Unions exist to cartelize the work force, limiting its numbers, which artificially inflates pay. That's why unions have been against child labor, female labor, non-union labor, etc.
In the software engineering field, we already have a very limited workforce, so no need for a union.
The child inside me that grew up watching the original trilogy, with a closet full of Kenner toys, just died...
Episode VII will be a teeny-bopper musical staring The Jonas Brothers. On the plus side, that would still be better than Episode I.
If you want to learn the behind the scenes parts of the language and the computer, get a BS in CS or CE. It will take a few more years, but your earning potential will be much higher than with a two year degree. You can learn all of that on your own, but it is difficult, and that piece of paper will get your resume in the door more easily than trying to explain autodidacticism to an HR drone.
But never stop learning, whether it be through tinkering, online stuff like the NAND-Tetris course, or formal, for-credit courses.
I saw it through another digital download source. It wasn't funny. Really the whole episode pretty much sucked, except for the debate sketch and the haunted house animatronics sketch.
Yeah, because governments can only do one thing at a time. They only have one department that can either provide health care or internet, but not both.
Well, they haven't solved all the other problems: many people don't get adequate medical care in a timely fashion, kids go to bed hungry, people still live on the streets, etc.
I'm also not suggesting that the government should supply any of these things, because government does a crappy job at a higher price. But if they are going to steal my hard earned money to pay for it, I'd prefer they pay for a necessity for the lower class, not a subsidy for the upper class masquerading as a luxury for the middle class.
Fortunately for me, I'm an American; my government mostly spends the borrowed savings of Chinese and Japanese people, and will never pay back more than a fraction of the original amount, so when they waste billions, I'm not on the hook.
I suspect part of the reason for this push (if Australia's government is anything like the USA government...and it is) is that some private corporations wanted to expand their holdings, but didn't want to have to actually pay for it, so they called some friends in Parliament and wrote some checks, and voila! And the MPs probably didn't complain when they heard that they would be able to control the single, centralized network for spying, censorship, or other nefarious purposes.
It's September. I'm sure the local REI has ski-masks in stock. Or better yet, the Halloween store for some Obama, Guy Fawkes, Joe Stalin, etc. masks.
But then the spy-camera sales rep probably didn't bring that up when he and the town council went to that luxury resort for the weekend to discuss the camera contract.
Is a Ph.D. a near-guarantee of a spot in a skunkworks type of job (Microsoft Research and the like)?
Having worked at MS with multiple Ph.D. holders, I can definitively say, "no". I knew testers with Ph.D.s, and team architects with nothing more than a BS. For your Ph.D. to get you into a research job, it needs to have some substance. Do your dissertation research in a cutting edge field, write papers that show you're an expert in the field, be prolific, rather than publishing the minimum to graduate, etc. If you do, they'll be more likely to hire you. And not because of the degree itself, but because of the work you did getting it. And of course if you can do that research on your own, and publish the same quality of papers, without a Ph.D. program to guide you, they'll still be interested, it's just a lot harder to achieve that level outside of academia.
If only pro-gun folks knew how easy it was to live without the things, and what a sense of peace one gets knowing they aren't about. Walking through an American city must be like walking through a cactus field - watch yourself all the time lest you get punched full of holes.
It's easy to live without the internet, too. Should we force you to do so because some people use it to molest children?
I walk through an American city (Seattle) on a regular basis. There are thousands of gun owners here, and many of us carry concealed or openly on a regular basis, yet we have a lower murder rate than most large cities on Earth. Why? Because we don't have a huge drug-based turf war.
Gun related deaths, outside of the drug trade, are very rare. And that's a completely different problem.
A hard to elucidate but very real reason why I (and I suspect, many others) want laws banning guns is because they are such inherently ugly and vile things - with the exception of hunting rifles, they exist for one purpose, to facilitate the most abhorrent crime there is.
Target shooting is the most abhorrent crime there is? That is the primary use of guns in America. I would have gone with something like genocide, which, interestingly enough, only seems to happen to unarmed populations.
Defense and offense are malleable terms
Not in the least. Defense is the resistance against offense, and offense is the initiation of force.
Beyond that, ban everything but slow-shooting hunting rifles. You don't need anything else.
Again, you don't need the internet, but we don't ban it just because some people use it maliciously. One of the costs of living in a free society is having to put up with shit you don't like. If one of your neighbors owns a gun, either deal with it or move. Unless he does something wrong (such as pointing it at another person), you have no reason to complain.
The police in the UK have and still to a degree manage to police their country without guns; surely regular citizens can get by in the same way in your country. Recall one of the reasons why police in the UK were able to operate that way: since criminals knew the police didn't carry guns, the criminals had less of a reason to do so themselves. Compare that situation to the US, where a veritable arms race has occurred, to the point were criminals and police carry military rifles on what appears to be a regular basis.
I'm curious which Hollywood movie you get your knowledge of American crime from. The vast majority of criminals in the US do not carry firearms, because carrying one adds a hefty decade or two to a prison sentence.
Interestingly enough...if you check the data, there's no real correlation between crime rates and gun control. Of the top 10 violent crime cities in the US, five are in very anti-gun states, the other five are in middle-of-the-road gun control states. What the high crime cities do have in common are gangs, poverty, and drugs.
As an aside, if you ever want to overthrow your government, then you will succeed when army units defect to the rebels' side. If the army is united, you can't win against it, for they are better armed. But the army is made of of citizens, and a just rebellion should be able to convince soldiers not to shoot fellow citizens and to oppose tyranny.
There are 1.4 million active duty military personnel in the US military. There are over 100 million legal gun owners in the US. We are far better armed. They might have tanks, bombers, and artillery, but controlling a population requires infantry. You can say that a full-auto M4 is better than what civilians own (but it's not). Our rifles have better range on average, and due to superior numbers, we can put more rounds on the target.
Government is a giant Costco where everybody pools their money together to buy shit for themselves, such as healthcare, military, trains, police, etc., for a lower wholesale price than if they bought it themselves.
This is one of the most retarded things I've read on/..
Government spends more on any one thing than the private sector would: vested self interest and the profit motive see to that. Without governments, there would be no need for militaries, since militaries are tools governments use to attack each other.
You might not like collections agencies, but they do perform a legitimate service. If the bank merely dropped the debt, they'd have to raise fees (or cry for more bailout money) to cover the losses, and the rest of us would end up paying. I've never dealt with a collections agency from the other side, but I have written code for a sub-prime lender, and met a few in-house collections people. They weren't "scum of the earth" they were people trying to convince someone to uphold his part of an agreement. Without them, the company would have probably gone out of business, laying off hundreds of people and denying thousands, who could not get an account at a normal bank, access to banking services.
Vultures might not be pretty, but without them, there'd be rotting corpses all over the places.
After a little RTFA time, I don't think it's quite like the blurb makes it sound. The system can't scan dozens of people walking down a sidewalk (unlike the facial recognition technology used in most "free" countries today). The user has to actively wave at it to allow it to scan.
One concern the article raised is that it appears the prints are stored on the machine as an image (or perhaps a series of numbers describing the layout) rather than a cryptographically secure hash of the print. So if you steal the system, you get a bunch of free pictures of people's prints...and you probably get all of the prints on the hand, since they would likely scan every digit and compare it to the database. As prints become a more common means of identification, those boxes become as valuable as credit card and SSN databases. Although I'm sure the security of 24-hour Fitness and Target are second to none.
I don't believe the lawmakers could really be this retarded; there has to be some other reason they're pushing for this law (perhaps just general harassment of gun owners?).
They can't ban guns directly, so they'll try to price them out of existence. Anti-gunners are also pushing for taxes on ammunition, higher taxes on gun sales, etc.
It's the same tactic the ATF used in 1934 to indirectly ban automatic weapons, short barrel rifles, and sound suppressors. They weren't illegal, but they required a $200 tax stamp (almost two months pay at the time) for every transfer.
Gold hasn't been particularly stable, since the value of gold is determined by what various countries set it at. EG in 1934, the U.S. government revalued gold from $20.67/oz to $35.00/oz, instantly deflating the dollar.
So...because the dollar v. gold is unstable, it must be gold? It couldn't possibly be the dollar? (Hint: it is the dollar). Countries don't set the price of anything, governments do. And what they set is the value of their currency in gold. What FDR did in 1934 was revalue the dollar, by decreeing that instead of giving an ounce of gold for $20USD, the foreign gold window (domestic gold ownership was banned) would give an ounce of gold for $35USD, which inflated the dollar, not deflated it. The federal reserve then printed up a bunch of fiat dollars to spend.
A government can't realistically set the value of gold. If the FED today redefined gold as $10/oz, people would simply not sell their gold...or they'd sell an ounce of gold...but only in a plastic case that costs around $1600. They could indirectly redefine the price of gold (and every other commodity) by taking currency out of circulation, or adding new currency, which is precisely why the US dollar has lost 98% of its purchasing power in a century. But really, all they're doing is changing the value of the dollar (reduce supply while demand stays stable).
Clearly the Roman Empire used fiat currency!
Damn! You got me...oh wait...they did! The Romans began debasing their coins (like most fiat currencies have been doing), basically saying that the coin that used to contain one ounce of silver, but now contains one-tenth of an ounce can still buy an ounce of silver. Guess what happened. People hoarded the old coins and the precious metal ingots.
Also, the crash of 1929 was in no way whatsoever caused by the use of a gold standard.
Good for you! You got one right. F. A. Hayek won his Nobel Prize for proving that the crash and the following depression were caused by the Fed induced business cycle. Really, as soon as the Fed began printing Federal Reserve Notes, without any gold backing, the US left the gold standard.
Finally, there have been quite a number of eras of growth and prosperity in which gold was not the standard. EG After WW2 Britain ended the gold standard and started an era of significant technological and economic growth.
That era is still ongoing. How are things working out for them now...oh, that's sad. Like the USA, the UK went on a binge of debt and inflation after WWII, marked with bubbles and busts (as Mises, Hayek, and others predicted would happen with a Keynesian economic policy). After each bust, they have to double the debt to make the next bubble. Both are now getting to the point where they learn that exponential growth is not sustainable.
"Kooky gold hoarders" are rather silly, because they tend to ignore any evidence that contradicts their views. There are many more counterexamples to the points you listed, and they aren't terribly difficult to research.
Maybe if you did some "difficult" research, you'd learn underlying facts, not just the surface fallacies that you spouted above...although the Roman thing was pretty easy to research. Maybe you just ignored it, because it contradicted your views. Are you a kooky gold hoarder?
Yeah, because it's not like gold* has been the most stable currency in human history...oh...wait...it has.
But there's no way that gold* has been the currency during every era of growth and prosperity, while fiat currency has been the currency during every economic collapse...what? That's true too? Really?
Well, I'm sure if we keep up the strawman attacks on the "kooky gold hoarders", people will continue to use fiat currency until we've successfully transferred all of their wealth to banking elites. And that's what's matters.
*Gold is used here to generically mean precious metals, primarily gold and silver, or certificates representing actual precious metal.
But imagine how bad it would have been if we didn't have the US government protecting us from terrorists...by helping the underwear bomber get on the plane, ignoring that he was on the watch list, and giving him a dud bomb?
Homer: Not a bear in sight. The Bear Patrol must be working like a charm.
Lisa: That's specious reasoning, Dad.
Homer: Thank you, dear.
Lisa: By your logic I could claim that this rock keeps tigers away.
Homer: Oh, how does it work?
Lisa: It doesn't work.
Homer: Uh-huh.
Lisa: It's just a stupid rock.
Homer: Uh-huh.
Lisa: But I don't see any tigers around, do you?
[Homer thinks of this, then pulls out some money]
Homer: Lisa, I want to buy your rock.
[Lisa refuses at first, then takes the exchange]
In addition to what tato said, you're also missing opportunity cost.
Imagine what great and wonderful things could be accomplished if that capital stayed in the hands of its rightful owners (i.e. the taxpayers) where it could be invested or used to buy innovative products and services. Or if the thousands of people, who have died because they'd rather risk the higher fatality rates of the highways than get sexually assaulted at the airport, had lived to be creative and productive.
What about when the dumb kids (i.e. those subjected to bureaucratic government "education") start finding the tough questions objectionable? Or when the illiterate ones start finding written questions objectionable?
Did they bother to calculate how much it cost the federal government to do all of this?
The feds spent $X to seize $Y of counterfeit goods that, if they entered the market, might have reduced NFL revenues by $Z.
Y >> Z is definitely true (the guy willing to pay $10 for the counterfeit, might not pay $50 for the authentic).
I seriously doubt X < Z.
Slashdot Mirror
Unions exist to cartelize the work force, limiting its numbers, which artificially inflates pay. That's why unions have been against child labor, female labor, non-union labor, etc.
In the software engineering field, we already have a very limited workforce, so no need for a union.
So 2011 saw Duke Nukem Forever. 2012 sees E 17. Is there a bigger piece of vaporware out there for 2013?
The child inside me that grew up watching the original trilogy, with a closet full of Kenner toys, just died...
Episode VII will be a teeny-bopper musical staring The Jonas Brothers. On the plus side, that would still be better than Episode I.
If you want to learn the behind the scenes parts of the language and the computer, get a BS in CS or CE. It will take a few more years, but your earning potential will be much higher than with a two year degree. You can learn all of that on your own, but it is difficult, and that piece of paper will get your resume in the door more easily than trying to explain autodidacticism to an HR drone.
But never stop learning, whether it be through tinkering, online stuff like the NAND-Tetris course, or formal, for-credit courses.
I saw it through another digital download source. It wasn't funny. Really the whole episode pretty much sucked, except for the debate sketch and the haunted house animatronics sketch.
Yeah, because governments can only do one thing at a time. They only have one department that can either provide health care or internet, but not both.
Well, they haven't solved all the other problems: many people don't get adequate medical care in a timely fashion, kids go to bed hungry, people still live on the streets, etc.
I'm also not suggesting that the government should supply any of these things, because government does a crappy job at a higher price. But if they are going to steal my hard earned money to pay for it, I'd prefer they pay for a necessity for the lower class, not a subsidy for the upper class masquerading as a luxury for the middle class.
Fortunately for me, I'm an American; my government mostly spends the borrowed savings of Chinese and Japanese people, and will never pay back more than a fraction of the original amount, so when they waste billions, I'm not on the hook.
I suspect part of the reason for this push (if Australia's government is anything like the USA government...and it is) is that some private corporations wanted to expand their holdings, but didn't want to have to actually pay for it, so they called some friends in Parliament and wrote some checks, and voila! And the MPs probably didn't complain when they heard that they would be able to control the single, centralized network for spying, censorship, or other nefarious purposes.
Here's how I picture it.
Also, like this.
It's September. I'm sure the local REI has ski-masks in stock. Or better yet, the Halloween store for some Obama, Guy Fawkes, Joe Stalin, etc. masks.
But then the spy-camera sales rep probably didn't bring that up when he and the town council went to that luxury resort for the weekend to discuss the camera contract.
Is a Ph.D. a near-guarantee of a spot in a skunkworks type of job (Microsoft Research and the like)?
Having worked at MS with multiple Ph.D. holders, I can definitively say, "no". I knew testers with Ph.D.s, and team architects with nothing more than a BS. For your Ph.D. to get you into a research job, it needs to have some substance. Do your dissertation research in a cutting edge field, write papers that show you're an expert in the field, be prolific, rather than publishing the minimum to graduate, etc. If you do, they'll be more likely to hire you. And not because of the degree itself, but because of the work you did getting it. And of course if you can do that research on your own, and publish the same quality of papers, without a Ph.D. program to guide you, they'll still be interested, it's just a lot harder to achieve that level outside of academia.
If only pro-gun folks knew how easy it was to live without the things, and what a sense of peace one gets knowing they aren't about. Walking through an American city must be like walking through a cactus field - watch yourself all the time lest you get punched full of holes.
It's easy to live without the internet, too. Should we force you to do so because some people use it to molest children?
I walk through an American city (Seattle) on a regular basis. There are thousands of gun owners here, and many of us carry concealed or openly on a regular basis, yet we have a lower murder rate than most large cities on Earth. Why? Because we don't have a huge drug-based turf war.
Gun related deaths, outside of the drug trade, are very rare. And that's a completely different problem.
A hard to elucidate but very real reason why I (and I suspect, many others) want laws banning guns is because they are such inherently ugly and vile things - with the exception of hunting rifles, they exist for one purpose, to facilitate the most abhorrent crime there is.
Target shooting is the most abhorrent crime there is? That is the primary use of guns in America. I would have gone with something like genocide, which, interestingly enough, only seems to happen to unarmed populations.
Defense and offense are malleable terms
Not in the least. Defense is the resistance against offense, and offense is the initiation of force.
Beyond that, ban everything but slow-shooting hunting rifles. You don't need anything else.
Again, you don't need the internet, but we don't ban it just because some people use it maliciously. One of the costs of living in a free society is having to put up with shit you don't like. If one of your neighbors owns a gun, either deal with it or move. Unless he does something wrong (such as pointing it at another person), you have no reason to complain.
The police in the UK have and still to a degree manage to police their country without guns; surely regular citizens can get by in the same way in your country. Recall one of the reasons why police in the UK were able to operate that way: since criminals knew the police didn't carry guns, the criminals had less of a reason to do so themselves. Compare that situation to the US, where a veritable arms race has occurred, to the point were criminals and police carry military rifles on what appears to be a regular basis.
I'm curious which Hollywood movie you get your knowledge of American crime from. The vast majority of criminals in the US do not carry firearms, because carrying one adds a hefty decade or two to a prison sentence.
Interestingly enough...if you check the data, there's no real correlation between crime rates and gun control. Of the top 10 violent crime cities in the US, five are in very anti-gun states, the other five are in middle-of-the-road gun control states. What the high crime cities do have in common are gangs, poverty, and drugs.
As an aside, if you ever want to overthrow your government, then you will succeed when army units defect to the rebels' side. If the army is united, you can't win against it, for they are better armed. But the army is made of of citizens, and a just rebellion should be able to convince soldiers not to shoot fellow citizens and to oppose tyranny.
There are 1.4 million active duty military personnel in the US military. There are over 100 million legal gun owners in the US. We are far better armed. They might have tanks, bombers, and artillery, but controlling a population requires infantry. You can say that a full-auto M4 is better than what civilians own (but it's not). Our rifles have better range on average, and due to superior numbers, we can put more rounds on the target.
No mil
Government is a giant Costco where everybody pools their money together to buy shit for themselves, such as healthcare, military, trains, police, etc., for a lower wholesale price than if they bought it themselves.
This is one of the most retarded things I've read on /. .
Government spends more on any one thing than the private sector would: vested self interest and the profit motive see to that. Without governments, there would be no need for militaries, since militaries are tools governments use to attack each other.
You might not like collections agencies, but they do perform a legitimate service. If the bank merely dropped the debt, they'd have to raise fees (or cry for more bailout money) to cover the losses, and the rest of us would end up paying. I've never dealt with a collections agency from the other side, but I have written code for a sub-prime lender, and met a few in-house collections people. They weren't "scum of the earth" they were people trying to convince someone to uphold his part of an agreement. Without them, the company would have probably gone out of business, laying off hundreds of people and denying thousands, who could not get an account at a normal bank, access to banking services.
Vultures might not be pretty, but without them, there'd be rotting corpses all over the places.
After a little RTFA time, I don't think it's quite like the blurb makes it sound. The system can't scan dozens of people walking down a sidewalk (unlike the facial recognition technology used in most "free" countries today). The user has to actively wave at it to allow it to scan.
One concern the article raised is that it appears the prints are stored on the machine as an image (or perhaps a series of numbers describing the layout) rather than a cryptographically secure hash of the print. So if you steal the system, you get a bunch of free pictures of people's prints...and you probably get all of the prints on the hand, since they would likely scan every digit and compare it to the database. As prints become a more common means of identification, those boxes become as valuable as credit card and SSN databases. Although I'm sure the security of 24-hour Fitness and Target are second to none.
If you aint law enforcement, don't even bother asking.
s/law enforcment/law enforcement with a valid warrant/
I don't believe the lawmakers could really be this retarded; there has to be some other reason they're pushing for this law (perhaps just general harassment of gun owners?).
They can't ban guns directly, so they'll try to price them out of existence. Anti-gunners are also pushing for taxes on ammunition, higher taxes on gun sales, etc.
It's the same tactic the ATF used in 1934 to indirectly ban automatic weapons, short barrel rifles, and sound suppressors. They weren't illegal, but they required a $200 tax stamp (almost two months pay at the time) for every transfer.
Gold hasn't been particularly stable, since the value of gold is determined by what various countries set it at. EG in 1934, the U.S. government revalued gold from $20.67/oz to $35.00/oz, instantly deflating the dollar.
So...because the dollar v. gold is unstable, it must be gold? It couldn't possibly be the dollar? (Hint: it is the dollar). Countries don't set the price of anything, governments do. And what they set is the value of their currency in gold. What FDR did in 1934 was revalue the dollar, by decreeing that instead of giving an ounce of gold for $20USD, the foreign gold window (domestic gold ownership was banned) would give an ounce of gold for $35USD, which inflated the dollar, not deflated it. The federal reserve then printed up a bunch of fiat dollars to spend.
A government can't realistically set the value of gold. If the FED today redefined gold as $10/oz, people would simply not sell their gold...or they'd sell an ounce of gold...but only in a plastic case that costs around $1600. They could indirectly redefine the price of gold (and every other commodity) by taking currency out of circulation, or adding new currency, which is precisely why the US dollar has lost 98% of its purchasing power in a century. But really, all they're doing is changing the value of the dollar (reduce supply while demand stays stable).
Clearly the Roman Empire used fiat currency!
Damn! You got me...oh wait...they did! The Romans began debasing their coins (like most fiat currencies have been doing), basically saying that the coin that used to contain one ounce of silver, but now contains one-tenth of an ounce can still buy an ounce of silver. Guess what happened. People hoarded the old coins and the precious metal ingots.
Also, the crash of 1929 was in no way whatsoever caused by the use of a gold standard.
Good for you! You got one right. F. A. Hayek won his Nobel Prize for proving that the crash and the following depression were caused by the Fed induced business cycle. Really, as soon as the Fed began printing Federal Reserve Notes, without any gold backing, the US left the gold standard.
Finally, there have been quite a number of eras of growth and prosperity in which gold was not the standard. EG After WW2 Britain ended the gold standard and started an era of significant technological and economic growth.
That era is still ongoing. How are things working out for them now...oh, that's sad. Like the USA, the UK went on a binge of debt and inflation after WWII, marked with bubbles and busts (as Mises, Hayek, and others predicted would happen with a Keynesian economic policy). After each bust, they have to double the debt to make the next bubble. Both are now getting to the point where they learn that exponential growth is not sustainable.
"Kooky gold hoarders" are rather silly, because they tend to ignore any evidence that contradicts their views. There are many more counterexamples to the points you listed, and they aren't terribly difficult to research.
Maybe if you did some "difficult" research, you'd learn underlying facts, not just the surface fallacies that you spouted above...although the Roman thing was pretty easy to research. Maybe you just ignored it, because it contradicted your views. Are you a kooky gold hoarder?
Yeah, because it's not like gold* has been the most stable currency in human history...oh...wait...it has.
But there's no way that gold* has been the currency during every era of growth and prosperity, while fiat currency has been the currency during every economic collapse...what? That's true too? Really?
Well, I'm sure if we keep up the strawman attacks on the "kooky gold hoarders", people will continue to use fiat currency until we've successfully transferred all of their wealth to banking elites. And that's what's matters.
*Gold is used here to generically mean precious metals, primarily gold and silver, or certificates representing actual precious metal.
I thought today was June 4, 2012. If it's 1989 still, I should probably get out of this office and head to high school.
The operating budget for Congress is in the billions. $5.5Billion actually.
Try it, and they'll arrest you anyway.
But imagine how bad it would have been if we didn't have the US government protecting us from terrorists...by helping the underwear bomber get on the plane, ignoring that he was on the watch list, and giving him a dud bomb?
Homer: Not a bear in sight. The Bear Patrol must be working like a charm.
Lisa: That's specious reasoning, Dad.
Homer: Thank you, dear.
Lisa: By your logic I could claim that this rock keeps tigers away.
Homer: Oh, how does it work?
Lisa: It doesn't work.
Homer: Uh-huh.
Lisa: It's just a stupid rock.
Homer: Uh-huh.
Lisa: But I don't see any tigers around, do you?
[Homer thinks of this, then pulls out some money]
Homer: Lisa, I want to buy your rock.
[Lisa refuses at first, then takes the exchange]
In addition to what tato said, you're also missing opportunity cost.
Imagine what great and wonderful things could be accomplished if that capital stayed in the hands of its rightful owners (i.e. the taxpayers) where it could be invested or used to buy innovative products and services. Or if the thousands of people, who have died because they'd rather risk the higher fatality rates of the highways than get sexually assaulted at the airport, had lived to be creative and productive.
What about when the dumb kids (i.e. those subjected to bureaucratic government "education") start finding the tough questions objectionable? Or when the illiterate ones start finding written questions objectionable?
Did they bother to calculate how much it cost the federal government to do all of this?
The feds spent $X to seize $Y of counterfeit goods that, if they entered the market, might have reduced NFL revenues by $Z.
Y >> Z is definitely true (the guy willing to pay $10 for the counterfeit, might not pay $50 for the authentic).
I seriously doubt X < Z.