And there are third party packages for Fedora and Ubuntu!
I don't want to get into the debate of whether or not gnome-shell is an improvement over the traditional desktop. Either way, it was wrong for them to push it unfinished on unsuspecting users. Now I can start promoting linux again, something I've had to stop doing because of all the coolaid drinking that has been going on in the UI space. My wife has been on Fedora 14 and now I can upgrade her without her killing me.
I wanted to like it, I really did. I tried it for a while, gave it a long time and forced myself to learn to work with activities, customize the dash, etc.,etc. There are some things that I like about it. Unfortunately, it comes down to usability. While I *can* get stuff done with it, it always takes longer. Too much clicking and moving back and forth in the GUI for the stuff I do. Same complaint I had about Windows Explorer in Windows 7 - it was an improvement, but it requires extra clicks and selections to get to what I need. What's wrong with the UI designers? Don't they use their own stuff?
So I'm using XFCE after years of using mainly Gnome. Not as pretty, some things I don't like about it, but it keeps me productive and takes less time to customize. Maybe I'll try out this Cinnamon thing and see how it does.
The same thing can be said about the corrupting influence of corporate money in funding climate change denial studies. If as a scientist, my research is being funded by oil companies who clearly want the studies to find a certain conclusion, you would be driving a stake in the heart of your career if you come to any other conclusion than climate change being unclear.
Can't you say the same thing about being funded by a government bureaucracy that clearly wants your studies to find a certain conclusion, like a study funded by the DEA to study dangers of marijuana, or by the FDA to show that GMO foods are safe? Wouldn't the EPA have a vested interest in funding studies that can show they need more funding and authority?
Geometry proofs are supposed to teach you how to think logically, which is sorely lacking these days. But I get your point. You must be much younger than me, because in my day only the girls took Home Ec, all the boys too Shop.
No, just the opposite. Or close. The supply is certainly limited, in some places more than others. Try streaming a movie on your phone during the early evening around the D.C. area, for instance, and you'll see how limited it is, as well as how demand can spike. If there was so little demand, everyone would be using the cheapest plan available, regardless of caps.
There is no real distinction between the two prominent parties in the US today. Both support racist policies, interventionist wars, police-state tactics and corporatism. The real division is between the political class (which includes the CEO club) and everybody else.
This is just plain flawed logic. There are a lot of things people rely on that require experts to keep working. Some schools still offer shop classes to learn car repair and mechanics, but we don't make that compulsory because not everyone can or should learn that stuff. Basic cooking skills are really important, too, but can you imagine making Home Ec classes compulsory?
The worst aspect of this idea is that what you would end up with is a whole generation of school kids that know enough to be dangerous. And not just to themselves, but also to everyone that ever comes in contact with their poorly constructed code. We have enough amateur crap to deal with (ever been called into help some business guy that decided he could build his own application because he can use MS Access?) Let the kids with aptitude or interest in learning this stuff have ready access to the classes and instruction they need, but don't shove everybody at it. It would not end well.
All Greece tried to do was shorten the work life and let people have a decent retirement, and it bankrupted the country in 20 years.
Greece's current problems has less to do with that than with the mistake of basing a large portion (18.2% of their GDP and 19% of their workforce) of their economy on tourism, which made them incredibly sensitive to economic downturns in other countries.
You're just focusing on a symptom instead of the root causes. Central planners always fail, because they can't control or predict human behavior. When individuals make their own economic decisions, it only affects them instead of the entire country's economy. When central planners start offering guarantees of payments into the future based on a (usually wrong) guess of future revenues, it means eventually the creditors will control the country instead of the citizens.
Besides, your description of the issue is way too simplistic. An economic downturn doesn't turn into an economic crisis overnight - Greece was already so overextended that they simply had nothing left to ride out the recession. And it's not the first time for them. They had the same issues in the early 1990's, so they just printed more money until the drachma was so weak they were able to pay the debt and export more. They can't do that with the Euro because they don't control its value. The long and short is that the government simply spends irresponsibly, and has for many years.
I think you articulated the scam pretty well - but Bain Capital is more of a counter-example, as they never used treasury funds and they didn't get any of their losses socialized. This is all enabled by central planning and debt-based fiat currency courtesy of the Federal Reserve and the massive market intervention of the Federal Government. Of course there are bad actors rigging the system, quite simply because the American people have been asleep at the wheel and letting their government turn into an aristocracy.
That isn't an issue of rich people being too rich (most of those 3.6 million people you want to vilify actually work very hard for their money and earn it by serving consumers), it's an issue of too many rich people gaining wealth via government largess, no-bid contracts, corruption and control over high-level federal administrators.
This, folks, is why I'm a socialist in favor of 'Basic Income'
From who? That sounds simple, but it would cause a lot of complex problems. All Greece tried to do was shorten the work life and let people have a decent retirement, and it bankrupted the country in 20 years.
Americans are big on simple answers to complex problems.
The reason Shakespeare was able to make money is because people bought tickets to go see his plays performed!
It was also because the majority of those people couldn't read anyway, AND there was no way to mass produce books. So copyright laws were completely unnecessary.
Why would it be extortion or why would there be bribes involved? Microsoft owns the patents based on years of R&D (Microsoft Research is the largest R&D center on the industry) and they legally ask for companies to pay to use their patented technology.
Microsoft has moved most of its R&D to India now, so I'm sure it's much cheaper for them these days. And how much of that R&D is actually spent researching better ways to lobby congress for more power?
You mean it was more than "all rich people are evil" and "pay my student loans" and "eat the rich"?
Occupy certainly stirred up some shit, and I applaud them for pointing out the frustration of regular Americans with the corporate welfare and financial inequities inherent in the system. The problem is that most people already see those problems, but Occupy never came up with any coherent solutions. Blaming all the rich just looks like class envy, much of it driven by trust account students. The problems are caused by the corrupt, rent-seeking, and Washington game-playing rich that mostly earn their wealth through government largess and influence with administration policy-makers.
I agree that the money comes from the people but what is the alternative? Does the rich guy get a patriot missile system and the poor guy has to hope no bombs come to his house?
Yep, exactly. And if it does come, then the government's job is to put the rich guy away in the dungeon for a really long time, probably for life.
Do only people who can afford it kids deserve and education or every kid?
That's what we're doing now. There is certainly a benefit to the well-being of the entire country that people are educated, so I can support public funding for education, as long as the community can bear the cost. What's happening right now is that the wealthy get decent education for their kids, while the poor are trapped into government-run schools that mostly do babysitting, with a good dose of government indoctrination, lots of experimentation with social engineering, and dumbing down of anything not required to create compliant wage slaves. Public money is spent to ensure the poor are unable to have alternatives to these failing, government-run schools, and that bad teachers are treated no different than the few good ones still left. Competition for education dollars would help the situation, but the system is designed to fight even modest proposals like allowing tax deductions for private donations to scholarship funds.
How about running water?
Running water isn't free, and never has been. Plumbers don't do much volunteer work, and if you don't pay your water bill the city will cut off your water. Communities that want some common services to deal with their local resources can agree to pool their money to create them, but I fail to see how this is anything but a local issue. The Federal government has no business getting involved in the control of state and local resources, no matter what. Even controlling pollution falls into this category, because states and local communities have a greater vested interest in maintaining clean water than the federal government. If California had dealt with the Snail Darter issue in the SF Bay waters instead of the EPA, then they would not have allowed Monsanto and DuPont to point the finger at irrigation pumps instead of the pollution that their own products were causing, and the EPA wouldn't have been able to cut off water to San Joaquin and put 70,000 farmers out of work and turn a bunch of rich farmland into a new desert.
You can't spend more than you take in I agree but that doesn't mean that sometimes things are more efficiently handled centrally either because of their nature (running water for example requires infrastructure to be built out that few individuals can afford themselves), or necessity for standardization (education, traffic laws etc).
These should still be community standards, not Federal standards. The traffic around DC is the worst in the country. I can't imagine any community wanting to emulate that.
Governments are elected to govern. If the majority of the electorate has voted them in on the platform that they were going to do X than it isn't governing by fiat.
That's the way it's supposed to work, but it's not the way it's currently working at the federal level, and it doesn't sound like what you were advocating at all.
I'm opposed to restricting personal freedoms at any level, I'm not opposed to government enforcing/managing access to those freedoms in the most uniform way as possible.
What does that even mean? If I have to beg some bureaucrat for "access" to my freedom - that's not freedom at all.
But as far as government doing what they said they would (at least as much as they can after the compromises to the other party) isn't dictatorship it is the will of the people.
That's a pretty specious claim. The bank bailout was opposed by an overwhelming majority of the people, but it passed anyway. Ethanol mandates and subsidies are now completely without support but still happening. SOPA is opposed by 96% to 4%, but getting pushed through. I could go on and on with these things. Practically nobody outside DC wants indefinite detention of US citizens by the military, but there it is.
I just don't see how it is fair that one kid learns about evolution and God, another learns about evolution, another just God etc based on where they live.
That's the parent's decision, not yours, not the government's. The issue here is that education has become mostly a monopoly protected by government and paid for by forceable confiscation of private money.
These to me are fundamental rights to a) remove ignorance b) have fair access to public programs
Those aren't rights - they are goods and services. "Public services" are is a complete misnomer. There is no equal access to public services and there never will be.
You seem to have fallen for this flawed idea that resources come from the government. They don't. Government takes resource from the people to fund itself. How those funds are spent will always be contentious. But if they continue spending more than they are able to take in, borrowing against the work of future taxpayers, eventually they will run out of resource, the economy will collapse, and the government will fall.
You were originally arguing to have those things dictated from Washington, and now you're saying they should not be dictated at all (which I agree with, BTW), so I don't know what your argument is, here, unless you've simply decided that the most powerful government should be deciding things by fiat for everyone because it's too hard to get people to agree.
My point was that government's role should be to first protect individual liberties and property rights, as the US Constitutions (and state Constitutions) already attempt to do. Everything else should worked out at the smallest level of government. Communities work out community rules, local governments resolve conflicts between communities, state governments conflicts between local counties, the Federal government should have no role except when conflicts arise between the states. Smaller government is always better because it is the most responsive to the people.
The vast majority of this is griping about no representation non-elected rulers.
Haven't you been paying attention? That's the argument today about our government, too: that the representatives are swayed by moneyed interests and are not responsive to the electorate.
It doesn't make sense to decide on a state by state basis whether or not birth control will be taught in PE class or not, or whether or not money will go to abortion clinics, or... These are common issues.
Wrong. People are not all alike, and it's unfair for 535 people to dictation personal issues to 360 million people. Communities should government themselves, first, without interference. Common issues are only those things that everyone can agree upon, and those are all enumerated in the Constitution of the US and the states.
We aren't talking about growing crops for example, where people in NY city might not care about it as long as it ends up on their plate at a reasonable price, these are things of value, common interest that should be decided once and managed consistently so that opportunities and obligations to society are consistent for all Americans/Mexicans/Whateverians
Central planning failure. When NYC decides how everything will run, they won't be getting any food on their plates because the bureaucrats that don't live in rural farmland don't know jack shit about life in rural farmlands, and eventually nobody will be growing crops anymore, or the only thing grown will be corporation GMO crops laden down with poisons so badly that nobody can survive long eating it.
Did you even read the quote you posted? Alexander Hamilton was advocating the use of the "public purse" to support the "efforts of industry", claiming it's necessary in the US where it's not in other countries with great private wealth. Since the US now has that wealth, his argument is no longer relevant.
Besides, Hamilton stood virtually alone among the founding fathers as a statist. He didn't trust the people to rule themselves, and advocated a strong "nanny state" government as powerful as King George's.
I'm also on Comcast ("XFinity"), and most stuff on AMC, and always Walking Dead are clearly flagged here as copy protected. The only difference is that I can't get AMC in HD, only in SD. But that seems backward to me, that they would flag the SD and not the HD format. Must have something to do with the local provider.
Is the country supposed to remain exactly the same even if a large part of the population no longer agrees with a 55 guys that have been dead for nearly 200 years and chief complaint was the accessibility of horse and buggy parking in front of the local dry goods store?
What is this kind of asinine hyperbole supposed to signify? Oh, that we're backwards because our Constitution is outdated and doesn't recognize your right to health care, filet mignot, and a new smart phone every year? Since you seem to have forgotten what the grievances were that prompted people to go to war to oust their leaders from power, I'll remind you:
Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.-- Such has been the patient sufferance of these Colonies; and such is now the necessity which constrains them to alter their former Systems of Government. The history of the present King of Great Britain is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute Tyranny over these States. To prove this, let Facts be submitted to a candid world.
He has refused his Assent to Laws, the most wholesome and necessary for the public good.
He has forbidden his Governors to pass Laws of immediate and pressing importance, unless suspended in their operation till his Assent should be obtained; and when so suspended, he has utterly neglected to attend to them.
He has refused to pass other Laws for the accommodation of large districts of people, unless those people would relinquish the right of Representation in the Legislature, a right inestimable to them and formidable to tyrants only.
He has called together legislative bodies at places unusual, uncomfortable, and distant from the depository of their public Records, for the sole purpose of fatiguing them into compliance with his measures.
He has dissolved Representative Houses repeatedly, for opposing with manly firmness his invasions on the rights of the people.
He has refused for a long time, after such dissolutions, to cause others to be elected; whereby the Legislative powers, incapable of Annihilation, have returned to the People at large for their exercise; the State remaining in the mean time exposed to all the dangers of invasion from without, and convulsions within.
He has endeavoured to prevent the population of these States; for that purpose obstructing the Laws for Naturalization of Foreigners; refusing to pass others to encourage their migrations hither, and raising the conditions of new Appropriations of Lands.
He has obstructed the Administration of Justice, by refusing his Assent to Laws for establishing Judiciary powers.
He has made Judges dependent on his Will alone, for the tenure of their offices, and the amount and payment of their salaries.
He has erected a multitude of New Offices, and sent hither swarms of Officers to harrass our people, and eat out their substance.
He has kept among us, in times of peace, Standing Armies without the Consent of our legislatures.
He has affected to render the Military independent of and superior to the Civil power.
He has combined with others to subject us to a jurisdiction foreign to our constitution, and unacknowledged by our laws; giving his Assent to their Acts of pretended Legislation:
For Quartering large bodies of armed troops among us:
For protecting them, by a mock Trial, from punishment for any Murders which they should commit on the Inhabitants of thes
Or, if you'd prefer to actually add to the discussion, come up with something, anything to support the assertion that Obama is knowingly causing harm with the end goal of a state-run utopia.
So many videos. So little time to dig up and post.
Hey - guess what? Alexander Hamilton lived in the US at a time when OTHER COUNTRIES had great private wealth. Today, the US is a country with great private wealth.
Slashdot Mirror
And there are third party packages for Fedora and Ubuntu!
I don't want to get into the debate of whether or not gnome-shell is an improvement over the traditional desktop. Either way, it was wrong for them to push it unfinished on unsuspecting users. Now I can start promoting linux again, something I've had to stop doing because of all the coolaid drinking that has been going on in the UI space. My wife has been on Fedora 14 and now I can upgrade her without her killing me.
I wanted to like it, I really did. I tried it for a while, gave it a long time and forced myself to learn to work with activities, customize the dash, etc.,etc. There are some things that I like about it. Unfortunately, it comes down to usability. While I *can* get stuff done with it, it always takes longer. Too much clicking and moving back and forth in the GUI for the stuff I do. Same complaint I had about Windows Explorer in Windows 7 - it was an improvement, but it requires extra clicks and selections to get to what I need. What's wrong with the UI designers? Don't they use their own stuff?
So I'm using XFCE after years of using mainly Gnome. Not as pretty, some things I don't like about it, but it keeps me productive and takes less time to customize. Maybe I'll try out this Cinnamon thing and see how it does.
The same thing can be said about the corrupting influence of corporate money in funding climate change denial studies. If as a scientist, my research is being funded by oil companies who clearly want the studies to find a certain conclusion, you would be driving a stake in the heart of your career if you come to any other conclusion than climate change being unclear.
Can't you say the same thing about being funded by a government bureaucracy that clearly wants your studies to find a certain conclusion, like a study funded by the DEA to study dangers of marijuana, or by the FDA to show that GMO foods are safe? Wouldn't the EPA have a vested interest in funding studies that can show they need more funding and authority?
Geometry proofs are supposed to teach you how to think logically, which is sorely lacking these days. But I get your point. You must be much younger than me, because in my day only the girls took Home Ec, all the boys too Shop.
AT&T has lots of supply and little demand.
No, just the opposite. Or close. The supply is certainly limited, in some places more than others. Try streaming a movie on your phone during the early evening around the D.C. area, for instance, and you'll see how limited it is, as well as how demand can spike. If there was so little demand, everyone would be using the cheapest plan available, regardless of caps.
She went to jail because they proved that she lied to them.
... while under oath.
Incorrect. The lie was told to investigators during the normal course of investigation, not in court and not under oath. They got her with this law.
There is no real distinction between the two prominent parties in the US today. Both support racist policies, interventionist wars, police-state tactics and corporatism. The real division is between the political class (which includes the CEO club) and everybody else.
45 comments, perhaps 3 of which that aren't jokes or AC trolls. /. used to be a place where science could be discussed intelligently...
Really? When was that?
Well, okay, could is probably true.
This is just plain flawed logic. There are a lot of things people rely on that require experts to keep working. Some schools still offer shop classes to learn car repair and mechanics, but we don't make that compulsory because not everyone can or should learn that stuff. Basic cooking skills are really important, too, but can you imagine making Home Ec classes compulsory?
The worst aspect of this idea is that what you would end up with is a whole generation of school kids that know enough to be dangerous. And not just to themselves, but also to everyone that ever comes in contact with their poorly constructed code. We have enough amateur crap to deal with (ever been called into help some business guy that decided he could build his own application because he can use MS Access?) Let the kids with aptitude or interest in learning this stuff have ready access to the classes and instruction they need, but don't shove everybody at it. It would not end well.
All Greece tried to do was shorten the work life and let people have a decent retirement, and it bankrupted the country in 20 years.
Greece's current problems has less to do with that than with the mistake of basing a large portion (18.2% of their GDP and 19% of their workforce) of their economy on tourism, which made them incredibly sensitive to economic downturns in other countries.
You're just focusing on a symptom instead of the root causes. Central planners always fail, because they can't control or predict human behavior. When individuals make their own economic decisions, it only affects them instead of the entire country's economy. When central planners start offering guarantees of payments into the future based on a (usually wrong) guess of future revenues, it means eventually the creditors will control the country instead of the citizens.
Besides, your description of the issue is way too simplistic. An economic downturn doesn't turn into an economic crisis overnight - Greece was already so overextended that they simply had nothing left to ride out the recession. And it's not the first time for them. They had the same issues in the early 1990's, so they just printed more money until the drachma was so weak they were able to pay the debt and export more. They can't do that with the Euro because they don't control its value. The long and short is that the government simply spends irresponsibly, and has for many years.
I think you articulated the scam pretty well - but Bain Capital is more of a counter-example, as they never used treasury funds and they didn't get any of their losses socialized. This is all enabled by central planning and debt-based fiat currency courtesy of the Federal Reserve and the massive market intervention of the Federal Government. Of course there are bad actors rigging the system, quite simply because the American people have been asleep at the wheel and letting their government turn into an aristocracy.
That isn't an issue of rich people being too rich (most of those 3.6 million people you want to vilify actually work very hard for their money and earn it by serving consumers), it's an issue of too many rich people gaining wealth via government largess, no-bid contracts, corruption and control over high-level federal administrators.
This, folks, is why I'm a socialist in favor of 'Basic Income'
From who? That sounds simple, but it would cause a lot of complex problems. All Greece tried to do was shorten the work life and let people have a decent retirement, and it bankrupted the country in 20 years.
Americans are big on simple answers to complex problems.
Hmm... Uh ... too obvious.
The reason Shakespeare was able to make money is because people bought tickets to go see his plays performed!
It was also because the majority of those people couldn't read anyway, AND there was no way to mass produce books. So copyright laws were completely unnecessary.
Most good coders that I know are among the best at spelling and grammar. Probably because they have to know ... languages.
Why would that be the case? Wouldn't they be the same patents they've used in other cases, and have been released for public consumption?
Why would it be extortion or why would there be bribes involved? Microsoft owns the patents based on years of R&D (Microsoft Research is the largest R&D center on the industry) and they legally ask for companies to pay to use their patented technology.
Microsoft has moved most of its R&D to India now, so I'm sure it's much cheaper for them these days. And how much of that R&D is actually spent researching better ways to lobby congress for more power?
You mean it was more than "all rich people are evil" and "pay my student loans" and "eat the rich"?
Occupy certainly stirred up some shit, and I applaud them for pointing out the frustration of regular Americans with the corporate welfare and financial inequities inherent in the system. The problem is that most people already see those problems, but Occupy never came up with any coherent solutions. Blaming all the rich just looks like class envy, much of it driven by trust account students. The problems are caused by the corrupt, rent-seeking, and Washington game-playing rich that mostly earn their wealth through government largess and influence with administration policy-makers.
Maybe you have a different take?
I agree that the money comes from the people but what is the alternative? Does the rich guy get a patriot missile system and the poor guy has to hope no bombs come to his house?
Yep, exactly. And if it does come, then the government's job is to put the rich guy away in the dungeon for a really long time, probably for life.
Do only people who can afford it kids deserve and education or every kid?
That's what we're doing now. There is certainly a benefit to the well-being of the entire country that people are educated, so I can support public funding for education, as long as the community can bear the cost. What's happening right now is that the wealthy get decent education for their kids, while the poor are trapped into government-run schools that mostly do babysitting, with a good dose of government indoctrination, lots of experimentation with social engineering, and dumbing down of anything not required to create compliant wage slaves. Public money is spent to ensure the poor are unable to have alternatives to these failing, government-run schools, and that bad teachers are treated no different than the few good ones still left. Competition for education dollars would help the situation, but the system is designed to fight even modest proposals like allowing tax deductions for private donations to scholarship funds.
How about running water?
Running water isn't free, and never has been. Plumbers don't do much volunteer work, and if you don't pay your water bill the city will cut off your water. Communities that want some common services to deal with their local resources can agree to pool their money to create them, but I fail to see how this is anything but a local issue. The Federal government has no business getting involved in the control of state and local resources, no matter what. Even controlling pollution falls into this category, because states and local communities have a greater vested interest in maintaining clean water than the federal government. If California had dealt with the Snail Darter issue in the SF Bay waters instead of the EPA, then they would not have allowed Monsanto and DuPont to point the finger at irrigation pumps instead of the pollution that their own products were causing, and the EPA wouldn't have been able to cut off water to San Joaquin and put 70,000 farmers out of work and turn a bunch of rich farmland into a new desert.
You can't spend more than you take in I agree but that doesn't mean that sometimes things are more efficiently handled centrally either because of their nature (running water for example requires infrastructure to be built out that few individuals can afford themselves), or necessity for standardization (education, traffic laws etc).
These should still be community standards, not Federal standards. The traffic around DC is the worst in the country. I can't imagine any community wanting to emulate that.
Governments are elected to govern. If the majority of the electorate has voted them in on the platform that they were going to do X than it isn't governing by fiat.
That's the way it's supposed to work, but it's not the way it's currently working at the federal level, and it doesn't sound like what you were advocating at all.
I'm opposed to restricting personal freedoms at any level, I'm not opposed to government enforcing/managing access to those freedoms in the most uniform way as possible.
What does that even mean? If I have to beg some bureaucrat for "access" to my freedom - that's not freedom at all.
But as far as government doing what they said they would (at least as much as they can after the compromises to the other party) isn't dictatorship it is the will of the people.
That's a pretty specious claim. The bank bailout was opposed by an overwhelming majority of the people, but it passed anyway. Ethanol mandates and subsidies are now completely without support but still happening. SOPA is opposed by 96% to 4%, but getting pushed through. I could go on and on with these things. Practically nobody outside DC wants indefinite detention of US citizens by the military, but there it is.
I just don't see how it is fair that one kid learns about evolution and God, another learns about evolution, another just God etc based on where they live.
That's the parent's decision, not yours, not the government's. The issue here is that education has become mostly a monopoly protected by government and paid for by forceable confiscation of private money.
These to me are fundamental rights to a) remove ignorance b) have fair access to public programs
Those aren't rights - they are goods and services. "Public services" are is a complete misnomer. There is no equal access to public services and there never will be.
You seem to have fallen for this flawed idea that resources come from the government. They don't. Government takes resource from the people to fund itself. How those funds are spent will always be contentious. But if they continue spending more than they are able to take in, borrowing against the work of future taxpayers, eventually they will run out of resource, the economy will collapse, and the government will fall.
You were originally arguing to have those things dictated from Washington, and now you're saying they should not be dictated at all (which I agree with, BTW), so I don't know what your argument is, here, unless you've simply decided that the most powerful government should be deciding things by fiat for everyone because it's too hard to get people to agree.
My point was that government's role should be to first protect individual liberties and property rights, as the US Constitutions (and state Constitutions) already attempt to do. Everything else should worked out at the smallest level of government. Communities work out community rules, local governments resolve conflicts between communities, state governments conflicts between local counties, the Federal government should have no role except when conflicts arise between the states. Smaller government is always better because it is the most responsive to the people.
The vast majority of this is griping about no representation non-elected rulers.
Haven't you been paying attention? That's the argument today about our government, too: that the representatives are swayed by moneyed interests and are not responsive to the electorate.
It doesn't make sense to decide on a state by state basis whether or not birth control will be taught in PE class or not, or whether or not money will go to abortion clinics, or ... These are common issues.
Wrong. People are not all alike, and it's unfair for 535 people to dictation personal issues to 360 million people. Communities should government themselves, first, without interference. Common issues are only those things that everyone can agree upon, and those are all enumerated in the Constitution of the US and the states.
We aren't talking about growing crops for example, where people in NY city might not care about it as long as it ends up on their plate at a reasonable price, these are things of value, common interest that should be decided once and managed consistently so that opportunities and obligations to society are consistent for all Americans/Mexicans/Whateverians
Central planning failure. When NYC decides how everything will run, they won't be getting any food on their plates because the bureaucrats that don't live in rural farmland don't know jack shit about life in rural farmlands, and eventually nobody will be growing crops anymore, or the only thing grown will be corporation GMO crops laden down with poisons so badly that nobody can survive long eating it.
Did you even read the quote you posted? Alexander Hamilton was advocating the use of the "public purse" to support the "efforts of industry", claiming it's necessary in the US where it's not in other countries with great private wealth. Since the US now has that wealth, his argument is no longer relevant.
Besides, Hamilton stood virtually alone among the founding fathers as a statist. He didn't trust the people to rule themselves, and advocated a strong "nanny state" government as powerful as King George's.
I'm also on Comcast ("XFinity"), and most stuff on AMC, and always Walking Dead are clearly flagged here as copy protected. The only difference is that I can't get AMC in HD, only in SD. But that seems backward to me, that they would flag the SD and not the HD format. Must have something to do with the local provider.
Is the country supposed to remain exactly the same even if a large part of the population no longer agrees with a 55 guys that have been dead for nearly 200 years and chief complaint was the accessibility of horse and buggy parking in front of the local dry goods store?
What is this kind of asinine hyperbole supposed to signify? Oh, that we're backwards because our Constitution is outdated and doesn't recognize your right to health care, filet mignot, and a new smart phone every year? Since you seem to have forgotten what the grievances were that prompted people to go to war to oust their leaders from power, I'll remind you:
Or, if you'd prefer to actually add to the discussion, come up with something, anything to support the assertion that Obama is knowingly causing harm with the end goal of a state-run utopia.
So many videos. So little time to dig up and post.
Hey - guess what? Alexander Hamilton lived in the US at a time when OTHER COUNTRIES had great private wealth. Today, the US is a country with great private wealth.