Are you implying that the interests of tech businesses and tech workers aren't exactly the same? The next thing you know, you're going to suggest a union or something. Socialism! Get the communist!
I think we all agree that $8.1 billion is a very large pile of cash. My point is that it's actually tiny compared to the ridiculously gigantic piles of cash used by the federal government for other purposes, and if you think that federal spending is bleeding the taxpayers dry you really should go after the ridiculously gigantic piles rather than the mere very large piles of cash.
Another way of looking at it: If you took all the funding for the US military, and put it towards space flight, you could fund approximately 45 NASAs. In it's glory years of the Apollo program, NASA got only twice as much as it does now, which should give you an idea of how much we skimp on real human progress to fund missile defense systems that don't work and military toys that the generals haven't even asked for.
Yeah, I once called out a well-meaning liberal peacenik type for focusing so much on how many women and children were killed from the war in Iraq. I simply asked "Why aren't we also counting how many men were killed?" and got a strange look.
we were just killing innocent civilians and calling them terrorists to justify out mass murder
Relevent to this: The US military defines "militant" as any male person in any country of the Middle East except Israel between the ages 13-50. Consider that the next time you hear a news report that says that "4 militants and 6 civilians" were killed: That could well be a random extended family meeting up for Eid, not a terrorist cell.
4 reasons the American Revolution worked and the French Revolution didn't: 1. France was in Europe, so armies attacking French revolutionaries were in much closer contact with their governments than armies attacking the colonial revolutionaries. By contrast, British Parliament was (stupidly) trying to give orders to their commanders 8 weeks later than the events that they were reacting to. That meant that military attacks on the French were much more likely to succeed.
2. The stronger military leaders the Americans had when the dust settled, most notably George Washington, repeatedly turned down offers of permanent political power. Washington had several opportunities to become the permanent leader of the new country, and refused each time. By contrast, Napoleon was a power-hungry bastard (the Americans had one of those for a while too - Benedict Arnold).
3. American diplomacy was much more successful than French diplomacy. Ben Franklin convinced the French to join our side against the British. When the French Revolution occurred, none of the major European powers allied themselves with them: They were attacked continuously from basically the entire rest of Europe for almost a decade before Napoleon took over. Their natural allies over in the United States had their own problems and couldn't provide much help because to do that they'd have had to get through the British navy.
4. The European monarchs of the time had lost the Americas and didn't think all that much of it except "Britain is weaker", but after the French killed Louis XVI they realized that their own necks were at risk, hence the all-out assaults on France.
And so you know, I agree with you that the US government is among the biggest assholes the world has ever seen. I'm just also of the view that we had some damn good ideas like free speech and freedom of religion that I'm glad we exported to many areas of the world.
Here's the only system of letter sequences that is guaranteed to catch all terrorists (case-insensitive) when run against a list of passengers: ['a', 'b', 'c', 'd', 'e', 'f', 'g', 'h', 'i', 'j', 'k', 'l', 'm', 'n', 'o', 'p', 'q', 'r', 's', 't', 'u', 'v', 'w', 'x', 'y', 'z']
That's it. Profiling gets you worse than nothing. Using the Richard Reid example again, how does your system possibly tell that Richard Reid is a terrorist but Harry Reid is not?
You are quite correct - I've seen the billboards, only in the neighborhoods that are overwhelmingly black and poor.
If you're black, you don't trust government authorities, because there's a long history of those authorities abusing and harassing black people. It's not uncommon for black people to be accused of and convicted of serious crimes on very limited evidence, so it's quite possible for the black people in these neighborhoods to think that they could show up to vote, the voting clerk finds something slightly wrong with their ID, and then they're locked up for 3 1/2 years.
You're right: We weren't after the minerals. We were after the right to build an oil pipeline that former Unocal executive Hamid Karzai agreed to shortly after he was installed as president of Afghanistan with the help of former oil executives Richard Cheney and George W Bush.
My favorite story about the 2000 presidential election: Fidel Castro offered to send Cuban election observers to ensure the FL elections were free and fair. That guy sure has a sense of humor.
In fact it never really docked in the first place.
That's not quite true: The French Revolutionaries, for instance, were largely inspired by the Americans to overthrow their king and install a republic.
Heck, I'm pretty sure somebody attempted to abduct me when I was about 6. And I wasn't in any serious danger, because I was walking down busy streets in broad daylight until I got to where I was going, where responsible adults told the would-be abductor to get lost immediately or they'd call the police.
That's why 999 out of 1000 attempted abductions fail: Kids taught the basics of how to protect themselves usually manage to do so. For example, if some stranger grabbed your son on the playground, chances are he'd at the very least scream his head off, getting the attention of any responsible adult in the area. If he's a bit older, he'll run, hide, fight back, or get help from friends or adults. A big part of the reason why strangers are far less successful than relatives or friends at abducting children is that the kid doesn't trust the stranger but does trust good old Uncle Joe.
All your arguments except that one are valid. Some math will tell you why. TSA budget: $8.1 billion US federal budget: $3.7 trillion
So the TSA makes up approximately 0.2% of the federal budget. You could cut it to $0 and still make no significant dent in the deficit. The big ticket items are, and have been for decades: Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and Defense. After the crash in 2008, unemployment insurance, food stamps, WIC, and housing assistance jumped up because more people are unemployed, hungry, or homeless. But the TSA just isn't even remotely close to what's bleeding the taxpayers dry.
Racial profiling wouldn't have helped: Richard Reid (the shoe bomber) is mostly white, Umar Abdulmutallab (the underwear bomber) is black, and the 9/11 hijackers were Arabic-looking. And the most successful "home-grown" terrorists were white guys: Ted Kazinski and Timothy McVeigh. And if the bad guys figured out that, say, white women over 40 were getting screened less, they'd recruit a white-looking woman over 40 with a name like "Jane Smith".
Behavioral profiling might conceivably have made a difference, if the behavior we're talking about is "one-way ticket, no baggage", but again a reasonably smart terrorist group would figure out the pattern and plan for it by buying a round-trip ticket instead.
The good news: The various bad guys that have been caught in the US have gotten what they thought were explosives exclusively from FBI agents. In fact, the FBI agents were so involved in the apparant plots that there's a real question of entrapment. And your chance of being killed by a terrorist are still far far lower than your chance of being killed by a drunk driver.
Number of children abducted by strangers: 115 annually in the entire United States. Now, that's not 0, but it's so close to 0 to be totally insignificant for any practical purpose. In roughly 999 out of 1000 cases, attempts by strangers are unsuccessful because the kid is smart enough to get away and/or other adults intervene. And as a sibling poster points out, this has been declining steadily for years.
Statistically speaking, the most likely way your child might die before they turn 14 is a car accident with you or their other parent in the driver's seat. The most likely ways your child might die between ages 14 and 18 are car accidents with themselves or their friends in the driver's seat, and the next most likely are gang-related homicide for black and Hispanic boys, and suicide for everyone else.
Your child is also far more likely to be abused by an adult you know and trust than by a stranger. The way you protect your kid from that is to teach them age-appropriate stuff like the "bathing-suit area", make sure they know they can tell you absolutely anything and trust them if they tell you something serious, and avoid putting the kid alone with an adult out of sight of everyone else.
I know that none of this is not what the "Don't tell me about 'facts'" reptilian brain is telling you, but it's the truth. You're far better off worrying about the real dangers than the fake dangers.
Apparently my folks had to deal with a couple of people (including a certified helicopter parent) who were surprised at the freedom they gave me. They countered with this: 1. We know exactly when he left, who he's with, where he's trying to get to, and what route he's going to take to get there. 2. We know that he only has the time to go from our house to where he's going, so he's not just wandering. 3. There are responsible adults along the way who would help in case something bad happened.
In other words, there was very little question of where I was likely to be at any given time, very little question of what I was doing, and they only increased the freedom after it became clear that I was handling the responsibility I'd already been given reasonably well.
Kids need to learn how to function without relying on parents, and if you do things right it will help dramatically when your kid is now 18 and headed to some faraway place for college. While 3 is probably a bit too young, by about 8 or 9 the child should be able to go places on their own. And a kid who is never ever lost when he's between 3 and 6 years old is a kid that is probably being watched too closely.
The secret is to do so in stages. For example, my folks wanted me to get used to traveling without their help: At 3, they were still taking me most everywhere. At 6, I was now responsible for walking to school with an older neighbor's kid. By the next year, I didn't have to stick with the neighbor's kid anymore. In theory, something really bad could have happened to me, but the only real challenge came from traffic, not crime.
Really, that's a better telling off than this one?
Picard: "The first duty of every Starfleet officer is to the truth, whether it's scientific truth or historical truth or personal truth! It is the guiding principle on which Starfleet is based! And if you can't find it within yourself to stand up and tell the truth about what happened, you don't deserve to wear that uniform! I'm going to make this simple for you, Mr. Crusher: Either you come forward and tell Admiral Brand what really took place, or I will." Wesley: "Captain..." Picard: "Dismissed!"
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Vote for the tooth fairy! $1 per tooth knocked out! Or follow the suggestion in my sig.
Are you implying that the interests of tech businesses and tech workers aren't exactly the same? The next thing you know, you're going to suggest a union or something. Socialism! Get the communist!
I think we all agree that $8.1 billion is a very large pile of cash. My point is that it's actually tiny compared to the ridiculously gigantic piles of cash used by the federal government for other purposes, and if you think that federal spending is bleeding the taxpayers dry you really should go after the ridiculously gigantic piles rather than the mere very large piles of cash.
Another way of looking at it: If you took all the funding for the US military, and put it towards space flight, you could fund approximately 45 NASAs. In it's glory years of the Apollo program, NASA got only twice as much as it does now, which should give you an idea of how much we skimp on real human progress to fund missile defense systems that don't work and military toys that the generals haven't even asked for.
Eric S Raymond had an interesting take on the gorilla arm problem. They key is the position of the screen.
Yeah, I once called out a well-meaning liberal peacenik type for focusing so much on how many women and children were killed from the war in Iraq. I simply asked "Why aren't we also counting how many men were killed?" and got a strange look.
we were just killing innocent civilians and calling them terrorists to justify out mass murder
Relevent to this: The US military defines "militant" as any male person in any country of the Middle East except Israel between the ages 13-50. Consider that the next time you hear a news report that says that "4 militants and 6 civilians" were killed: That could well be a random extended family meeting up for Eid, not a terrorist cell.
That's nothing, wait until a 2000 inch TV comes out.
4 reasons the American Revolution worked and the French Revolution didn't:
1. France was in Europe, so armies attacking French revolutionaries were in much closer contact with their governments than armies attacking the colonial revolutionaries. By contrast, British Parliament was (stupidly) trying to give orders to their commanders 8 weeks later than the events that they were reacting to. That meant that military attacks on the French were much more likely to succeed.
2. The stronger military leaders the Americans had when the dust settled, most notably George Washington, repeatedly turned down offers of permanent political power. Washington had several opportunities to become the permanent leader of the new country, and refused each time. By contrast, Napoleon was a power-hungry bastard (the Americans had one of those for a while too - Benedict Arnold).
3. American diplomacy was much more successful than French diplomacy. Ben Franklin convinced the French to join our side against the British. When the French Revolution occurred, none of the major European powers allied themselves with them: They were attacked continuously from basically the entire rest of Europe for almost a decade before Napoleon took over. Their natural allies over in the United States had their own problems and couldn't provide much help because to do that they'd have had to get through the British navy.
4. The European monarchs of the time had lost the Americas and didn't think all that much of it except "Britain is weaker", but after the French killed Louis XVI they realized that their own necks were at risk, hence the all-out assaults on France.
And so you know, I agree with you that the US government is among the biggest assholes the world has ever seen. I'm just also of the view that we had some damn good ideas like free speech and freedom of religion that I'm glad we exported to many areas of the world.
Here's the only system of letter sequences that is guaranteed to catch all terrorists (case-insensitive) when run against a list of passengers:
['a', 'b', 'c', 'd', 'e', 'f', 'g', 'h', 'i', 'j', 'k', 'l', 'm', 'n', 'o', 'p', 'q', 'r', 's', 't', 'u', 'v', 'w', 'x', 'y', 'z']
That's it. Profiling gets you worse than nothing. Using the Richard Reid example again, how does your system possibly tell that Richard Reid is a terrorist but Harry Reid is not?
You are quite correct - I've seen the billboards, only in the neighborhoods that are overwhelmingly black and poor.
If you're black, you don't trust government authorities, because there's a long history of those authorities abusing and harassing black people. It's not uncommon for black people to be accused of and convicted of serious crimes on very limited evidence, so it's quite possible for the black people in these neighborhoods to think that they could show up to vote, the voting clerk finds something slightly wrong with their ID, and then they're locked up for 3 1/2 years.
You're right: We weren't after the minerals. We were after the right to build an oil pipeline that former Unocal executive Hamid Karzai agreed to shortly after he was installed as president of Afghanistan with the help of former oil executives Richard Cheney and George W Bush.
Also, he just let shoe bomber Richard Reid through and harassed Paula Abdul for no reason.
My favorite story about the 2000 presidential election: Fidel Castro offered to send Cuban election observers to ensure the FL elections were free and fair. That guy sure has a sense of humor.
In fact it never really docked in the first place.
That's not quite true: The French Revolutionaries, for instance, were largely inspired by the Americans to overthrow their king and install a republic.
I'm glad you're not a lawyer.
1. The Supremacy Clause clearly states that federal law trumps state law wherever they conflict.
2. Treaties trump federal law wherever they conflict.
So if you have a state law that says you can't do X, and a treaty that says you must allow X, then X is allowed.
Heck, I'm pretty sure somebody attempted to abduct me when I was about 6. And I wasn't in any serious danger, because I was walking down busy streets in broad daylight until I got to where I was going, where responsible adults told the would-be abductor to get lost immediately or they'd call the police.
That's why 999 out of 1000 attempted abductions fail: Kids taught the basics of how to protect themselves usually manage to do so. For example, if some stranger grabbed your son on the playground, chances are he'd at the very least scream his head off, getting the attention of any responsible adult in the area. If he's a bit older, he'll run, hide, fight back, or get help from friends or adults. A big part of the reason why strangers are far less successful than relatives or friends at abducting children is that the kid doesn't trust the stranger but does trust good old Uncle Joe.
we all know that it is bleeding the taxpayers dry
All your arguments except that one are valid. Some math will tell you why.
TSA budget: $8.1 billion
US federal budget: $3.7 trillion
So the TSA makes up approximately 0.2% of the federal budget. You could cut it to $0 and still make no significant dent in the deficit. The big ticket items are, and have been for decades: Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and Defense. After the crash in 2008, unemployment insurance, food stamps, WIC, and housing assistance jumped up because more people are unemployed, hungry, or homeless. But the TSA just isn't even remotely close to what's bleeding the taxpayers dry.
What kind of profiling are we talking about?
Racial profiling wouldn't have helped: Richard Reid (the shoe bomber) is mostly white, Umar Abdulmutallab (the underwear bomber) is black, and the 9/11 hijackers were Arabic-looking. And the most successful "home-grown" terrorists were white guys: Ted Kazinski and Timothy McVeigh. And if the bad guys figured out that, say, white women over 40 were getting screened less, they'd recruit a white-looking woman over 40 with a name like "Jane Smith".
Behavioral profiling might conceivably have made a difference, if the behavior we're talking about is "one-way ticket, no baggage", but again a reasonably smart terrorist group would figure out the pattern and plan for it by buying a round-trip ticket instead.
The good news: The various bad guys that have been caught in the US have gotten what they thought were explosives exclusively from FBI agents. In fact, the FBI agents were so involved in the apparant plots that there's a real question of entrapment. And your chance of being killed by a terrorist are still far far lower than your chance of being killed by a drunk driver.
quite possible, as Bruce Schneier explains in detail.
Number of children abducted by strangers: 115 annually in the entire United States. Now, that's not 0, but it's so close to 0 to be totally insignificant for any practical purpose. In roughly 999 out of 1000 cases, attempts by strangers are unsuccessful because the kid is smart enough to get away and/or other adults intervene. And as a sibling poster points out, this has been declining steadily for years.
Statistically speaking, the most likely way your child might die before they turn 14 is a car accident with you or their other parent in the driver's seat. The most likely ways your child might die between ages 14 and 18 are car accidents with themselves or their friends in the driver's seat, and the next most likely are gang-related homicide for black and Hispanic boys, and suicide for everyone else.
Your child is also far more likely to be abused by an adult you know and trust than by a stranger. The way you protect your kid from that is to teach them age-appropriate stuff like the "bathing-suit area", make sure they know they can tell you absolutely anything and trust them if they tell you something serious, and avoid putting the kid alone with an adult out of sight of everyone else.
I know that none of this is not what the "Don't tell me about 'facts'" reptilian brain is telling you, but it's the truth. You're far better off worrying about the real dangers than the fake dangers.
Not as much fun as doing a "General Lee" or an "Evel Kneivel" with a Google Maps car.
Apparently my folks had to deal with a couple of people (including a certified helicopter parent) who were surprised at the freedom they gave me. They countered with this:
1. We know exactly when he left, who he's with, where he's trying to get to, and what route he's going to take to get there.
2. We know that he only has the time to go from our house to where he's going, so he's not just wandering.
3. There are responsible adults along the way who would help in case something bad happened.
In other words, there was very little question of where I was likely to be at any given time, very little question of what I was doing, and they only increased the freedom after it became clear that I was handling the responsibility I'd already been given reasonably well.
fuck the children
Well don't do that, that's sick! But you're right that many people will exploit parents' fears to sell them useless stuff or get their votes.
Kids need to learn how to function without relying on parents, and if you do things right it will help dramatically when your kid is now 18 and headed to some faraway place for college. While 3 is probably a bit too young, by about 8 or 9 the child should be able to go places on their own. And a kid who is never ever lost when he's between 3 and 6 years old is a kid that is probably being watched too closely.
The secret is to do so in stages. For example, my folks wanted me to get used to traveling without their help: At 3, they were still taking me most everywhere. At 6, I was now responsible for walking to school with an older neighbor's kid. By the next year, I didn't have to stick with the neighbor's kid anymore. In theory, something really bad could have happened to me, but the only real challenge came from traffic, not crime.
Really, that's a better telling off than this one?
Picard: "The first duty of every Starfleet officer is to the truth, whether it's scientific truth or historical truth or personal truth! It is the guiding principle on which Starfleet is based! And if you can't find it within yourself to stand up and tell the truth about what happened, you don't deserve to wear that uniform! I'm going to make this simple for you, Mr. Crusher: Either you come forward and tell Admiral Brand what really took place, or I will."
Wesley: "Captain..."
Picard: "Dismissed!"