The unstated part of the quote (which was obvious to all at the time) is "in the eyes of the law".
No. For example, the phrase shows up in the preamble to the Declaration of Independence (1776) and it is "obvious to all at the time" that it wasn't qualified by "in the eyes of the law".
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.
I feel like now it would be more rational to forgo working in the hopes of graduating faster to get into a job that has a wage high enough to start paying back all of those loans.
Two problems with that feeling. Why would you graduate faster? Among other things, crap jobs help teach you how to do things important to graduatin from college faster, such as time management and not procrastinating.
And less job experience means a more reluctant employer. If borrowing money is driving your life decisions to this extent, then I think the problem is that you are borrowing too much money.
critical thinking skills are acquired via the liberal arts side
That's vile slander from the detractors of the liberal arts. How could you properly indoctrinate students in thoughtgood, if you're so far off message? There are a lot of fields, such as the victim studies where critical thinking just gets in the way.
First, the majority of people do not possess the ability to think critically.
IMHO, if they have a brain, they have the ability. Not thinking critically is not the same as not having the ability to think critically.
Second, why is everything the education systems fault? Why don't parents encourage their children to think critically?
Why? You just said most people don't have the ability. Encouragement from parents wouldn't change that (and would actually be a waste of the parent's time), unless the ability actually was there.
Instead of attracting the best talent we have states actively eroding teacher benefits which drives the talent away and opens the door for Teach for America type excuses for real teachers.
Just think (well, if you have the ability to) how much worse it must be in those countries which aren't spending as much on education per student as the US does - like Finland, Sweden, Japan, and Germany. They must be absolutely benighted places.
It's more than just outsourcing. Most of those young people haven't worked at anything before they enter college and a lot of them don't start working till after they leave college. Going well into your adult life without actually holding any job (even one outside of IT) is pretty destructive just on its own.
That they will be successful is only a foregone conclusion in a country where people steadfastly stick to the belief that political donations are speech and that corporations have rights in addition to the rights of the individuals it employs.
Because there's only one interest possible in the corporate world - make some quick bucks for these particular electricity companies? No. You don't get it. This is not the only corporate interest out there. Even in a world dominated by corporate interests, which isn't the case in Oklahoma or the US, there would still be conflicts between the corporations.
Also, we see once again that certain people are willing to take rights away from business owners and employees. You still have that little problem that it is unconstitutional. The Constitution doesn't make an exception for agents of corporations from its lists of rights, enumerated or not. The whole point of corporate personhood is to honor those rights.
Don't I actually have to be wrong first before this term applies? I've heard the ZOMG Federal Reserve argument before. The Fed is an institution created and backed by the power of the US government. The US government runs the top level of the Fed and happens to control in other ways what policies the Fed can implement (for example, via pressure on bank members).
The whole scheme of money creation was created and endorsed by the US government who backs it up with a variety of means. As an example of that last statement, I suggest you actually look at a US bill. It has on it "this note is legal tender for all debts, public and private". Being required to pay your US taxes, both federal and state, with US dollars is yet another way the US government backs its currency. You can also pay debts and public charges with currency.
In modern, neo-Liberal economic societies Government borrows money from private, central banks. This money is called into creation as debt. The creation of the money is an act of the bank - an accounting phantom - entering new assets as black ink on their ledgers.
Like any other transaction, it is a mutual act of two or more parties. This is an act of the bank and an act of the government.
If EMP doesn't do that much, why would the military harden its electronics against it?
Because they have to design for being a lot closer to a nuclear blast than 400 km.
How much would the EMP attack be enhanced by optimizing the warhead for that in a fashion similar to what is done for neutron bombs?
That adds mass to the warhead. Plus most of the energy of the weapon is already in the form of gamma rays.
If you've only got one shot in the face of missile defenses, do you go for an obvious high value target that may fail, or maybe something else?
Or you deliver by boat and skip those annoying defenses altogether.
Either way I think that it is prudent to take steps to harden the infrastructure, especially where it can be done at moderate cost.
Note that the infrastructure which is to be hardened is much bigger in cross section than a car or a PC. A power grid can actually intercept a lot of energy from a space-side nuclear blast or an exceptional solar flare. I agree that it is prudent to harden such infrastructure.
My question is more relevant than mpapet's observation was. The original poster observed:
When your profit is determined by the government, you always turn to the government to increase or maintain your profits, which in turn means you become quite expert at that game.
So mpapet observes:
The other last time I looked, business interests of all kinds turn to governments to maintain their profits, and raise barriers to comp
etition.
Why would mpapet make that observation? He implies here that it's just another case of a business interest turning to government to "maintain their profits". That in turn implies that the business has other choices contrary to the original poster's assertion that these electricity companies have a sole target to game.
At this point, I became curious about what mpapet actually thought and believed compared to what he wrote. My question in hindsight was not a good one, but there's still a problem with his reasoning.
The neo-con ideology which has pervaded most capitalist economies is one of debt fuelled growth. This is across the board including government, business and private household debt. In the US this started in earnest with Regan, in other countries it began when whatever new-breed, neo-con idealist came to power in their country.
This scheme predates neo-con ideology by at least centuries. A number of businesspeople and adventurers borrowed with an eye to making more than enough to pay off that debt. And debt-fueled growth doesn't respect ideological lines. For example, the USSR and modern Venezuela did this trick with mediocre results.
I don't have any complaints about the post outside of that.
This is a pretty weak troll. While it is true that the previous poster would have been more accurate to say that morality and ethics weren't defined as claimed by the original poster, their etymological analysis did reflect the actual meaning of the terms.
So do regulated utilities. You need some way to distinguish between the two.
The other last time I looked, business interests of all kinds turn to governments to maintain their profits, and raise barriers to competition.
So you disagree that there is a stronger incentive to turn to government to enhance your business model when the government is the primary factor determining how profitable you are?
Put that explosion over the central United States, and then draw a 1,000 mile radius of damage. Which do you think will have a bigger impact? One city hit by a nuke, or most of the US hit by EMP?
cold fjord, he already mentioned actual evidence, Starfish Prime. We already have a good idea of how much damage such a bomb can do on the ground and hundreds of kilometers above Earth. Starfish Prime just didn't do that much.
So the answer appears to be that hitting one large city like New York City with a nuke causes more damage. Further, the 1.4 megaton size of Starfish Prime is rather large for a bomb. Shrink the bomb to tens of kilotons and the math is even stronger in favor of hitting cities.
In 2020 we'll be hearing "Obama did it, too" from the Republicans.
You're probably right. I'm sure this idea will be a huge stretch for everyone here, including me, but maybe, just maybe, we shouldn't use the worst of us as our role models? Nor excuse others who do so?
So can we just all admit that we have no control over our government anymore
Why admit something that isn't true? Would I love to have more control over my government, the US government? Absolutely. Would I like to have a much smaller government which can be controlled easier? Absolutely. Would I like constitutional rule changes, like abandoning the first past the post, that undermine the current political oligopoly? Absolutely. That doesn't mean that no control currently exists, but rather what control does exist can be greatly improved.
Which is what they've done, considering they haven't made it a rule yet
Doesn't look like that to me. Looks like they made the rule, but are going through a legally required public hearing before they implement it (note that they don't actually have to pay any attention to the outcome of the hearing). If they didn't have to go through those motions, I think the rule would already be implemented.
Now, I suppose they might be honestly trying to implement regulation on a public health basis, but it could also be a rule to favor large feed producers or major breweries who happen to have the economies of scale to deal with yet another frivolous but obstructive rule.
Congress certainly could limit how much individuals, corporations, unions, etc. can spend on political messages.
Without violating the First Amendment? I think it's much harder to do that than you do. Political messages fall into two protected categories of the First Amendment - speech and petition for redress of grievances.
But you are splitting hairs saying its not congress' job to amend the constitution.
I didn't split that hair. Looking back through the thread, no one else did either. We were responding to the original claim that Congress could pass a law to reverse Citizens United. It can't. All the talk of constitutional amendments (which aren't legislative law) doesn't change that.
Government does. Notice that every major currency in the world is backed by a government or in the case of the Euro, a group of governments. You have to go pretty far down in scale before you find currencies that aren't government-backed, such as BitCoin or currencies in MMOs.
The first rule of Tautology Club is the first rule of Tautology Club.
A truism isn't a tautology. In the US, there exists those who are law abiding, complying with regulations and common sense with respect to fire arms, whether they own them or not. They make up the vast majority of the population. And there's a fair sized group of people who commit crimes with hand guns most which are already illegally obtained.
Are you claiming that gun control laws are useless if one person ignores them? Australia passed laws in 1996 to greatly limit firearms. The number of firearms and the number of violent deaths in Australia both suffered major declines in the years since then.
Of course, I am. The US experienced a similar decline in violent deaths from firearms and for the most part, didn't tighten gun control laws.
By the NRA fundamentalists' logic, we shouldn't have laws because criminals ignore laws anyway.
Keep in mind that these are laws which constrain the actions of the law abiding while doing nothing to change the behavior of those already committing crimes.
If thats the only 'fact' supporting why it should be approved, then it should not be.
This is why US law permits what it doesn't explicitly ban. So people like you can't just block things without a reason. Making money is not something that just magically happens. It occurs for two reasons, either someone is providing a service of value and receiving adequate compensation for it. Or someone is forcing someone to buy their shit. Making money in the absence of coercion implies that a good or service of value is being traded voluntarily.
There are several problems with this point of view. First, those who are greedy may throw their support to a harmful ideology (such as happened with German business and the Nazis prior to the Second World War). They can cause great harm in their own right, such as the Congo Free State or the British East India company.
Third, they can hold ideologies and attempt to pursue their greed in a way steered by their ideological blinders. For example, the Russian sell off of oil assets was expected to be a massive generator of economic value by a lot of generic business people, and it was - for a clique of well-connected oligarches. Everyone else who wasn't so well connected didn't do as well as they thought they would.
And so I don't get worried about corporations influencing governments. As long as they're kept at one anothers' throats (capitalism) things are working more or less the way they should.
This is the third great division of power in US politics.
Slashdot Mirror
The problem with that is that "the greenhouse effect" is a *cause*, but "climate change" is a *result*
An effect is not a cause. For example, the second definition from that link:
an event, condition, or state of affairs that is produced by a cause
The unstated part of the quote (which was obvious to all at the time) is "in the eyes of the law".
No. For example, the phrase shows up in the preamble to the Declaration of Independence (1776) and it is "obvious to all at the time" that it wasn't qualified by "in the eyes of the law".
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.
See? No qualifier, explicit or implied.
I feel like now it would be more rational to forgo working in the hopes of graduating faster to get into a job that has a wage high enough to start paying back all of those loans.
Two problems with that feeling. Why would you graduate faster? Among other things, crap jobs help teach you how to do things important to graduatin from college faster, such as time management and not procrastinating.
And less job experience means a more reluctant employer. If borrowing money is driving your life decisions to this extent, then I think the problem is that you are borrowing too much money.
critical thinking skills are acquired via the liberal arts side
That's vile slander from the detractors of the liberal arts. How could you properly indoctrinate students in thoughtgood, if you're so far off message? There are a lot of fields, such as the victim studies where critical thinking just gets in the way.
First, the majority of people do not possess the ability to think critically.
IMHO, if they have a brain, they have the ability. Not thinking critically is not the same as not having the ability to think critically.
Second, why is everything the education systems fault? Why don't parents encourage their children to think critically?
Why? You just said most people don't have the ability. Encouragement from parents wouldn't change that (and would actually be a waste of the parent's time), unless the ability actually was there.
Instead of attracting the best talent we have states actively eroding teacher benefits which drives the talent away and opens the door for Teach for America type excuses for real teachers.
Just think (well, if you have the ability to) how much worse it must be in those countries which aren't spending as much on education per student as the US does - like Finland, Sweden, Japan, and Germany. They must be absolutely benighted places.
It's more than just outsourcing. Most of those young people haven't worked at anything before they enter college and a lot of them don't start working till after they leave college. Going well into your adult life without actually holding any job (even one outside of IT) is pretty destructive just on its own.
That they will be successful is only a foregone conclusion in a country where people steadfastly stick to the belief that political donations are speech and that corporations have rights in addition to the rights of the individuals it employs.
Because there's only one interest possible in the corporate world - make some quick bucks for these particular electricity companies? No. You don't get it. This is not the only corporate interest out there. Even in a world dominated by corporate interests, which isn't the case in Oklahoma or the US, there would still be conflicts between the corporations.
Also, we see once again that certain people are willing to take rights away from business owners and employees. You still have that little problem that it is unconstitutional. The Constitution doesn't make an exception for agents of corporations from its lists of rights, enumerated or not. The whole point of corporate personhood is to honor those rights.
But you're an oligarchy
Not the last time I checked. Maybe I can shoot laser beams from my eyes too? I'll have to try that sometime.
therefore by you saying that you possess some control over your government you're admitting that you're in the 1%
Oh, I see. This is a logical fail in slow motion.
Wrong.
Don't I actually have to be wrong first before this term applies? I've heard the ZOMG Federal Reserve argument before. The Fed is an institution created and backed by the power of the US government. The US government runs the top level of the Fed and happens to control in other ways what policies the Fed can implement (for example, via pressure on bank members).
The whole scheme of money creation was created and endorsed by the US government who backs it up with a variety of means. As an example of that last statement, I suggest you actually look at a US bill. It has on it "this note is legal tender for all debts, public and private". Being required to pay your US taxes, both federal and state, with US dollars is yet another way the US government backs its currency. You can also pay debts and public charges with currency.
In modern, neo-Liberal economic societies Government borrows money from private, central banks. This money is called into creation as debt. The creation of the money is an act of the bank - an accounting phantom - entering new assets as black ink on their ledgers.
Like any other transaction, it is a mutual act of two or more parties. This is an act of the bank and an act of the government.
If EMP doesn't do that much, why would the military harden its electronics against it?
Because they have to design for being a lot closer to a nuclear blast than 400 km.
How much would the EMP attack be enhanced by optimizing the warhead for that in a fashion similar to what is done for neutron bombs?
That adds mass to the warhead. Plus most of the energy of the weapon is already in the form of gamma rays.
If you've only got one shot in the face of missile defenses, do you go for an obvious high value target that may fail, or maybe something else?
Or you deliver by boat and skip those annoying defenses altogether.
Either way I think that it is prudent to take steps to harden the infrastructure, especially where it can be done at moderate cost.
Note that the infrastructure which is to be hardened is much bigger in cross section than a car or a PC. A power grid can actually intercept a lot of energy from a space-side nuclear blast or an exceptional solar flare. I agree that it is prudent to harden such infrastructure.
When your profit is determined by the government, you always turn to the government to increase or maintain your profits, which in turn means you become quite expert at that game.
So mpapet observes:
The other last time I looked, business interests of all kinds turn to governments to maintain their profits, and raise barriers to comp etition.
Why would mpapet make that observation? He implies here that it's just another case of a business interest turning to government to "maintain their profits". That in turn implies that the business has other choices contrary to the original poster's assertion that these electricity companies have a sole target to game.
At this point, I became curious about what mpapet actually thought and believed compared to what he wrote. My question in hindsight was not a good one, but there's still a problem with his reasoning.
The neo-con ideology which has pervaded most capitalist economies is one of debt fuelled growth. This is across the board including government, business and private household debt. In the US this started in earnest with Regan, in other countries it began when whatever new-breed, neo-con idealist came to power in their country.
This scheme predates neo-con ideology by at least centuries. A number of businesspeople and adventurers borrowed with an eye to making more than enough to pay off that debt. And debt-fueled growth doesn't respect ideological lines. For example, the USSR and modern Venezuela did this trick with mediocre results.
I don't have any complaints about the post outside of that.
This is a pretty weak troll. While it is true that the previous poster would have been more accurate to say that morality and ethics weren't defined as claimed by the original poster, their etymological analysis did reflect the actual meaning of the terms.
Deregulated utilities end up as monopolies.
So do regulated utilities. You need some way to distinguish between the two.
The other last time I looked, business interests of all kinds turn to governments to maintain their profits, and raise barriers to competition.
So you disagree that there is a stronger incentive to turn to government to enhance your business model when the government is the primary factor determining how profitable you are?
Put that explosion over the central United States, and then draw a 1,000 mile radius of damage. Which do you think will have a bigger impact? One city hit by a nuke, or most of the US hit by EMP?
cold fjord, he already mentioned actual evidence, Starfish Prime. We already have a good idea of how much damage such a bomb can do on the ground and hundreds of kilometers above Earth. Starfish Prime just didn't do that much.
So the answer appears to be that hitting one large city like New York City with a nuke causes more damage. Further, the 1.4 megaton size of Starfish Prime is rather large for a bomb. Shrink the bomb to tens of kilotons and the math is even stronger in favor of hitting cities.
In 2020 we'll be hearing "Obama did it, too" from the Republicans.
You're probably right. I'm sure this idea will be a huge stretch for everyone here, including me, but maybe, just maybe, we shouldn't use the worst of us as our role models? Nor excuse others who do so?
So can we just all admit that we have no control over our government anymore
Why admit something that isn't true? Would I love to have more control over my government, the US government? Absolutely. Would I like to have a much smaller government which can be controlled easier? Absolutely. Would I like constitutional rule changes, like abandoning the first past the post, that undermine the current political oligopoly? Absolutely. That doesn't mean that no control currently exists, but rather what control does exist can be greatly improved.
Which is what they've done, considering they haven't made it a rule yet
Doesn't look like that to me. Looks like they made the rule, but are going through a legally required public hearing before they implement it (note that they don't actually have to pay any attention to the outcome of the hearing). If they didn't have to go through those motions, I think the rule would already be implemented.
Now, I suppose they might be honestly trying to implement regulation on a public health basis, but it could also be a rule to favor large feed producers or major breweries who happen to have the economies of scale to deal with yet another frivolous but obstructive rule.
Congress certainly could limit how much individuals, corporations, unions, etc. can spend on political messages.
Without violating the First Amendment? I think it's much harder to do that than you do. Political messages fall into two protected categories of the First Amendment - speech and petition for redress of grievances.
But you are splitting hairs saying its not congress' job to amend the constitution.
I didn't split that hair. Looking back through the thread, no one else did either. We were responding to the original claim that Congress could pass a law to reverse Citizens United. It can't. All the talk of constitutional amendments (which aren't legislative law) doesn't change that.
Who creates money?
Government does. Notice that every major currency in the world is backed by a government or in the case of the Euro, a group of governments. You have to go pretty far down in scale before you find currencies that aren't government-backed, such as BitCoin or currencies in MMOs.
The first rule of Tautology Club is the first rule of Tautology Club.
A truism isn't a tautology. In the US, there exists those who are law abiding, complying with regulations and common sense with respect to fire arms, whether they own them or not. They make up the vast majority of the population. And there's a fair sized group of people who commit crimes with hand guns most which are already illegally obtained.
Are you claiming that gun control laws are useless if one person ignores them? Australia passed laws in 1996 to greatly limit firearms. The number of firearms and the number of violent deaths in Australia both suffered major declines in the years since then.
Of course, I am. The US experienced a similar decline in violent deaths from firearms and for the most part, didn't tighten gun control laws.
By the NRA fundamentalists' logic, we shouldn't have laws because criminals ignore laws anyway.
Keep in mind that these are laws which constrain the actions of the law abiding while doing nothing to change the behavior of those already committing crimes.
If thats the only 'fact' supporting why it should be approved, then it should not be.
This is why US law permits what it doesn't explicitly ban. So people like you can't just block things without a reason. Making money is not something that just magically happens. It occurs for two reasons, either someone is providing a service of value and receiving adequate compensation for it. Or someone is forcing someone to buy their shit. Making money in the absence of coercion implies that a good or service of value is being traded voluntarily.
Third, they can hold ideologies and attempt to pursue their greed in a way steered by their ideological blinders. For example, the Russian sell off of oil assets was expected to be a massive generator of economic value by a lot of generic business people, and it was - for a clique of well-connected oligarches. Everyone else who wasn't so well connected didn't do as well as they thought they would.
And so I don't get worried about corporations influencing governments. As long as they're kept at one anothers' throats (capitalism) things are working more or less the way they should.
This is the third great division of power in US politics.