you can easily obtain DNA from someone who is [in the database]
The fewer people who are in the database, the fewer choices are available to a forger. When everyone is in the database, nobody is off limits.
or you can plant DNA from someone who isn't and just report that you think you may have seen them leaving the scene.
And in doing so, either (A) draw attention to yourself as a witness, or (B) raise the suspicions of a frame-up with a needlessly anonymous tip.
If you can frame someone with DNA (and you certainly can), then you can frame them approximately as easily whether they're already in the database or not.
Saying it doesn't make it so. When everyone is in the database, forging anyone's blood is possible without any further involvement or the stigma of an anonymous tip.
I don't understand why I should have the right to be not knowable if my DNA shows up at a crime scene unless I have been previously *convicted* of a felony. By this argument, we want to make sure that those who are committing their first felony cannot be found via DNA. What is the advantage to society that we be unable to find first-time felons, or tenth-time felons who managed to plea bargain down to a non-felony each time they commit a felony?
The answer is easy to understand, but so much easier to overlook. If your DNA is in the database, then anyone who wants to commit a crime against any of your acquaintances, or frame you for whatever reason, has only to obtain the smallest sample of your DNA (e.g. from a kleenex or napkin in your trash), use an easily available PCR kit to amplify it, add the DNA to some of your type of whole blood with leukocytes removed, sprinkle a few drops at the crime scene, and presto! you're in jail on incontrovertable evidence.
But it's not incontrovertable if the process of faking your blood with PCRed DNA is so easy, is it? Well, that's missing the point. The likelyhood that anyone would actually do this sort of thing (if they haven't already) is strongly correlated with the proportion of the population cataloged in a database. If everyone is cataloged, then everyone's friend is cataloged, and everyone's enemy is cataloged. So no criminal is then precluded from establishing this nearly perfect diversion.
In short, the larger proportion of people in the cops database, the more useless the database becomes. As soon as one DNA forgery is discovered, there goes the "beyond a reasonable doubt" standard in every subsequent case.
a weak dollar... boosts domestic sales and US exports... a strong dollar... harms domestic sales
In the short term, that is true, although given the famously huge U.S. trade deficit there will obviously be more importers hurt than exporters helped. However, there is a lot more to it than that.
... if foreign U.S. investors start to abandon dollar-denominated securities on concerns that any profits will be lost as they convert back to their own currencies, U.S. investors may also take money from the stock market in a bid to beat the rush.
"If the dollar's slide is seen as transient, then the market will stabilize as investors realize the damage has been done," said Anthony Chan, senior managing director and chief economist at Banc One Investment Advisors, which oversees $180 billion. "But not even domestic investors are blind and they don't want to be in front of the train."
... If that reluctance to hold U.S. securities spreads to U.S. Treasuries, interest rates will also rise, potentially jeopardizing the economic recovery.
Another fear is that the strengthening global economy will make it harder for the U.S. to fund its current account deficit....
Note that the Prudential analyst quoted expects the economy to "decelerate" in the second half of 2004.
You are seriously suggesting that the dot-com crash was due to Bush saying he would "steeply" cut taxes and increase military spendnig and not touching entitlements?
The "dot com crash" was not due to Bush, but rather to the poor management you cited. Internet startups and telecom companies were never more than 10% of stock capitalization. The broad-market crash, amounting to $7 billion in lost securities value and affecting every sector other than defense contractors, was clearly the result of Bush's effective announcement that he would eliminate the surplus.
Event though... at the time there was no real fear of any significant or actual deficit spending?
On the contrary, the GDP contracted in 3Q2000, which signaled the very real possibility of the elimination of the surplus without any tax cuts or spending increases.
Since when is news of a lower tax burden BAD news for the stock market?
When it means pressure towards currency devaluation and the related effects; in particular:
... if foreign U.S. investors start to abandon dollar-denominated securities on concerns that any profits will be lost as they convert back to their own currencies, U.S. investors may also take money from the stock market in a bid to beat the rush.
"If the dollar's slide is seen as transient, then the market will stabilize as investors realize the damage has been done," said Anthony Chan, senior managing director and chief economist at Banc One Investment Advisors, which oversees $180 billion. "But not even domestic investors are blind and they don't want to be in front of the train."
... If that reluctance to hold U.S. securities spreads to U.S. Treasuries, interest rates will also rise, potentially jeopardizing the economic recovery.
Another fear is that the strengthening global economy will make it harder for the U.S. to fund its current account deficit
Note that Prudential analyst quoted expects the economy to "decelerate" in the second half of 2004.
I will once again STRONGLY suggest you THANK this administration for following program (cut taxes, cut interest rates, provide incentives to businesses) so as to shorted the duration and severity of the recession.
Thank them for delivering a jobless recovery; for being the first administration in over 50 years that has presided over a net loss of jobs? No, all they've done is enrich their core constituency, at the expense of the vast majority. No thanks for that.
You again attempt to take the discussion away from the CAUSE of the recession to something completely unrelated to the CAUSE -- and argueably related to the RESULT. First the deficit, and now the decline in the dollar.
You misunderstand. I believe Bush's announcment that he would most likely resume serious deficit spending, and the fact that he did so (well before any of the expensive events begining with 9/11/2001) caused the broad bear market, the recession, and the dollar's fall.
I read your linked article and found no fault with it, but I don't think it supports any of your points. You'd better read the article to which I linked.
I still can't get the bea.doc.gov URL you linked to show me the numbers you're talking about, but I found them in an AP news article from a week ago:
Based on new data, the Commerce Department said the GDP -- the country's total output of goods and services -- shrank by 0.5 percent at an annual rate in the July-September quarter of 2000. Previously, the government had said GDP was rising at a weak annual rate of 0.6 percent during that quarter.
The GDP returned to positive territory in the October-December quarter of 2000, rising at an annual rate of 2.1 percent, before slipping back into negative territory in the first quarter of 2001. The first, second and third quarters of 2001 all experienced falling GDP as the country slogged through its first recession since 1990-91.
The National Bureau of Economic Research, the official arbiter of when recessions begin and end, has determined that the recession began in March 2001 and ended in November of that year.
So, Neocon, according to the revised figures the recession did not begin during Clinton's term, contrary to your original false claim as well as your last half-dozen accusations against the accuracy of my conclusions.
All that AND the recession is STILL turning around it record time. This is pretty damn impressive.
Given the magnitude of the tax cuts involved, I'm not so impressed.
The deficit is NOT the cause of the recession, is it?
Yes, but not directly. As I said before, once it became clear to stockholders that Bush, who in April 2000 said that he would steeply cut taxes, steeply increase military spending, keep entitlements untouched, and return the surplus to taxpayers, once it became clear Bush could actually win over Gore, at that point the frenzied profit-taking which removed $7 billion from U.S. stock markets terrified consumer confidence and corporate purchasing, resulting in the loss of 3.3 million jobs as well as the recession. The Bush tax cuts did stimulate growth enough to end the recession of 2001. However, they did not result in net job creation.
Since currency traders have already removed 1/5 of the dollar's value this year, it's not likely that importers are going to have much fun once their futures coverage runs out. Although exporters will have a great time, a glance at the trade deficit shows that they're a much smaller part of the economy. I predict that the resulting inflation will be quite interesting since the FOMC has given up almost all of their rate-lowering power. And, with corporate earnings held low and interest rates with nowhere left to go but up, the fundamental correctness of the 2000-2002 stock market profit-takers will be cemented, and the cost of capital will reach the levels at which currency traders have already pegged it.
I can only hope that those three million newly jobless get off their duff and vote in November. IT's not like they have anything better to do with their Tuesdays.
In inflation adjusted dollars, historically the deficit has been larger and the sky hasn't fallen.
Sure, but are you confusing the deficit with the total debt? After world war II, the U.S. debt was about 100% of the GNP, but tax rates at the top bracket were much, much higher, and several years of surpluses paid down that debt. There is no plan for such surpluses in the Bush budget.
Currently, federal debt is 12% of the total debt owed by all U.S. debtors, public and private. The Bush OMB projections plan to increase that federal portion of the credit market to 19% in 2008, and they assume that in doing so they will see an interest rate increase of less than 1%. Do you agree that is possible?
I read the UCLA study, and I don't think it takes those interest rate pressures into account. It was written before the magnitude of the Bush deficits was announced.
''It was the first time I had ever been to the dump,'' Massey recalled, wrinkling his nose. ''I said, 'I'm not going to get dirty,' so I wandered over to a shed where the recycling was stored. I notice there's a big barrel for recycled paper that's full of discarded tax forms from an accounting firm.'' Each form had the person's name, date of birth, Social Security number -- all the information necessary for taking out a line of credit.
My local police department recently published a blurb asking residents to dispose of identity theft-related materials (e.g., financial statements, anything with a SSN, etc.) in the ordinary garbage, instead of the "mixed paper" recycling bins as we've been asked by the rest of the city government.
It seems that identity thieves are very happy about the shared, clean, and portable "mixed paper" recycling containers found throughout my (rather affluent) city, and they tend to pick them up, quickly sort through the cereal and microwave dinner boxes for the good stuff, and have the container back before anyone notices.
Presumably today's dumpster divers have the luxury of avoiding coffee grounds, so you can go a long way towards protecting yourself by dumping the financial correspondence in with the smelly stuff.
this recession can no more be blamed on Bush and/or Clinton than it can be blamed on my son.
I can only assume that your son did not telegraph his intent to return the U.S. to radical deficit spending in April 2000.
Note that under Bush's plan, interest payments on the national debt reach $260 billion, and that assumes the interest rate (on Treasury notes; see Table 4) doesn't go any higher than 5.3%. At the rate the dollar has been falling lately, there is no way debt markets can absorb another $2 trillion in Treasury securities with interest rates rising only 0.7%.
changes to data by the Commerce Department now show the economy first contracted in the third quarter of 2000
While I'm not suprised that Don Evans' Commerce Dept. would claim such a thing, I can find no data anywhere on the web claiming anything other than the fact that U.S. real GDP grew +0.6% in 3Q2000 and +1.1% in 4Q2000.
When an economy as large as ours starts a down-turn, it isn't instantaneous -- it starts with slowed growth.
GDP growth changing from +0.6 to +1.1% is not slowing.
In december of 2000, several articles appeared which hailed the end of economic growth.... It looks like the "slump" started WELL within the Clinton admin.
In fact, I happen to agree with you, because I believe the economic downturn, and the much more important loss of over three million jobs, was caused primarily by the $7 trillion that exited the U.S. stock markets from mid-2000 through 2002. That "slump" began almost exactly the same time as Bush started leading Gore in the polls.
That's a simplistic view that ignores what SCO really wants.
They are not intentionally trying to pump-and-dump, although they will surely be very vulnerable to suits charging such intentions within half a month.
The truth is that the head executives at SCO really believed that there was some part of SysV inside Linux, and you can tell by the malloc() and other examples that they were showing to the analysts under nondisclosure. They believed it so much that they didn't want to even consider the possibility that they were wrong, and the executives weren't technical enough to tell that their "evidence" was faulty.
What they've always really wanted is to get a license fee from each copy of Linux in any commercial use. That's why they've resisted explaining exactly which code they consider infringing, because they were afraid Linus would order it replaced right away (which of course he would, if there was any.)
While I agree that this thread is no longer worth continuation, I feel strangely compelled to point out that the time period between July 1990 and March 1991 is three quarters, not one quarter.
Clinton cannot be credited for the economic growth of the nineties since it began before he was president.
Ha. You would be blaming Clinton for any recession that had occured during his presidency, would you not?
under new consumer protection laws, companies that knowingly divulge your personal information to a third party without informing you are liable. A California woman has sued MS, saying that it's various OS and browser vulnerabilities amount to divulging information to third parties without her
The case you are thinking of alleged violations of one of California's different consumer privacy protection laws from last year, along with the California Business and Profession Code's Unfair Business Practices statutes, which are just amazingly broad and unpredictable in scope.
IANAL but IMHO she's going to lose against claiming the disclaimer is unfair (she should have alleged that the disclaimer is insufficiently communicated), but would otherwise win on the monopoly factors. Only time will tell.
How does linking to a gif image of a graph of job creation in the seventies and eighties tell us anything about anyone's definition of a recession?
As the caption indicates, the shaded areas are recessions as defined by the NBER (and as in turn used by federal and state governments and news media) which claimed that the U.S. experienced negative growth from July 1990 through March 1991. I can find no sources claiming that a recession did not occur during that period. At this point I am guessing you are trolling me because I'm almost certain you are not ignorant of these facts.
By the way, the graph shows both job creation and job destruction, which I for one consider far more important than GDP growth. When a hospital needs to be torn down because it has become structually unsound, that results in additional GDP "product," even though the quality of life has clearly suffered. Lots of negative things are recorded as positive growth.
First off, Neocon, you admitted that the U.S. tax and entitlement system is socialist to an extent, and claimed that there is more freedom, democracy, and prosperity here than anywhere else, so of course by your own words socialism is different than murderous communist regimes. I am disappointed that your argument so quickly reverted to an absolutest black-or-white, all-or-nothing, no-middle-ground position, but not suprised given the extent of your indoctrination with the propaganda of the greedy rich.
... your assertion that there was a recession in the early nineties... defined as three consecutive quarters of zero or negative growth... rather than a brief period of slowed growth
I can understand that to believe your world view you must, like Reagan, repress the truth to the point of asserting that nobody is ("meaningfully") hungry in the U.S., and that the poor drive automobiles and wear designer clothing. And a way I can see how the powerful emotions stirred by those images have prevented you from reconciling them with facts. But must you also take issue with the Federal Reserve Board's definition of recession?
... your failure to provide a single statistical measure of Swedish or American cost of living....
I cited one Swedish government web page, one Swedish university web page, and one European Union web page pertaining to the cost of living in Sweden, and surveyed classified ads in three U.S. cities for comparison. I'm pretty sure you missed that.
But look, even if I'm completely wrong about the cost of living, they still have 3.5 years more lifespan and lower infant mortality, illiteracy, inflation, etc. Who cares if they can't afford a five bedroom house on 3 acres -- what good are earthly riches when you have so much less time to enjoy them? You can't take it with you.
wind is quickly on its way to dominance
on
Global Dimming
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
Wind is nice and clean, but it takes a lot of windmills to generate enough power to replace a power plant. Windmill farms are regarded as many to be ugly so people don't want them around their houses.
Actually, the entire electricity requirements of the United States could be served by wind turbines with a combined land-use footprint of only 14,000 acres, including enough grid redundancy to provide 99.5% uptime through long grid transmission to areas experiencing calm winds. (The remaining 0.5% backup could be hydro or whatever.) That area is only twice the size of the Stanford campus, and as large as the amount of Oak forest that California loses each year.
Some people consider turbines ugly at first glance, but more people want wind turbines in their neighborhood than want mercury-spewing coal smokestacks in their state.
Well, just to correct the record, I take issue with your accusations or implications that I...
...believe "free speech and the right to take unpopular positions are unimportant compared to the `right' to do drugs." On the contrary, I only said that civil limitatins on speech, such as prior restraint -- which I detest, by the way -- are softer restrictions on freedom than imprisonment, whether for drugs or "three strikes" or mandatory minimums on anything.
...did not admit my inconsequential mistakes pertaining to per-capita income and the dates of gubanatorial races as soon as you pointed them out (and yes, of course I vote.)
...believe "Clinton should be credited for an economic boom which started in 1985." That's absurd because there was a steep recession in the early 1990s.
...confuse capitalist progressive socialist tax structures with opressive and deadly communism, which is completely different, lacking all aspects of capitalism
...fail to compare the cost of living to national median incomes to estimate standard of living.
Finally, I never said anything about whether a strong dollar is better than a weak dollar. I believe that long-term currency stability is more important than either. Excessive rallies and slides can both be devistating, to different sectors. As for the harm caused by a weak dollar, significant currency devaluations, such as those caused by unsustainable debt, are the strongest of inflationary pressures second only to a default.
You take, for instance, a different view of what Jesus meant than the apostles did.
That's news to me. In what way do you think so?
You assert that we should believe that you are correct, while ``everyone else is being fooled''
Certainly not. The people doing the fooling, with whom the top-heavy wealth of the U.S. is being densely concentrated, aren't being fooled. Most people are apathetic, and don't vote, so they also don't qualify as being fooled, for whatever that's worth. But the people doing the fooling are unlikely to spend much more than they think they need to in order to remain in control of their destiny -- at the expense of those one-in-fifteen single mothers who can't afford food (or a car!) -- which means they only try to fool only a comfortable majority of the body politic, and certainly not everyone.
Here's an essay about the concentration of wealth in the U.S., couched in an argument to steeply increase the minimum wage, with which I generally agree. The facts pertaining to the concentration of wealth, rising CEO salaries, etc., are as indisputable as the pointless growth of the U.S. prison population -- and very fundamentally related, I think.
such basic errors as confusing per capita GDP with mean income, or asserting that US gubernatorial elections are held in March, merely heightens the absurdity of the situation
At least I admitted all the errors you caught as soon as you pointed them out. I am tempted to post my enumeration of your own obvious errors in this thread. Even if I were to give you the benefit of the doubt and count only my corrections that you didn't contest, I think I would be able to come up with several more than you might be comfortable with.
Anyway, thank you for taking the time to explain your views, especially those that I had the opportunity to correct. Without this discussion I would not know, as I do now, how to respond to someone who says that the poor in the U.S. drive automobiles and have no "internationally meaningful" form of poverty. I should have not been caught off guard by that, because I remember when Reagan said there were no hungry people in the U.S. The image of the poor wearing designer clothing that has been painted so vividly through the decades (in Reagan's day it was $100 tennis shoes, IIRC) is truly very powerful, and I will endeavor to remember and respect its potency. I was relieved that you merely countered the contradiction from UNICEF's child poverty rankings with numbers from the USDA, and glad we didn't have to delve further into, say, the proportion of homeless in the U.S., which I find quite depressing.
On a positive note, I hope that your agreement -- recognizing the utility of at least some tax-based entitlements, which took a few days for you to admit -- will help you explore more about the optimum extent and parameters of such programs, in light of your newfound knowledge of the child hunger levels. It is good to know that you don't really want the kind of pure capitalism where the orphaned, disabled, and elderly are forced to depend solely on chairity, because you know as well as I that there's not enough chairity to go around, and even if every single person tithed and those working at chairities volunteered or lived like paupers, there would still not be enough to prevent widespread hunger, homelessness, and the prevalence of associated diseases that affect us all.
And I pray that we will both strive to be more like Jesus without distraction from the apologists of any age.
Slashdot Mirror
The fewer people who are in the database, the fewer choices are available to a forger. When everyone is in the database, nobody is off limits.
And in doing so, either (A) draw attention to yourself as a witness, or (B) raise the suspicions of a frame-up with a needlessly anonymous tip.
Saying it doesn't make it so. When everyone is in the database, forging anyone's blood is possible without any further involvement or the stigma of an anonymous tip.
The answer is easy to understand, but so much easier to overlook. If your DNA is in the database, then anyone who wants to commit a crime against any of your acquaintances, or frame you for whatever reason, has only to obtain the smallest sample of your DNA (e.g. from a kleenex or napkin in your trash), use an easily available PCR kit to amplify it, add the DNA to some of your type of whole blood with leukocytes removed, sprinkle a few drops at the crime scene, and presto! you're in jail on incontrovertable evidence.
But it's not incontrovertable if the process of faking your blood with PCRed DNA is so easy, is it? Well, that's missing the point. The likelyhood that anyone would actually do this sort of thing (if they haven't already) is strongly correlated with the proportion of the population cataloged in a database. If everyone is cataloged, then everyone's friend is cataloged, and everyone's enemy is cataloged. So no criminal is then precluded from establishing this nearly perfect diversion.
In short, the larger proportion of people in the cops database, the more useless the database becomes. As soon as one DNA forgery is discovered, there goes the "beyond a reasonable doubt" standard in every subsequent case.
In the short term, that is true, although given the famously huge U.S. trade deficit there will obviously be more importers hurt than exporters helped. However, there is a lot more to it than that.
Please see this Reuters article; here's a particularly interesting excerpt:
Note that the Prudential analyst quoted expects the economy to "decelerate" in the second half of 2004.
The "dot com crash" was not due to Bush, but rather to the poor management you cited. Internet startups and telecom companies were never more than 10% of stock capitalization. The broad-market crash, amounting to $7 billion in lost securities value and affecting every sector other than defense contractors, was clearly the result of Bush's effective announcement that he would eliminate the surplus.
On the contrary, the GDP contracted in 3Q2000, which signaled the very real possibility of the elimination of the surplus without any tax cuts or spending increases.When it means pressure towards currency devaluation and the related effects; in particular:
Note that Prudential analyst quoted expects the economy to "decelerate" in the second half of 2004.
Thank them for delivering a jobless recovery; for being the first administration in over 50 years that has presided over a net loss of jobs? No, all they've done is enrich their core constituency, at the expense of the vast majority. No thanks for that.
You misunderstand. I believe Bush's announcment that he would most likely resume serious deficit spending, and the fact that he did so (well before any of the expensive events begining with 9/11/2001) caused the broad bear market, the recession, and the dollar's fall.
I read your linked article and found no fault with it, but I don't think it supports any of your points. You'd better read the article to which I linked.
So, Neocon, according to the revised figures the recession did not begin during Clinton's term, contrary to your original false claim as well as your last half-dozen accusations against the accuracy of my conclusions.
However, I believe that a version of IBM's DITTO was available on System/360 in 1965. I've not been able to confirm this, though.
Given the magnitude of the tax cuts involved, I'm not so impressed.
Yes, but not directly. As I said before, once it became clear to stockholders that Bush, who in April 2000 said that he would steeply cut taxes, steeply increase military spending, keep entitlements untouched, and return the surplus to taxpayers, once it became clear Bush could actually win over Gore, at that point the frenzied profit-taking which removed $7 billion from U.S. stock markets terrified consumer confidence and corporate purchasing, resulting in the loss of 3.3 million jobs as well as the recession. The Bush tax cuts did stimulate growth enough to end the recession of 2001. However, they did not result in net job creation.
Since currency traders have already removed 1/5 of the dollar's value this year, it's not likely that importers are going to have much fun once their futures coverage runs out. Although exporters will have a great time, a glance at the trade deficit shows that they're a much smaller part of the economy. I predict that the resulting inflation will be quite interesting since the FOMC has given up almost all of their rate-lowering power. And, with corporate earnings held low and interest rates with nowhere left to go but up, the fundamental correctness of the 2000-2002 stock market profit-takers will be cemented, and the cost of capital will reach the levels at which currency traders have already pegged it.
I can only hope that those three million newly jobless get off their duff and vote in November. IT's not like they have anything better to do with their Tuesdays.
Sure, but are you confusing the deficit with the total debt? After world war II, the U.S. debt was about 100% of the GNP, but tax rates at the top bracket were much, much higher, and several years of surpluses paid down that debt. There is no plan for such surpluses in the Bush budget.
Currently, federal debt is 12% of the total debt owed by all U.S. debtors, public and private. The Bush OMB projections plan to increase that federal portion of the credit market to 19% in 2008, and they assume that in doing so they will see an interest rate increase of less than 1%. Do you agree that is possible?
I read the UCLA study, and I don't think it takes those interest rate pressures into account. It was written before the magnitude of the Bush deficits was announced.
My local police department recently published a blurb asking residents to dispose of identity theft-related materials (e.g., financial statements, anything with a SSN, etc.) in the ordinary garbage, instead of the "mixed paper" recycling bins as we've been asked by the rest of the city government.
It seems that identity thieves are very happy about the shared, clean, and portable "mixed paper" recycling containers found throughout my (rather affluent) city, and they tend to pick them up, quickly sort through the cereal and microwave dinner boxes for the good stuff, and have the container back before anyone notices.
Presumably today's dumpster divers have the luxury of avoiding coffee grounds, so you can go a long way towards protecting yourself by dumping the financial correspondence in with the smelly stuff.
I can only assume that your son did not telegraph his intent to return the U.S. to radical deficit spending in April 2000.
Note that under Bush's plan, interest payments on the national debt reach $260 billion, and that assumes the interest rate (on Treasury notes; see Table 4) doesn't go any higher than 5.3%. At the rate the dollar has been falling lately, there is no way debt markets can absorb another $2 trillion in Treasury securities with interest rates rising only 0.7%.
Tht URL doesn't work, and I can't verify your assertion. Everything I find says real, seasonally-adjusted, revised GDP grew +0.6% in 3Q2000.
I made no such assertion. In fact, the revised figures directly from the Department of Commerce agree that real GDP grew in 3Q2000 and grew twice as fast in 4Q2000. They do not agree with the Texas newspaper Jhon quoted.
Why have you stopped wishing me a good day?
While I'm not suprised that Don Evans' Commerce Dept. would claim such a thing, I can find no data anywhere on the web claiming anything other than the fact that U.S. real GDP grew +0.6% in 3Q2000 and +1.1% in 4Q2000.
GDP growth changing from +0.6 to +1.1% is not slowing.
In fact, I happen to agree with you, because I believe the economic downturn, and the much more important loss of over three million jobs, was caused primarily by the $7 trillion that exited the U.S. stock markets from mid-2000 through 2002. That "slump" began almost exactly the same time as Bush started leading Gore in the polls.
Clinton wasn't president in March, 2001.
No, GDP declined during Q3'90, Q4'90, and Q1'91, even though it grew during one of the included months.
That's a simplistic view that ignores what SCO really wants.
They are not intentionally trying to pump-and-dump, although they will surely be very vulnerable to suits charging such intentions within half a month.
The truth is that the head executives at SCO really believed that there was some part of SysV inside Linux, and you can tell by the malloc() and other examples that they were showing to the analysts under nondisclosure. They believed it so much that they didn't want to even consider the possibility that they were wrong, and the executives weren't technical enough to tell that their "evidence" was faulty.
What they've always really wanted is to get a license fee from each copy of Linux in any commercial use. That's why they've resisted explaining exactly which code they consider infringing, because they were afraid Linus would order it replaced right away (which of course he would, if there was any.)
Ha. You would be blaming Clinton for any recession that had occured during his presidency, would you not?
The case you are thinking of alleged violations of one of California's different consumer privacy protection laws from last year, along with the California Business and Profession Code's Unfair Business Practices statutes, which are just amazingly broad and unpredictable in scope.
IANAL but IMHO she's going to lose against claiming the disclaimer is unfair (she should have alleged that the disclaimer is insufficiently communicated), but would otherwise win on the monopoly factors. Only time will tell.
As the caption indicates, the shaded areas are recessions as defined by the NBER (and as in turn used by federal and state governments and news media) which claimed that the U.S. experienced negative growth from July 1990 through March 1991. I can find no sources claiming that a recession did not occur during that period. At this point I am guessing you are trolling me because I'm almost certain you are not ignorant of these facts.
By the way, the graph shows both job creation and job destruction, which I for one consider far more important than GDP growth. When a hospital needs to be torn down because it has become structually unsound, that results in additional GDP "product," even though the quality of life has clearly suffered. Lots of negative things are recorded as positive growth.
I can understand that to believe your world view you must, like Reagan, repress the truth to the point of asserting that nobody is ("meaningfully") hungry in the U.S., and that the poor drive automobiles and wear designer clothing. And a way I can see how the powerful emotions stirred by those images have prevented you from reconciling them with facts. But must you also take issue with the Federal Reserve Board's definition of recession?
I cited one Swedish government web page, one Swedish university web page, and one European Union web page pertaining to the cost of living in Sweden, and surveyed classified ads in three U.S. cities for comparison. I'm pretty sure you missed that.
But look, even if I'm completely wrong about the cost of living, they still have 3.5 years more lifespan and lower infant mortality, illiteracy, inflation, etc. Who cares if they can't afford a five bedroom house on 3 acres -- what good are earthly riches when you have so much less time to enjoy them? You can't take it with you.
Actually, the entire electricity requirements of the United States could be served by wind turbines with a combined land-use footprint of only 14,000 acres, including enough grid redundancy to provide 99.5% uptime through long grid transmission to areas experiencing calm winds. (The remaining 0.5% backup could be hydro or whatever.) That area is only twice the size of the Stanford campus, and as large as the amount of Oak forest that California loses each year.
Some people consider turbines ugly at first glance, but more people want wind turbines in their neighborhood than want mercury-spewing coal smokestacks in their state.
Wind power is the fastest growning renewable industry and is expected to be the dominant form of power production in less than 30 years.
Please see the Windpower FAQ for more information.
This means, as has been often noted, the atmosphere is absorbing more energy. That in turn is great news for wind power, a renewable industry which is growing rapidly and in fact is expected to be the dominant form of power production in less than 30 years.
Far more than the food is worth in a nutritional sense: Global Trade == Global Warming
Finally, I never said anything about whether a strong dollar is better than a weak dollar. I believe that long-term currency stability is more important than either. Excessive rallies and slides can both be devistating, to different sectors. As for the harm caused by a weak dollar, significant currency devaluations, such as those caused by unsustainable debt, are the strongest of inflationary pressures second only to a default.
Thanks again.
That's news to me. In what way do you think so?
Certainly not. The people doing the fooling, with whom the top-heavy wealth of the U.S. is being densely concentrated, aren't being fooled. Most people are apathetic, and don't vote, so they also don't qualify as being fooled, for whatever that's worth. But the people doing the fooling are unlikely to spend much more than they think they need to in order to remain in control of their destiny -- at the expense of those one-in-fifteen single mothers who can't afford food (or a car!) -- which means they only try to fool only a comfortable majority of the body politic, and certainly not everyone.
Here's an essay about the concentration of wealth in the U.S., couched in an argument to steeply increase the minimum wage, with which I generally agree. The facts pertaining to the concentration of wealth, rising CEO salaries, etc., are as indisputable as the pointless growth of the U.S. prison population -- and very fundamentally related, I think.
At least I admitted all the errors you caught as soon as you pointed them out. I am tempted to post my enumeration of your own obvious errors in this thread. Even if I were to give you the benefit of the doubt and count only my corrections that you didn't contest, I think I would be able to come up with several more than you might be comfortable with.
Anyway, thank you for taking the time to explain your views, especially those that I had the opportunity to correct. Without this discussion I would not know, as I do now, how to respond to someone who says that the poor in the U.S. drive automobiles and have no "internationally meaningful" form of poverty. I should have not been caught off guard by that, because I remember when Reagan said there were no hungry people in the U.S. The image of the poor wearing designer clothing that has been painted so vividly through the decades (in Reagan's day it was $100 tennis shoes, IIRC) is truly very powerful, and I will endeavor to remember and respect its potency. I was relieved that you merely countered the contradiction from UNICEF's child poverty rankings with numbers from the USDA, and glad we didn't have to delve further into, say, the proportion of homeless in the U.S., which I find quite depressing.
On a positive note, I hope that your agreement -- recognizing the utility of at least some tax-based entitlements, which took a few days for you to admit -- will help you explore more about the optimum extent and parameters of such programs, in light of your newfound knowledge of the child hunger levels. It is good to know that you don't really want the kind of pure capitalism where the orphaned, disabled, and elderly are forced to depend solely on chairity, because you know as well as I that there's not enough chairity to go around, and even if every single person tithed and those working at chairities volunteered or lived like paupers, there would still not be enough to prevent widespread hunger, homelessness, and the prevalence of associated diseases that affect us all.
And I pray that we will both strive to be more like Jesus without distraction from the apologists of any age.
True; what they can't know, though, they can sure make up out of whole cloth.