Sounds like it is not a violation of rights, but is a continuance of acceptable monitoring.
Just because an activity is widespread doesn't imply it is not an violation of rights. It's also worth noting that most of these "acceptable monitoring" efforts are voluntary. You chose to carry the RFID. Here. there are significant penalties, if the student doesn't go to school. And the student isn't going to school without an RFID chip apparently.
While I feel a knee-jerk reaction against such privacy invasion myself, I am also open to the notion that the only way we will better understand human activity is to study it. As the schools aren't open about any such goal, and probably don't even have one I suppose we can discount it in this case. Data on human activity is of immense worth however, and to stand in the way of harvesting it for no rational reason is akin to religious nuttery.
To elaborate on the point the other replier made, human research in the developed world generally is based on the informed and voluntary consent of the subjects of the research.
As for the dangers of indoctrinating children.
One need only look at student loans in the US. There's a huge disaster brewing there from millions of college students borrowing large amounts (on usurious terms, creating unique debt that cannot be discharged or ameliorated in a bankruptcy proceeding) for the risky process of obtaining a credential with dubious value, the college diploma.
What exactly are the ill effects you perceive of more people knowing your shit? The next generation are telling everybody their shit voluntarily anyway.
And we're seeing some of the more obvious effects, such as losing jobs or relationships because of something that got online (and not necessarily by the intent of the victim).
But I have to ask here, why should I be in favor of a problem that can result in fraud, theft, blackmail, or other crimes against me? Or which can result in powerful entities knowing too much about me and using that to harm me and those I care about?
A student can't opt out of homework either. Better call the civil rights people, sounds like slavery to me.
Well, if the high school had to pay at least minimum wage, it would curtail some of these abuses. A student spends something like 35-40 hours per week in the high school classroom. Let's say 10 hours per week. If in addition they're working a job for say another 10 hours, then that's 55-60 hours of work each week (which is massive especially to the people who claim 40 hour work weeks are too long) and they're only being paid for 10 of them. Plus in too many cases, that work just doesn't prepare them educationally or vocationally. Then it's just a huge chunk of their lives wasted.
Your last post contained a non-sequitur and a logical fallacy
I disagree. You claimed courts were a money sink with benefits that justify the sink. I pointed out that the civil courts didn't have that problem. Their costs are generally covered by payments from the participants in the case.
And I still find it interesting that you have to be forced to pay for a good thing.
that the only thing I get from it is that you are almost as bad a libertard as roman_mir.
Perhaps you should try to bring your irrationality down to his level. At least, he doesn't use retarded terms like "libertard".
Look what happened to OWS - it fizzled out instead of escalating.
I think it's instructive to look at the differences between how the Tea Party and OWS fared. Tea Party is still going and changing campaign planks throughout the US. It wasn't strong enough to knock out Romney, but it forced the hand of whoever manipulates vote tabulation in Republican primaries.
In comparison, what electoral results has OWS accomplished? They were big protests. They got in the news and inconvenienced a lot of people. There's even some sort of mildly coherent narrative about what OWS is about. But they haven't tried much less succeeded at changing how people vote.
Think of it this way (car analogy time!): a crisis is like a car crash. It's bad, but people could see the car from a mile away and avoid it if they had a bit of sense. Instability would be if the car's invisible, and nobody knows when a car might or might not crash (and where it would crash, so you don't know which way to dodge)
The driver is getting paid a lot of money to crash someone else's car. Plus he's got an air bag and seat belt. All the excitement happens to the people he hits. So it's just not his problem. And a lot of people just don't have that sense to get out of the way.
Society has more than a monetary benefit from a working post office with universal service. As an example, it enables the smooth functioning of the courts, by being a universal carrier for legal documents.
So how do you explain the civil court principle of "loser pays court costs."
If you really think that all benefits from a public service can be accounted for in cash, then that serves only as proof that you're a basement-dwelling teenager with walls full of Ayn Rand posters.
So if we didn't force you to pay taxes, you wouldn't pay for a working court system and law enforcement service? It's just not that valuable to you to voluntarily pay for it with money?
We could list the similarities for hours, right? Everything from the PATRIOT act, support for the TSA, the bailouts of private corporations, and countless billion dollars of government grants to private corporations that donated to campaigns, etc..
Well, how does not getting reelected help Obama or Bush further their goals and beliefs? That explains the funding and naked cronyism right there. And something like the PATRIOT act or the TSA is red meat to authoritarians looking to expand their power. That aspect Bush and Obama have in common.
Well, what am I supposed to do? Again, what you claim isn't what happened. I even went back to the part in question, and it's just not there.
So how many people is that? 535 right? That's slightly more common than 1 in a million as a portion of the overall US. So I'm supposed to be wrong about the attitudes of hundreds of millions of people, because an incredibly small group behaves peculiarly? This is a non sequitur, assertions that do not follow from the premises.
I don't belittle elected officials there. Nor do I suggest my voice is somehow more valid. Plus, I am a bit puzzled by the accusation. What's wrong with belittling elected representatives? How is that somehow worse than belittling any other choice of the public, say like what system of measurements they use or whether they prefer dollar coins or bills? At least your system of measure or your dollar coins aren't going to put on airs or get into trouble on their own.
And I still don't see how discussing the allegedly non-economic interests (the example of the "fiscal cliff" seems a poor choice BTW since it appears to me to be typical political brinksmanship over mostly economic matters) of Congress has any bearing to the problem at hand.
The amount of doublethink it would take to reach that conclusion from what I said
I was merely pointing out that you were using irrelevant measures. Did we change biologically in the last century? No. Did we change mentally in the last century? No. We are the same people we were.
And let's note why that's important. The earlier poster asked "Why not look at history?" Modest changes in society just don't qualify as a serious reason for why we can't use the lessons of history.
How can you not see? The poor class in the US is completely subservient. They're a combination of too hungry, too dumb, too sick, and too drugged up (by the media, or real drugs) to fight back.
Only a minority of them stand up, and they're highly inefficient, quickly shunned and dismissed (i.e. OWS, Tea Party, etc)
And how does that help economic stability? Repress small demonstrations means you'll just get big ones. Again, I don't see whatever point you are trying to make here.
First, quite a few people (example) predicted the collapse. There was little threat to stability for those who planned around it.
I agree that the crisis was easy to spot. And a lot of people responsible didn't because the incentives were in place to ignore it. But that "safety net" was in part responsible for creating the incentives for the crisis.
For example, a significant portion of the most questionable real estate loans in the US were for "affordable housing". I don't think it was the cause (easy credit from the fed and extremely high leverage was the real causes), but it was a contributing factor to an incident that created a lot of economic instability, which was my original point in all this.
This is a common mistake to make. If it's valuable, then someone will be willing to pay their own money for it, even if the main parties to the transaction can't pay for it directly.
And the post office needs no such charity. There's a straightforward mechanism of postage by which people can pay for the service.
I have to sneeze into my hand (and I have to have the flue, ofc). Then in less than a minute I have to shake hands with you (and you should not have flu), then you need to touch your nose or mouth more or less immediately *and* there needs to be a very high dose of viruses that you catch an infection.
As I said to the other replier, here is a working scenario by which this can happen.
You can wash your hans as often as you want, the likelihood that you get infected that way is so small it is not worth it.
Not at all. A lot of people cover their face when they sneeze. But if they don't clean their hands afterward, they can still infect people and you demonstrate one means by which they can do so.
but he was trying to get extensions from the Iraqis to let us stay even longer.
Extensions that the Iraqis were willing to give. Sure, it wasn't going to be for free, but I see no evidence the strings attached would have been onerous. IMHO, if Obama really wanted to stay in Iraq longer, he could have gotten adequate terms for that.
Concerning Iran, Obama's administration is just as full of chicken-hawks as Bush's was. There's already been a big propaganda push against Iran. I see no reason to believe that Obama is any less interested in invading Iran than McCain would have been.
Obama has been working hard to prevent an Israeli strike on Iran facilities (having a friend do the actual shooting is very "chicken hawk"). And his administration is notably cooler to Israel than the Bush administration was.
I agree that there is a propaganda push. What I disagree on is the assumption that this is a deliberate prelude to war. Obama routinely does such standoffs with many parties. And these actions are typically propaganda-heavy. It strikes me that he's pretty much treating Iran as another political obstacle, like Republican congresscritters. I don't think that's a healthy attitude, but I'm not the one with the job.
That doesn't mean that the US won't get in a war with Iran. I just don't think Obama's administration is planning such.
Personally, I'd be more comfortable with a government that *can't* survive nazi-theocrat-extinctionists holding the reins of power.
Like the Weimar Republic? That didn't turn out well. And there's a number of other cases where candidates with particularly nasty hidden agendas got in and destroyed a society simply because not enough safeguards were in place.
And Rockoon is right. GWB and Obama agreed on an AWFUL lot.
You and a baboon would agree on an AWFUL lot as well. More importantly, in the same situations you would act very similar even if your beliefs aren't the same. Throw you in a fire and you'll try just as hard as that baboon to get out. That latter point is important because I think the fundamental flaw here is equating observed behavior with belief.
Consider Obamacare. Obama squandered immense political capital to get that thing passed. That sacrifice includes basically abandoning most of his promises. Bush would have laughed off most of the bill.
Conversely, Bush did much the same with respect with the war on Iraq, possibly even manufacturing evidence (it being difficult to prove someone was lying and incompetent instead of merely incompetent). Obama expressed his opposition to that war from the start, and it's unlikely he'd have ever entertained such a thing either on his own initiative or at the insistence of his supporters.
Or how about Obama's soak-the-rich schtick? Bush wouldn't have done that.
And then there's the respective lives the two led before they became presidents. Bush had considerable business experience prior to entering politics (though that experience mostly showed that he had little competence in such things). Meanwhile, the only business experience Obama had was some work at a legal firm and he got out after a short time (half a year maybe). Then Obama got on the "community organizer" and academia gigs. I don't see Bush getting into either, much less being successful at gaming those systems.
Then there's the leftist stuff that Obama has been involved in off and on over most of his life. Bush in comparison is a fundamentalist Christian with a blue blood, conservative outlook.
The point here is that they have obvious differences of ideology. And these show in what efforts they push the most. The "AWFUL lot" that they "agree" on, is stuff that if you screw up, you lose support for your main effort. Obama could have chosen to just pull all troops out of Iraq and Afghanistan, but the consequences of that would have hurt his domestic strategy. It's hard to pass Obamacare, if say your allied congresscritters are spending their time explaining why we're losing an ally in the Middle East or why someone blew up more real estate in New York City.
A US president has to pick and choose their battles. They can't just make arbitrarily large changes.
For real? You think Bush and Obama are extremely different?
Yes.
December 2008, Bush was gearing up to leave office and Obama was gearing up to enter office. Both proclaimed their support for the GM bailout:
So? The GM bailout ended up helping the UAW, an Obama ally, tremendously. It wouldn't have happened that way under a Bush administration.
We could list the similarities for hours, right? Everything from the PATRIOT act, support for the TSA, the bailouts of private corporations, and countless billion dollars of government grants to private corporations that donated to campaigns, etc..
Most of which would have happened no matter who was in office. Hence, my point. We don't want pharaoh-style tearing down of the predecessor's works or winner-takes-all politics.
Either way, the underclass is prevented from turning to crime and rebellion
I don't see the connection. To the contrary, a repressed and held down underclass seems to resort to crime a lot. Further, why are we measuring economic stability only in terms of crime and rebellion? There was a recent economic crisis that threatened economic stability, and it didn't originate from an underclass.
I think this sort of reasoning should be standard fare for political debate. If your attitude on a political or ethical activity or behavior changes based on the identity of who did it, then there's something fundamentally wrong.
The previous example is classic and describes one of the fundamental hypocrisies of politics: it's ok if the good guys do it, but not ok if the bad guys do it. Another one is the evolution of power. Too many people are willing to grant some political figure power because they like that person. They aren't willing to consider what happens when that political figure is no longer in power and another less appealing figure comes in.
As I see it, I want a government stable enough that it doesn't fall apart the moment an extreme faction gets in power. You want something that can survive a neo-nazi, fundamentalist (of any religious flavor), voluntary human extinctionist head of state, or whatever crazy ideology is out there. And frankly, I think the US has such a system. It's survived (so far) both G. W. Bush and Obama, for example, and that's probably as extreme a difference in ideology as you're likely to get.
A companies first and foremost responsibility is to it's customers, 2nd to it's employees and finally 3rd to it's shareholders.
This bears repeating. Bankruptcy solves this problem as much as anything can. Perhaps due to the systemic risk of so many institutions failing at once, there should have been some sort of action to provide liquidity or whatever. But that could have been done on the cheap while the company was going through bankruptcy. Instead, they turned a crisis into a milk run, transferring wealth from the public to the people who caused the crisis.
Those rail guns are going to be nearly direct fire weapons. That means the defender with a laser probably can get line of sight with the shooter. Doesn't mean that the defender can do much (say to a heavily armored against laser target 200 miles away), but it does limit the options.
And indirect fire weapons are quite susceptible to this sort of thing.
Income taxes aren't the only taxes out there. AMT kicks in once you get to a certain income level. Some safety net programs drop completely, if you earn too much.
Slashdot Mirror
Sounds like it is not a violation of rights, but is a continuance of acceptable monitoring.
Just because an activity is widespread doesn't imply it is not an violation of rights. It's also worth noting that most of these "acceptable monitoring" efforts are voluntary. You chose to carry the RFID. Here. there are significant penalties, if the student doesn't go to school. And the student isn't going to school without an RFID chip apparently.
While I feel a knee-jerk reaction against such privacy invasion myself, I am also open to the notion that the only way we will better understand human activity is to study it. As the schools aren't open about any such goal, and probably don't even have one I suppose we can discount it in this case. Data on human activity is of immense worth however, and to stand in the way of harvesting it for no rational reason is akin to religious nuttery.
To elaborate on the point the other replier made, human research in the developed world generally is based on the informed and voluntary consent of the subjects of the research.
As for the dangers of indoctrinating children.
One need only look at student loans in the US. There's a huge disaster brewing there from millions of college students borrowing large amounts (on usurious terms, creating unique debt that cannot be discharged or ameliorated in a bankruptcy proceeding) for the risky process of obtaining a credential with dubious value, the college diploma.
What exactly are the ill effects you perceive of more people knowing your shit? The next generation are telling everybody their shit voluntarily anyway.
And we're seeing some of the more obvious effects, such as losing jobs or relationships because of something that got online (and not necessarily by the intent of the victim).
But I have to ask here, why should I be in favor of a problem that can result in fraud, theft, blackmail, or other crimes against me? Or which can result in powerful entities knowing too much about me and using that to harm me and those I care about?
A student can't opt out of homework either. Better call the civil rights people, sounds like slavery to me.
Well, if the high school had to pay at least minimum wage, it would curtail some of these abuses. A student spends something like 35-40 hours per week in the high school classroom. Let's say 10 hours per week. If in addition they're working a job for say another 10 hours, then that's 55-60 hours of work each week (which is massive especially to the people who claim 40 hour work weeks are too long) and they're only being paid for 10 of them. Plus in too many cases, that work just doesn't prepare them educationally or vocationally. Then it's just a huge chunk of their lives wasted.
Your last post contained a non-sequitur and a logical fallacy
I disagree. You claimed courts were a money sink with benefits that justify the sink. I pointed out that the civil courts didn't have that problem. Their costs are generally covered by payments from the participants in the case.
And I still find it interesting that you have to be forced to pay for a good thing.
that the only thing I get from it is that you are almost as bad a libertard as roman_mir.
Perhaps you should try to bring your irrationality down to his level. At least, he doesn't use retarded terms like "libertard".
Look what happened to OWS - it fizzled out instead of escalating.
I think it's instructive to look at the differences between how the Tea Party and OWS fared. Tea Party is still going and changing campaign planks throughout the US. It wasn't strong enough to knock out Romney, but it forced the hand of whoever manipulates vote tabulation in Republican primaries.
In comparison, what electoral results has OWS accomplished? They were big protests. They got in the news and inconvenienced a lot of people. There's even some sort of mildly coherent narrative about what OWS is about. But they haven't tried much less succeeded at changing how people vote.
Think of it this way (car analogy time!): a crisis is like a car crash. It's bad, but people could see the car from a mile away and avoid it if they had a bit of sense. Instability would be if the car's invisible, and nobody knows when a car might or might not crash (and where it would crash, so you don't know which way to dodge)
The driver is getting paid a lot of money to crash someone else's car. Plus he's got an air bag and seat belt. All the excitement happens to the people he hits. So it's just not his problem. And a lot of people just don't have that sense to get out of the way.
That's what you got from my post? Seriously? I think you need to worry less about libertards and more about your own thought processes.
Society has more than a monetary benefit from a working post office with universal service. As an example, it enables the smooth functioning of the courts, by being a universal carrier for legal documents.
So how do you explain the civil court principle of "loser pays court costs."
If you really think that all benefits from a public service can be accounted for in cash, then that serves only as proof that you're a basement-dwelling teenager with walls full of Ayn Rand posters.
So if we didn't force you to pay taxes, you wouldn't pay for a working court system and law enforcement service? It's just not that valuable to you to voluntarily pay for it with money?
We could list the similarities for hours, right? Everything from the PATRIOT act, support for the TSA, the bailouts of private corporations, and countless billion dollars of government grants to private corporations that donated to campaigns, etc..
Well, how does not getting reelected help Obama or Bush further their goals and beliefs? That explains the funding and naked cronyism right there. And something like the PATRIOT act or the TSA is red meat to authoritarians looking to expand their power. That aspect Bush and Obama have in common.
So how many people is that? 535 right? That's slightly more common than 1 in a million as a portion of the overall US. So I'm supposed to be wrong about the attitudes of hundreds of millions of people, because an incredibly small group behaves peculiarly? This is a non sequitur, assertions that do not follow from the premises.
I don't belittle elected officials there. Nor do I suggest my voice is somehow more valid. Plus, I am a bit puzzled by the accusation. What's wrong with belittling elected representatives? How is that somehow worse than belittling any other choice of the public, say like what system of measurements they use or whether they prefer dollar coins or bills? At least your system of measure or your dollar coins aren't going to put on airs or get into trouble on their own.
And I still don't see how discussing the allegedly non-economic interests (the example of the "fiscal cliff" seems a poor choice BTW since it appears to me to be typical political brinksmanship over mostly economic matters) of Congress has any bearing to the problem at hand.
The amount of doublethink it would take to reach that conclusion from what I said
I was merely pointing out that you were using irrelevant measures. Did we change biologically in the last century? No. Did we change mentally in the last century? No. We are the same people we were.
And let's note why that's important. The earlier poster asked "Why not look at history?" Modest changes in society just don't qualify as a serious reason for why we can't use the lessons of history.
How can you not see? The poor class in the US is completely subservient. They're a combination of too hungry, too dumb, too sick, and too drugged up (by the media, or real drugs) to fight back.
Only a minority of them stand up, and they're highly inefficient, quickly shunned and dismissed (i.e. OWS, Tea Party, etc)
And how does that help economic stability? Repress small demonstrations means you'll just get big ones. Again, I don't see whatever point you are trying to make here.
First, quite a few people (example) predicted the collapse. There was little threat to stability for those who planned around it.
I agree that the crisis was easy to spot. And a lot of people responsible didn't because the incentives were in place to ignore it. But that "safety net" was in part responsible for creating the incentives for the crisis.
For example, a significant portion of the most questionable real estate loans in the US were for "affordable housing". I don't think it was the cause (easy credit from the fed and extremely high leverage was the real causes), but it was a contributing factor to an incident that created a lot of economic instability, which was my original point in all this.
This is a common mistake to make. If it's valuable, then someone will be willing to pay their own money for it, even if the main parties to the transaction can't pay for it directly.
And the post office needs no such charity. There's a straightforward mechanism of postage by which people can pay for the service.
I have to sneeze into my hand (and I have to have the flue, ofc). Then in less than a minute I have to shake hands with you (and you should not have flu), then you need to touch your nose or mouth more or less immediately *and* there needs to be a very high dose of viruses that you catch an infection.
As I said to the other replier, here is a working scenario by which this can happen.
You can wash your hans as often as you want, the likelihood that you get infected that way is so small it is not worth it.
Not at all. A lot of people cover their face when they sneeze. But if they don't clean their hands afterward, they can still infect people and you demonstrate one means by which they can do so.
Yes, but you have to sneeze into your hand, shake hands with someone, then they have to touch their mouth or nose, all within a few seconds.
And that happens. Can we move on now?
but he was trying to get extensions from the Iraqis to let us stay even longer.
Extensions that the Iraqis were willing to give. Sure, it wasn't going to be for free, but I see no evidence the strings attached would have been onerous. IMHO, if Obama really wanted to stay in Iraq longer, he could have gotten adequate terms for that.
Concerning Iran, Obama's administration is just as full of chicken-hawks as Bush's was. There's already been a big propaganda push against Iran. I see no reason to believe that Obama is any less interested in invading Iran than McCain would have been.
Obama has been working hard to prevent an Israeli strike on Iran facilities (having a friend do the actual shooting is very "chicken hawk"). And his administration is notably cooler to Israel than the Bush administration was.
I agree that there is a propaganda push. What I disagree on is the assumption that this is a deliberate prelude to war. Obama routinely does such standoffs with many parties. And these actions are typically propaganda-heavy. It strikes me that he's pretty much treating Iran as another political obstacle, like Republican congresscritters. I don't think that's a healthy attitude, but I'm not the one with the job.
That doesn't mean that the US won't get in a war with Iran. I just don't think Obama's administration is planning such.
Personally, I'd be more comfortable with a government that *can't* survive nazi-theocrat-extinctionists holding the reins of power.
Like the Weimar Republic? That didn't turn out well. And there's a number of other cases where candidates with particularly nasty hidden agendas got in and destroyed a society simply because not enough safeguards were in place.
And Rockoon is right. GWB and Obama agreed on an AWFUL lot.
You and a baboon would agree on an AWFUL lot as well. More importantly, in the same situations you would act very similar even if your beliefs aren't the same. Throw you in a fire and you'll try just as hard as that baboon to get out. That latter point is important because I think the fundamental flaw here is equating observed behavior with belief.
Consider Obamacare. Obama squandered immense political capital to get that thing passed. That sacrifice includes basically abandoning most of his promises. Bush would have laughed off most of the bill.
Conversely, Bush did much the same with respect with the war on Iraq, possibly even manufacturing evidence (it being difficult to prove someone was lying and incompetent instead of merely incompetent). Obama expressed his opposition to that war from the start, and it's unlikely he'd have ever entertained such a thing either on his own initiative or at the insistence of his supporters.
Or how about Obama's soak-the-rich schtick? Bush wouldn't have done that.
And then there's the respective lives the two led before they became presidents. Bush had considerable business experience prior to entering politics (though that experience mostly showed that he had little competence in such things). Meanwhile, the only business experience Obama had was some work at a legal firm and he got out after a short time (half a year maybe). Then Obama got on the "community organizer" and academia gigs. I don't see Bush getting into either, much less being successful at gaming those systems.
Then there's the leftist stuff that Obama has been involved in off and on over most of his life. Bush in comparison is a fundamentalist Christian with a blue blood, conservative outlook.
The point here is that they have obvious differences of ideology. And these show in what efforts they push the most. The "AWFUL lot" that they "agree" on, is stuff that if you screw up, you lose support for your main effort. Obama could have chosen to just pull all troops out of Iraq and Afghanistan, but the consequences of that would have hurt his domestic strategy. It's hard to pass Obamacare, if say your allied congresscritters are spending their time explaining why we're losing an ally in the Middle East or why someone blew up more real estate in New York City.
A US president has to pick and choose their battles. They can't just make arbitrarily large changes.
For real? You think Bush and Obama are extremely different?
Yes.
December 2008, Bush was gearing up to leave office and Obama was gearing up to enter office. Both proclaimed their support for the GM bailout:
So? The GM bailout ended up helping the UAW, an Obama ally, tremendously. It wouldn't have happened that way under a Bush administration.
We could list the similarities for hours, right? Everything from the PATRIOT act, support for the TSA, the bailouts of private corporations, and countless billion dollars of government grants to private corporations that donated to campaigns, etc..
Most of which would have happened no matter who was in office. Hence, my point. We don't want pharaoh-style tearing down of the predecessor's works or winner-takes-all politics.
Either way, the underclass is prevented from turning to crime and rebellion
I don't see the connection. To the contrary, a repressed and held down underclass seems to resort to crime a lot. Further, why are we measuring economic stability only in terms of crime and rebellion? There was a recent economic crisis that threatened economic stability, and it didn't originate from an underclass.
I think this sort of reasoning should be standard fare for political debate. If your attitude on a political or ethical activity or behavior changes based on the identity of who did it, then there's something fundamentally wrong.
The previous example is classic and describes one of the fundamental hypocrisies of politics: it's ok if the good guys do it, but not ok if the bad guys do it. Another one is the evolution of power. Too many people are willing to grant some political figure power because they like that person. They aren't willing to consider what happens when that political figure is no longer in power and another less appealing figure comes in.
As I see it, I want a government stable enough that it doesn't fall apart the moment an extreme faction gets in power. You want something that can survive a neo-nazi, fundamentalist (of any religious flavor), voluntary human extinctionist head of state, or whatever crazy ideology is out there. And frankly, I think the US has such a system. It's survived (so far) both G. W. Bush and Obama, for example, and that's probably as extreme a difference in ideology as you're likely to get.
A companies first and foremost responsibility is to it's customers, 2nd to it's employees and finally 3rd to it's shareholders.
This bears repeating. Bankruptcy solves this problem as much as anything can. Perhaps due to the systemic risk of so many institutions failing at once, there should have been some sort of action to provide liquidity or whatever. But that could have been done on the cheap while the company was going through bankruptcy. Instead, they turned a crisis into a milk run, transferring wealth from the public to the people who caused the crisis.
You can not get flu by *just* shaking hands
Again the money quote:
Less often, a person might also get flu by touching a surface or object that has flu virus on it and then touching their own mouth or nose.
A hand is a "surface or object" that can have flu virus on it.
What happens if the bad guys happen to drop depth charges on that outlet?
Those rail guns are going to be nearly direct fire weapons. That means the defender with a laser probably can get line of sight with the shooter. Doesn't mean that the defender can do much (say to a heavily armored against laser target 200 miles away), but it does limit the options.
And indirect fire weapons are quite susceptible to this sort of thing.
Income taxes aren't the only taxes out there. AMT kicks in once you get to a certain income level. Some safety net programs drop completely, if you earn too much.
We aren't the same people we were a century or more ago - society has changed, people's expectations have changed, etc... etc...
In other words, we are the same people we were. Changing society or expectations doesn't change that.