive, auto-trains should be faster than driving. - It costs more than driving it.
The long-term goal, in my view, might want to be a high-speed autotrain along most 2-digit interstate routes, with stops in major cities and highway intersections. For instance, train 65 would run Gary IN - Indianapolis IN - Louisville KY - Nashville TN - Birmingham AL - Montgomery AL - Mobile AL. For anyone driving long distances along I-65, that would be potentially faster, safer, lower emissions, cheaper, and more comfortable to boot.
Trains tend to be even more inefficient than buses or planes
Depends what you mean by "inefficient": They're obviously a lot slower than planes for longer trips (for short trips in, say, the northeast, they can be faster due to the time it takes to get to the airport and go through security), but are often faster than buses (shorter stops, fewer layovers, and higher top speeds - about 150 mph for Acela, about 90 mph for everything else). For fuel economy and emissions, trains are somewhat worse than buses, but much better than planes, and roughly comparable to packing 4 people into a Prius. On price, coach train tickets are roughly the same as coach plane tickets, but sleeper rooms can run up the price quite a bit more.
Do they even have showers in those small sleeper rooms, if the trip will take days to complete?
Yes - the small sleeper roomettes give you a 1-person shower down the hall, and the larger (but more expensive) bedrooms have a private toilet and shower.
In defense of NASA, though, it produces some really awesome results, mostly in the form of scientific efforts and engineering that other organizations can't (or won't) do. For example, nobody else has managed to even come close to landing rovers on Mars. Sure, private ventures might eventually do that, but one thing governments can do that private companies can't is make investments that will take decades to pay off.
There are a lot of real pork projects to cut: fighters that never see combat, ships that the Navy isn't even asking for, etc, which cost far more than NASA ever did.
Give me your best fare or I'll fly with your competitor. Please folks, let's remember that we still have the right to tell corporations to fuck off.
That works in a highly competitive market. In oligopolies like the airline business, that doesn't always work, because it can be more profitable for all competitors to screw over their customers than it is for 1 competitor to out-compete the other ones by not screwing over their customers.
For a somewhat simplified example, consider a market with 3 significant players with roughly equal customer bases, who we'll call AT&T, Verizon, and T-Mobile. Now, let's say that one of them adds on a new $10 fee for something that all players currently do for free. Now, Verizon has two options: A. Don't add on the fee, and advertise to AT&T's customers that AT&T is making you pay an extra $10. If they do, they'll add c customers from AT&T, getting P=p * c, where p is the marginal profit per customer. B. Add on the same $10 fee. If they do, then they get an immediate gain of P=$10 * their current customer base C. However, if T-Mobile chooses option A, then Verizon risks losing c customers, so the actual profit is P=$10*(C-c) - p*c.
So which do you choose? The payoffs look like this: Verizon A, T-Mobile A: Verizon gets p*c, T-Mobile gets p*c, AT&T gets $10*(C-2c) - p*2c. Verizon A, T-Mobile B: Verizon gets $10*(C-c) - p*c, T-Mobile gets p*2c, AT&T gets $10*(C-2c) - p*2c. Verizon B, T-Mobile B: Verizon gets $10*C, T-Mobile gets $10*C, AT&T gets $10*C.
So what Verizon and T-Mobile will choose to do depends not only on what AT&T does, but also the marginal profit per customer and the odds that a customer will switch vendors (or drop out of the market completely). If, say, the customers are contractually locked in, then c is very low, so the benefits of not charging the fee are low, so all 3 will choose to add on the fee in short order. It's typically in the interests of all 3 competitors to limit c as much as possible, because that allows them to collectively get $10*3C rather than the $10*C or $10*2C as in the other possible results.
For airlines, the way they reduce c is with frequent flyer programs.
Actually, I'm rather fond of the longer Amtrak trips I've taken: you get a small sleeper room, and just lounge around for a couple of days watching the world go by. About the only thing the long-distance trains lack that would be really nice is Internet access.
Your example, in this case, does not follow through with the thought: if governments cut spending, of course the people who rely on government spending (be it welfare, employment, or subsidiary employment) will be impacted; you would need to cut spending AND cut taxes, while opening up trade barriers, and ensuring that enforcement of beneficial laws is top notch; then you may call upon the private sector to place those people in positions in which they will, arguably, be both more efficient and better paid. Failure, on any of those parts, will naturally result in failure of the whole.
You're missing the entire point of Keynes' argument: 1. Say, for the sake of argument, that there's a shiftless layabout Larry who survives off of a total government welfare payment of $1000 a month. 2. According to your policy, we should now cut that welfare payment to $0. (GDP - $1000) 3. Now, the thing is, Larry used to pay his landlord Lonny $650 in rent (either directly or through some kind of subsidy program). But now Lonny has had his income dropped by $650, so he has to cut his spending to match. (GDP - $1650 total) 4. So now, Larry and Lonny, who both shop at the store owned by Gary the grocer, cut their food spending by $250. But that means Gary lost $500, so he has to cut his spending by $500. (GDP - $2150 total) By similar tacks, our $1000 cut hurts Dave the local doctor, Mike the mechanic, etc. 5. This kind of effect continues, as everyone tries to simultaneously tighten their belt. We've gone only 3 steps, but that $1000 savings in government payments has cost the economy already over twice that amount. 6. Now, you're right that Larry is now motivated to get a job, any job he can, because he gets a job or he starves and freezes. The problem is: Who's going to hire him? Lonny won't, he just lost $650 in sales. Nor will Gary, Dave, Mike, etc for the same reason. So all you've accomplished is taking Larry and thrown him out on the street for being a shiftless layabout (where he will attempt to survive by begging or stealing), but you've also hurt everyone else in town.
Here's another part of why your argument doesn't work: In the US in 1893, taxes were low, government spending was low, tariffs were low, and law enforcement was not particularly lax. And yet, there was a crippling depression that lasted for 4 years, which according to your theory can't happen.
People would have to drive the train stations, and park there; and if you have ridden an Amtrak train lately, you'd know that parking space is a major issue; we don't even have room to park our cars at the existing stations!
That's funny, I would have thought that those kind of problems would have hurt the Acela Express (the closest thing America has to a high speed rail line), but in fact it's been getting more and more riders and is turning a profit. So the markets have spoken, and say that America wants high speed rail. Worth mentioning is that you also don't have to build the whole thing at once: You could, say, build an extension to the Acela that continues south from Washington DC to reach Richmond VA, Raleigh-Durham NC, and continuing on towards Miami. And there would be a possible benefit to just building that, even if you don't have a high-speed line from Boston to Los Angeles.
My argument here is that spending money to produce something potentially useful is no worse than spending money to produce nothing at all and just keep the unemployed afloat.
However, modern Science shows Keynes and Socialism to have deleterious effects on the smooth functioning of economic behavior.
Exactly what evidence do you have of that?
Consider that there is not insignificant evidence that your "deleterious effects" (which I notice are not defined anywhere) simply aren't there. For example, European countries that have cut government spending have seen unemployment rise, sometimes precipitously, exactly as Keynes predicted.
Another thought for you: What would have happened if the US government had, instead of paying out billions in unemployment benefits, instead paid out billions to repair highway bridges or build a high speed rail network?
On the other hand, perhaps there's another explanation.....
That's no explanation, because he'd clearly have to be lying about lying about everything, but that means he's telling the truth, but that means he lies about everything, but that means.... *does not compute* *does not compute* *head explodes*
The KKK, in its heyday: - had millions of members constituting a significant percentage of the white population in the areas they were active, and a larger number of sympathizers - had prominent elected officials in its ranks, and was involved in killing officials that did not support them - were about as secret as your church membership about who was in it - were firm believers in Protestant Christianity (their most important symbols were crosses in various forms) - committed atrocities with the full support of the white population of their area, as demonstrated by the routine acquittals in any cases where KKK members were charged for their crimes - absolutely demanded respect from all residents of the areas they were active in
And lastly, there are still several thousand Klansmen in the US. For reference, Al Qaida's membership is according to most estimates somewhere between 500 and 1000 people.
My suspicion is that in the universe that Fox News and right-wing radio inhabit, the words "communist", "socialist", "liberal", "fascist", "Democrat", and "evil" are all synonyms. Closely related terms include "Muslim" and "moocher".
Obviously, nobody gets fired for "right leaning views".
In the 1950's, people did get fired (and also denied positions) specifically for being communists. If you're going to claim systemic discrimination against conservatives in academia, you're going to have to show consequences at least as severe as that.
There are 2 reasons I can see for the EFF using the more general term: 1. One of the winners was Greece, going after someone who was satirizing a Greek Orthodox monk. It's not always about Muslims. 2. The organization opposes all attempts to censor online speech, not just religiously motivated attempts.
Lockheed traded Barb Williams to SpaceX in return Barb McIntosh and a sum of $3 million. No word yet on what that will do for their chances of winning the Goddard Trophy, the long-time rocketry championship, but the expectation is that this will allow Lockheed to unload an unfavorable contract while making SpaceX more competitive in the playoffs.
Technically correct, and completely symbolic and irrelevant.
Israeli policy in the West Bank has typically been to take land by force and demand that the Palestinians do nothing about it. Israeli policy in the Gaza Strip has been to blockade all shipments to the area and to forcibly prevent anyone from leaving, and then periodically "mow the grass" (this is the Israeli term for their periodic indiscriminate bombing of Gaza).
Any reasonably fair way of looking at the conflict in the Levant acknowledges three basic facts: 1. Both Israelis and Palestinians have been absolutely brutal, including attacking and terrorizing civilians. 2. Israel is currently winning by a wide margin. For instance, in the last dust-up, approximately 1200 Gazans died, and approximately 10 Israelis died. Or you can look at who controls what land. Or you can look at the casualties over the last 10 years, which give Israel approximately a 6:1 advantage. 3. Neither Israel nor Hamas nor Fatah operate within the bounds of international law.
Naturally, they would breed prodigiously, eh? There would be much time, and little to do. But with the proper breeding techniques and a ratio of say, ten females to each male, I would guess that they could then work their way back to the present gross national product within say, twenty years. I hasten to add that since each man will be required to do prodigious service along these lines, the women will have to be selected for their sexual characteristics which will have to be of a highly stimulating nature.
You're assuming that in order to be a business owner, you need to be good at business.
That's demonstrably untrue. For instance, many business owners got there because their dad (or granddad or great-granddad) were good at business, even if Junior is a complete idiot. Other business owners are people that got a big pile of wealth by other means and invested it in an existing business and were thus put in charge by virtue of their voting shares. Still others owe their position to successfully "failing upwards" i.e. getting promoted despite failing left and right.
"I don't know if there's a strict definition, it's not like it was necessary to have one a few years back."
There wasn't and isn't, because US law makes no distinction between the New York Times printing something and Joe the moon landing denier printing something. That's because if the government gets in the business of saying "Organization A has freedom of the press, Organization B does not", it's extremely likely that the government will decide that based on whether it likes what organizations A and B are printing. In other words, it would destroy the freedom of the press entirely.
Place blame on exactly who's shoulders it belongs: - Barack Obama (D) made it national policy to aggressively prosecute whistleblowers of all stripes (including Bradley Manning), and proudly supported the effort to cut off funding of Wikileaks despite the demonstrable fact that the organization has not been convicted or blamed for any crimes in any court of law. - Joe Lieberman (I) did the actual organizing of all the payment processors to cut off payments. - Lest you think this was all the Democrats' idea, Mitch McConnell, Dick Cheney, and quite a few other prominent Republicans fully supported these moves. Probably because it made their guys look bad too.
Make no mistake about it: There was absolutely nothing legal about what the US government did to Wikileaks, but there was little to no opposition within the government. Julian Assange had a point during his extradition trial when he argued that the United States could not be trusted to follow its own laws. The trouble, of course, was that the UK and Sweden were happy to bend over when the US asked them to, and it was Ecuador with the cajones to stand up to them.
Again, a guy with a sword can easily do as much damage, the attack in the chinese school proves that point.
I looked up the attack in the Chinese schools that it seemed like you were referring to, and discovered that it proved my point, not yours. So either the comparison is valid and supports my argument, or it's invalid and you had no reason to bring it up in the first place.
Here's another international comparison that might be of interest: Japan has very strict gun control laws, and has approximately 11 shootings per year and 0.3 per 100,000 homicides per year in total, versus the US's approximately 12,000 shootings and 4.2 homicides per 100,000.
In 6 attacks, guys armed with swords and similar sorts of weapons killed 21 people. 90 were injured, but survived. If we average that out, that means 3.5 people are killed and 15 injured per sword attack, versus 27 killed in 1 gun attack.
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Another way of putting it: all the stuff we remember Newton for was for him a fun hobby project. Not only was alchemy a big focus of his, he also played around with religion and magical ritual (as did several other British academics in his time).
Same story with Rene Descartes, a couple generations earlier: His focus was first and foremost on his philosophical works, the algebra work (including inventing exponents and analytic geometry) was just for fun.
It gives you an idea of how ridiculously smart these guys were. I mean, it's one thing to have a lasting impact on something you've devoted your life to, but it's even more amazing to be just saying "Hey, I think I'll do some genius level work in math today". Especially because they were living in a time when there was plenty of superstition screwing up science - for comparison's sake, Newton was about 50 years old when the Salem Witch Trials were going on.
In other words, the Amtrak Auto-Train. It's not only possible to do this, we've been doing it for a while, and there are many happy customers.
The challenges:
- Loading and unloading currently takes a while.
- It currently takes 17.5 hours by auto-train to cover the same distance as an 11.5 hour drive. To be competitive, auto-trains should be faster than driving.
- It costs more than driving it.
The long-term goal, in my view, might want to be a high-speed autotrain along most 2-digit interstate routes, with stops in major cities and highway intersections. For instance, train 65 would run Gary IN - Indianapolis IN - Louisville KY - Nashville TN - Birmingham AL - Montgomery AL - Mobile AL. For anyone driving long distances along I-65, that would be potentially faster, safer, lower emissions, cheaper, and more comfortable to boot.
Trains tend to be even more inefficient than buses or planes
Depends what you mean by "inefficient": They're obviously a lot slower than planes for longer trips (for short trips in, say, the northeast, they can be faster due to the time it takes to get to the airport and go through security), but are often faster than buses (shorter stops, fewer layovers, and higher top speeds - about 150 mph for Acela, about 90 mph for everything else). For fuel economy and emissions, trains are somewhat worse than buses, but much better than planes, and roughly comparable to packing 4 people into a Prius. On price, coach train tickets are roughly the same as coach plane tickets, but sleeper rooms can run up the price quite a bit more.
Do they even have showers in those small sleeper rooms, if the trip will take days to complete?
Yes - the small sleeper roomettes give you a 1-person shower down the hall, and the larger (but more expensive) bedrooms have a private toilet and shower.
I agree, private space flight is great news.
In defense of NASA, though, it produces some really awesome results, mostly in the form of scientific efforts and engineering that other organizations can't (or won't) do. For example, nobody else has managed to even come close to landing rovers on Mars. Sure, private ventures might eventually do that, but one thing governments can do that private companies can't is make investments that will take decades to pay off.
There are a lot of real pork projects to cut: fighters that never see combat, ships that the Navy isn't even asking for, etc, which cost far more than NASA ever did.
Give me your best fare or I'll fly with your competitor. Please folks, let's remember that we still have the right to tell corporations to fuck off.
That works in a highly competitive market. In oligopolies like the airline business, that doesn't always work, because it can be more profitable for all competitors to screw over their customers than it is for 1 competitor to out-compete the other ones by not screwing over their customers.
For a somewhat simplified example, consider a market with 3 significant players with roughly equal customer bases, who we'll call AT&T, Verizon, and T-Mobile. Now, let's say that one of them adds on a new $10 fee for something that all players currently do for free. Now, Verizon has two options:
A. Don't add on the fee, and advertise to AT&T's customers that AT&T is making you pay an extra $10. If they do, they'll add c customers from AT&T, getting P=p * c, where p is the marginal profit per customer.
B. Add on the same $10 fee. If they do, then they get an immediate gain of P=$10 * their current customer base C. However, if T-Mobile chooses option A, then Verizon risks losing c customers, so the actual profit is P=$10*(C-c) - p*c.
So which do you choose? The payoffs look like this:
Verizon A, T-Mobile A: Verizon gets p*c, T-Mobile gets p*c, AT&T gets $10*(C-2c) - p*2c.
Verizon A, T-Mobile B: Verizon gets $10*(C-c) - p*c, T-Mobile gets p*2c, AT&T gets $10*(C-2c) - p*2c.
Verizon B, T-Mobile B: Verizon gets $10*C, T-Mobile gets $10*C, AT&T gets $10*C.
So what Verizon and T-Mobile will choose to do depends not only on what AT&T does, but also the marginal profit per customer and the odds that a customer will switch vendors (or drop out of the market completely). If, say, the customers are contractually locked in, then c is very low, so the benefits of not charging the fee are low, so all 3 will choose to add on the fee in short order. It's typically in the interests of all 3 competitors to limit c as much as possible, because that allows them to collectively get $10*3C rather than the $10*C or $10*2C as in the other possible results.
For airlines, the way they reduce c is with frequent flyer programs.
Actually, I'm rather fond of the longer Amtrak trips I've taken: you get a small sleeper room, and just lounge around for a couple of days watching the world go by. About the only thing the long-distance trains lack that would be really nice is Internet access.
Not just their recent history: A significant percentage of Americans believe that the Civil War was not about slavery.
Your example, in this case, does not follow through with the thought: if governments cut spending, of course the people who rely on government spending (be it welfare, employment, or subsidiary employment) will be impacted; you would need to cut spending AND cut taxes, while opening up trade barriers, and ensuring that enforcement of beneficial laws is top notch; then you may call upon the private sector to place those people in positions in which they will, arguably, be both more efficient and better paid. Failure, on any of those parts, will naturally result in failure of the whole.
You're missing the entire point of Keynes' argument:
1. Say, for the sake of argument, that there's a shiftless layabout Larry who survives off of a total government welfare payment of $1000 a month.
2. According to your policy, we should now cut that welfare payment to $0. (GDP - $1000)
3. Now, the thing is, Larry used to pay his landlord Lonny $650 in rent (either directly or through some kind of subsidy program). But now Lonny has had his income dropped by $650, so he has to cut his spending to match. (GDP - $1650 total)
4. So now, Larry and Lonny, who both shop at the store owned by Gary the grocer, cut their food spending by $250. But that means Gary lost $500, so he has to cut his spending by $500. (GDP - $2150 total) By similar tacks, our $1000 cut hurts Dave the local doctor, Mike the mechanic, etc.
5. This kind of effect continues, as everyone tries to simultaneously tighten their belt. We've gone only 3 steps, but that $1000 savings in government payments has cost the economy already over twice that amount.
6. Now, you're right that Larry is now motivated to get a job, any job he can, because he gets a job or he starves and freezes. The problem is: Who's going to hire him? Lonny won't, he just lost $650 in sales. Nor will Gary, Dave, Mike, etc for the same reason. So all you've accomplished is taking Larry and thrown him out on the street for being a shiftless layabout (where he will attempt to survive by begging or stealing), but you've also hurt everyone else in town.
Here's another part of why your argument doesn't work: In the US in 1893, taxes were low, government spending was low, tariffs were low, and law enforcement was not particularly lax. And yet, there was a crippling depression that lasted for 4 years, which according to your theory can't happen.
People would have to drive the train stations, and park there; and if you have ridden an Amtrak train lately, you'd know that parking space is a major issue; we don't even have room to park our cars at the existing stations!
That's funny, I would have thought that those kind of problems would have hurt the Acela Express (the closest thing America has to a high speed rail line), but in fact it's been getting more and more riders and is turning a profit. So the markets have spoken, and say that America wants high speed rail. Worth mentioning is that you also don't have to build the whole thing at once: You could, say, build an extension to the Acela that continues south from Washington DC to reach Richmond VA, Raleigh-Durham NC, and continuing on towards Miami. And there would be a possible benefit to just building that, even if you don't have a high-speed line from Boston to Los Angeles.
My argument here is that spending money to produce something potentially useful is no worse than spending money to produce nothing at all and just keep the unemployed afloat.
However, modern Science shows Keynes and Socialism to have deleterious effects on the smooth functioning of economic behavior.
Exactly what evidence do you have of that?
Consider that there is not insignificant evidence that your "deleterious effects" (which I notice are not defined anywhere) simply aren't there. For example, European countries that have cut government spending have seen unemployment rise, sometimes precipitously, exactly as Keynes predicted.
Another thought for you: What would have happened if the US government had, instead of paying out billions in unemployment benefits, instead paid out billions to repair highway bridges or build a high speed rail network?
He's a /. geek: Chances are good that there's not much risk of him having children.
I lie about everything
On the other hand, perhaps there's another explanation.....
That's no explanation, because he'd clearly have to be lying about lying about everything, but that means he's telling the truth, but that means he lies about everything, but that means .... *does not compute* *does not compute* *head explodes*
The KKK, in its heyday:
- had millions of members constituting a significant percentage of the white population in the areas they were active, and a larger number of sympathizers
- had prominent elected officials in its ranks, and was involved in killing officials that did not support them
- were about as secret as your church membership about who was in it
- were firm believers in Protestant Christianity (their most important symbols were crosses in various forms)
- committed atrocities with the full support of the white population of their area, as demonstrated by the routine acquittals in any cases where KKK members were charged for their crimes
- absolutely demanded respect from all residents of the areas they were active in
And lastly, there are still several thousand Klansmen in the US. For reference, Al Qaida's membership is according to most estimates somewhere between 500 and 1000 people.
The comparison seems apt.
My suspicion is that in the universe that Fox News and right-wing radio inhabit, the words "communist", "socialist", "liberal", "fascist", "Democrat", and "evil" are all synonyms. Closely related terms include "Muslim" and "moocher".
Obviously, nobody gets fired for "right leaning views".
In the 1950's, people did get fired (and also denied positions) specifically for being communists. If you're going to claim systemic discrimination against conservatives in academia, you're going to have to show consequences at least as severe as that.
There are 2 reasons I can see for the EFF using the more general term:
1. One of the winners was Greece, going after someone who was satirizing a Greek Orthodox monk. It's not always about Muslims.
2. The organization opposes all attempts to censor online speech, not just religiously motivated attempts.
All I said was that this piece of halibut was good enough for Jehovah!
Lockheed traded Barb Williams to SpaceX in return Barb McIntosh and a sum of $3 million. No word yet on what that will do for their chances of winning the Goddard Trophy, the long-time rocketry championship, but the expectation is that this will allow Lockheed to unload an unfavorable contract while making SpaceX more competitive in the playoffs.
Technically correct, and completely symbolic and irrelevant.
Israeli policy in the West Bank has typically been to take land by force and demand that the Palestinians do nothing about it. Israeli policy in the Gaza Strip has been to blockade all shipments to the area and to forcibly prevent anyone from leaving, and then periodically "mow the grass" (this is the Israeli term for their periodic indiscriminate bombing of Gaza).
Any reasonably fair way of looking at the conflict in the Levant acknowledges three basic facts:
1. Both Israelis and Palestinians have been absolutely brutal, including attacking and terrorizing civilians.
2. Israel is currently winning by a wide margin. For instance, in the last dust-up, approximately 1200 Gazans died, and approximately 10 Israelis died. Or you can look at who controls what land. Or you can look at the casualties over the last 10 years, which give Israel approximately a 6:1 advantage.
3. Neither Israel nor Hamas nor Fatah operate within the bounds of international law.
Naturally, they would breed prodigiously, eh? There would be much time, and little to do. But with the proper breeding techniques and a ratio of say, ten females to each male, I would guess that they could then work their way back to the present gross national product within say, twenty years. I hasten to add that since each man will be required to do prodigious service along these lines, the women will have to be selected for their sexual characteristics which will have to be of a highly stimulating nature.
You're assuming that in order to be a business owner, you need to be good at business.
That's demonstrably untrue. For instance, many business owners got there because their dad (or granddad or great-granddad) were good at business, even if Junior is a complete idiot. Other business owners are people that got a big pile of wealth by other means and invested it in an existing business and were thus put in charge by virtue of their voting shares. Still others owe their position to successfully "failing upwards" i.e. getting promoted despite failing left and right.
"I don't know if there's a strict definition, it's not like it was necessary to have one a few years back."
There wasn't and isn't, because US law makes no distinction between the New York Times printing something and Joe the moon landing denier printing something. That's because if the government gets in the business of saying "Organization A has freedom of the press, Organization B does not", it's extremely likely that the government will decide that based on whether it likes what organizations A and B are printing. In other words, it would destroy the freedom of the press entirely.
Place blame on exactly who's shoulders it belongs:
- Barack Obama (D) made it national policy to aggressively prosecute whistleblowers of all stripes (including Bradley Manning), and proudly supported the effort to cut off funding of Wikileaks despite the demonstrable fact that the organization has not been convicted or blamed for any crimes in any court of law.
- Joe Lieberman (I) did the actual organizing of all the payment processors to cut off payments.
- Lest you think this was all the Democrats' idea, Mitch McConnell, Dick Cheney, and quite a few other prominent Republicans fully supported these moves. Probably because it made their guys look bad too.
Make no mistake about it: There was absolutely nothing legal about what the US government did to Wikileaks, but there was little to no opposition within the government. Julian Assange had a point during his extradition trial when he argued that the United States could not be trusted to follow its own laws. The trouble, of course, was that the UK and Sweden were happy to bend over when the US asked them to, and it was Ecuador with the cajones to stand up to them.
To quote you further up the thread:
Again, a guy with a sword can easily do as much damage, the attack in the chinese school proves that point.
I looked up the attack in the Chinese schools that it seemed like you were referring to, and discovered that it proved my point, not yours. So either the comparison is valid and supports my argument, or it's invalid and you had no reason to bring it up in the first place.
Here's another international comparison that might be of interest: Japan has very strict gun control laws, and has approximately 11 shootings per year and 0.3 per 100,000 homicides per year in total, versus the US's approximately 12,000 shootings and 4.2 homicides per 100,000.
Wikipedia on the Chinese school attacks
In 6 attacks, guys armed with swords and similar sorts of weapons killed 21 people. 90 were injured, but survived. If we average that out, that means 3.5 people are killed and 15 injured per sword attack, versus 27 killed in 1 gun attack.