If you've got a stable place with something of a kitchen and storage, you can get good, nutritious staples at the grocery store. Most of that stuff comes in greater quantities than you can use at once, and a lot of it requires preparation. Otherwise, fast food's probably the best you can do on that budget.
You know what happens with Medicaid, at least until the ACA? If you start making money to try to get out of poverty, you lose it. That was one of the big things keeping many AFDC mothers on welfare: if they tried to better themselves, their children would not have medical coverage. That's scary. If we implemented some form of universal health care, we'd be enabling people to get off welfare.
Scholarships for low-income families? There are some, sure. Are there enough to put all the poor children into good elementary, middle, and high schools? Public schools in poor areas frequently suck, and low-income scholarships to colleges tend to go to people who have had a decent education up until college.
Social environment? How about one where hard work will probably get someone out of poverty? A lot of poor people are hard workers, sometimes working two half-time jobs with a lot of travel time between, so they don't have time to get enough sleep. Since both are minimum-wage jobs with hours sufficiently low that the employer doesn't have to offer any sort of benefit, and that's still insufficient money to maintain a stable lifestyle that can withstand the odd financial setback here or there, this isn't a way out of poverty.
I don't think many of the habitual poor are habitually poor because they want to be. Lots of them want to advance themselves but can't catch a break. Others have taken too much abuse and have given up. They've got plenty of social stigma, and it's holding them down.
Let's take an example. You're a poor person, and you find a better job some distance away. Now, mass transit in all but a few US cities sucks, and jobs the poor can get tend not to come with flexible schedules. Housing might be more expensive near the job, so the only option you have is driving. Since you're poor, you own a junker, and it's unreliable, so it's sometimes very difficult to get to work on time, and it's prone to cost you a lot of money (from your point of view) at unpredictable times.
I don't want you to snipe at solutions for problems like that. I just want you to think about such problems.
There's a serious philosophical problem here. The drug testing costs more than the money it saves, and it's an additional hassle for anyone on benefits. On any rational basis, it should not be done. The goal is clearly not to avoid waste. It's to spend additional resources to avoid spending money on people the legislature disapproves of.
It would make sense to say, "We're willing to spend $X to help the poor. How can we best help the poor with this money?". Instead, we put money and people into making damn sure nobody poor is getting anything they can be legally denied.
The poor pay taxes. They just don't pay income taxes. If they earn money, they pay FICA taxes. If they buy things, they pay sales taxes. If they rent, part of the rent goes to property taxes (my state allows property tax rebates to sufficiently poor renters).
Liberals want equal opportunity. The difference is that we use a realistic definition of equal opportunity, as opposed to an ideological one. An underfed black girl going to a crappy school does not have the same opportunity as a well-off white boy going through top-level schools, to include an Ivy League school.
On the other hand, if you were making a decision that would affect the profitability of one tobacco company or another, you would have at least a small financial interest in the decision. If it's just your decision, that's fine, and you should act according to your best interest. If you're making a decision for a corporation or government, that's conflict of interest.
With Android, when I want to install an app, I'm presented with a list of permissions that I can grant or deny. They just kinda sit there on the screen, devoid of context. You or I can understand what they mean in isolation like that, but even we don't know how they're going to be used. A mapping program will need to know where it is now and then, but you don't want it tracking your movements and sending them to the FBI or someone you're trying to avoid socially. On iOS, you are informed when a program wants to use location services, and can make the decision in context. Particularly in the case of a non-expert user, permissions at runtime when it may be obvious what the program is trying to do are better than permissions at install time.
You can write programs for iOS in C#. Since I haven't done it, I don't know how much Objective-C you need to know, but I'd bet it's all in wrappers.
The runtime isn't important. Android uses Dalvik, which AFAIK isn't standard anything. I really don't see the difference here between iOS and Android. Both have preferred languages, which compile to something that will run on the phone or tablet. The details are irrelevant if all you want to do is get an app running on one or the other (or both). The details are relevant if you're writing the compiler back end, but those vary widely too. There is no standard CPU, although most in things resembling computers are AMD64 or ARM.
I've been told you can load programs onto an iDevice that you've compiled yourself. If so, you can sideload as long as you've got the source. I consider that much more important than the ability to sideload a binary, myself.
And, as far as the fundamental design principles go, you're dead wrong on one point.
User control conflicts with security. All user control and users will run assorted things on their phone. Unless there is some sort of whitelist, some of these things will be malware. This is based on decades of experience, and nobody has found a way around it. It's possible to try to detect malware, either on installation or by monitoring execution, but neither of these will work in general. Blacklists don't work. Checking signatures is a form of blacklist. For anything a piece of malware is likely to do, legitimate software is likely to do, and knowing whether a certain data connection is legitimate or not is arbitrarily difficult.
To repeat, the only way to allow the average user to do safe computing is to restrict that user to a set of programs that can be pre-checked. That is precisely what you do with your CentOS box: you allow your wife and children to install software only from a set of curated repositories. Most people don't have a highly competent computer person to do this for them, and for most people the walled garden is the only way to avoid serious malware.
I'd say that ranked-choice voting would be much more significant in changing results than a second primary. I'd like to see that in place, but I seem to be a minority in that.
Ranked choice would have made no difference in the Democratic primaries, but IIRC the Republicans have some winner-take-all states, and it might have had a big impact there.
Ignoring the Second Amendment for the sake of argument, guns have significant legitimate uses. They can be used for hunting, shooting at the range, and self-defense, all of which are legal in the US, and lots of people do use guns for those purposes.
It's easy to use guns to commit crimes. I suspect a gun seller would be in trouble if he or she sold a weapon with the knowledge that it was going to be used illegally, or if the purchaser did not have the right to carry a firearm.
From a legal point of view, the right comparison is someone who helps other people violate copyright on a massive scale vs. someone who hangs around in bad neighborhoods and sells guns to known criminals who clearly intend to do something illegal with them. I think that, if both were caught, the latter guy would be in more trouble than the former.
As for the torrent file being prima facie illegal, I suspect there are arguments to be made. Since the defendant didn't show up to court, the defendant couldn't present any of those arguments,
The Pirate Bay exists for the primary purpose of facilitating copyright infringement, which is illegal in every developed nation. There's going to be some law or another that covers it in pretty much any jurisdiction.
And this would be different from other presidential elections I've lived through in what way? You stated a near-truism and plugged 2016 in where it said $YEAR.
Clinton had some authority in changing document classification, FWIW. I don't know how that applies here.
Also, legal or not, Clinton made a judgment call on what had to be done. Prosecute her for decisions like that and you run a large risk of crippling US diplomacy.
The circumstance was that she couldn't get the document she needed through standard classified channels, and she decided that getting the document was more important than strictly obeying the classification laws.
At some point, rigid security procedures are going to hinder getting things done, and there needs to be ways, official or unofficial, to bypass them if the need is urgent. Clinton was the Secretary of State, and decided it was better to send the document to her through unclassified channels than not to send it at all. She may have not set things up right, but at the time she needed the thing it was too late for that. Diplomacy can be time-sensitive.
I'm not saying this because I'm a Clinton supporter. I'd support any other Cabinet-level official in doing the same thing on occasion, D or R.
If they were that prejudiced against Republicans, why did Kasich do so well on Politifact? He was rated as about as honest as Clinton and Sanders.
The reason Politifact seems biased against Republicans right now is that there are a lot of Republicans who are lying. Religious fanatics tend to say things based on what they want to be true rather than what's true, and Trump of course is a liar. The Republican party in general is anti-inconvenient-science, currently more so than the Democrats.
I'd like to see the Republican Party come back to where it was some time ago, but it seems determined to attain irrational ideological purity at the expense of anything else - at least until the voters rebel and pick a candidate who isn't a hard-line conventional ideologically driven Republican.
Ventura wasn't that bad a manager, and the surplus-to-deficit change was largely not his fault. Minnesota relies heavily on its income tax for revenue, which means its revenue is more affected by the economy than usual. I'm not calling him a good governor, but he wasn't as bad as some people think.
The day after he was elected, I heard person after person say "At least it wasn't", followed by one of two names.
Some of them were clearly incompetent (Fiorina, Carson). Some of them were far to the right of the Republican Party, which isn't primarily composed of far-right-wing religious fanatics (although it's got more than its share of them). You've got a point in that what mainstream candidates they had did poorly (like Bush), but there were a lot that were less acceptable to the Republican rank and file than Trump. (You may find that frightening. I do.)
Why do you think she'll get us into big wars? She did vote for the Iraq invasion, but so did many other people, who were deceived by the White House. She didn't get us into any boots-on-the-ground shooting commitments, as far as I noticed.
Okay, what did Clinton do wrong with Benghazi? She had limited resources, and Congress refused to provide the additional resources she asked for. She distributed her security forces in a reasonable way, and that's all she could do. Once the attack started, there was nothing she could do to affect the outcome. If you're accusing her of causing the deaths of diplomats, everything that happened after the attack is irrelevant.
She went through more than a dozen Congressional inquiries from a very hostile Congress, and none of them was able to pin wrongdoing on her.
It's things like the constant harping on Benghazi that make me slow to believe anything bad I hear about her, since so much of what bad stuff I hear is malicious lies and half-truths.
A second primary would have had no effect. The Democratic nomination has been a two-horse race from the start, with delegates going to only Sanders and Clinton. The result was pretty decisive: Clinton led by hundreds of pledged delegates. In the Republican race, Trump has a majority of the delegates. In primaries and caucuses with multiple candidates, he topped out at about 40% of the vote. When it was down to Trump, Cruz, and Kasich, Trump started winning majorities. If Trump merely had the largest number of delegates, but not a majority, a second primary might change the result, but that's not the case.
There's also an expectation that, if you buy a cup of coffee and it comes with cream and sugar, that there will be a safe and obvious way to put the cream and sugar into the coffee. Had the cup been able to function without the lid, there would have been no injury and no lawsuit.
In an urban area, discharging a firearm in public is likely to be illegal, because of the danger to others. You're probably having a camera record an illegal act that people are going to notice. Firing a paintball is likely to be safer legally.
I write stuff for my employer, and it's theirs (work for hire). They pay me well every two weeks.
Now suppose I were to write a good novel. That's a fair amount of unpaid work. Now, suppose I self-publish electronically. The only way I earn money is if people buy my book, and each purchase gives me a little money. Assume that lots of people like it enough so they'd pay for it, and my adoring fans are happy to give me enough money to encourage me and support me while I work on another book. How should that work?
Now, suppose I self-publish something I've already written (which wouldn't qualify as "good" by most definitions). Same mechanics. I've written a novel that not many people like (my wife said it was readable, and in the second half of the book she didn't notice it being amateurish). Very few people like it enough to pay for it. However, I've done the same thing as in the previous paragraph, and the only differences are quality and how much people in general like it. Should I be paid for it? If so, how much and how should this be determined?
The easy solution is to pay me some money for each copy of my book sold. That self-regulates to get me an economically reasonable amount of money. However, it requires copyright.
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If you've got a stable place with something of a kitchen and storage, you can get good, nutritious staples at the grocery store. Most of that stuff comes in greater quantities than you can use at once, and a lot of it requires preparation. Otherwise, fast food's probably the best you can do on that budget.
You know what happens with Medicaid, at least until the ACA? If you start making money to try to get out of poverty, you lose it. That was one of the big things keeping many AFDC mothers on welfare: if they tried to better themselves, their children would not have medical coverage. That's scary. If we implemented some form of universal health care, we'd be enabling people to get off welfare.
Scholarships for low-income families? There are some, sure. Are there enough to put all the poor children into good elementary, middle, and high schools? Public schools in poor areas frequently suck, and low-income scholarships to colleges tend to go to people who have had a decent education up until college.
Social environment? How about one where hard work will probably get someone out of poverty? A lot of poor people are hard workers, sometimes working two half-time jobs with a lot of travel time between, so they don't have time to get enough sleep. Since both are minimum-wage jobs with hours sufficiently low that the employer doesn't have to offer any sort of benefit, and that's still insufficient money to maintain a stable lifestyle that can withstand the odd financial setback here or there, this isn't a way out of poverty.
I don't think many of the habitual poor are habitually poor because they want to be. Lots of them want to advance themselves but can't catch a break. Others have taken too much abuse and have given up. They've got plenty of social stigma, and it's holding them down.
Let's take an example. You're a poor person, and you find a better job some distance away. Now, mass transit in all but a few US cities sucks, and jobs the poor can get tend not to come with flexible schedules. Housing might be more expensive near the job, so the only option you have is driving. Since you're poor, you own a junker, and it's unreliable, so it's sometimes very difficult to get to work on time, and it's prone to cost you a lot of money (from your point of view) at unpredictable times.
I don't want you to snipe at solutions for problems like that. I just want you to think about such problems.
There's a serious philosophical problem here. The drug testing costs more than the money it saves, and it's an additional hassle for anyone on benefits. On any rational basis, it should not be done. The goal is clearly not to avoid waste. It's to spend additional resources to avoid spending money on people the legislature disapproves of.
It would make sense to say, "We're willing to spend $X to help the poor. How can we best help the poor with this money?". Instead, we put money and people into making damn sure nobody poor is getting anything they can be legally denied.
The poor pay taxes. They just don't pay income taxes. If they earn money, they pay FICA taxes. If they buy things, they pay sales taxes. If they rent, part of the rent goes to property taxes (my state allows property tax rebates to sufficiently poor renters).
Liberals want equal opportunity. The difference is that we use a realistic definition of equal opportunity, as opposed to an ideological one. An underfed black girl going to a crappy school does not have the same opportunity as a well-off white boy going through top-level schools, to include an Ivy League school.
On the other hand, if you were making a decision that would affect the profitability of one tobacco company or another, you would have at least a small financial interest in the decision. If it's just your decision, that's fine, and you should act according to your best interest. If you're making a decision for a corporation or government, that's conflict of interest.
With Android, when I want to install an app, I'm presented with a list of permissions that I can grant or deny. They just kinda sit there on the screen, devoid of context. You or I can understand what they mean in isolation like that, but even we don't know how they're going to be used. A mapping program will need to know where it is now and then, but you don't want it tracking your movements and sending them to the FBI or someone you're trying to avoid socially. On iOS, you are informed when a program wants to use location services, and can make the decision in context. Particularly in the case of a non-expert user, permissions at runtime when it may be obvious what the program is trying to do are better than permissions at install time.
You can write programs for iOS in C#. Since I haven't done it, I don't know how much Objective-C you need to know, but I'd bet it's all in wrappers.
The runtime isn't important. Android uses Dalvik, which AFAIK isn't standard anything. I really don't see the difference here between iOS and Android. Both have preferred languages, which compile to something that will run on the phone or tablet. The details are irrelevant if all you want to do is get an app running on one or the other (or both). The details are relevant if you're writing the compiler back end, but those vary widely too. There is no standard CPU, although most in things resembling computers are AMD64 or ARM.
I've been told you can load programs onto an iDevice that you've compiled yourself. If so, you can sideload as long as you've got the source. I consider that much more important than the ability to sideload a binary, myself.
And, as far as the fundamental design principles go, you're dead wrong on one point.
User control conflicts with security. All user control and users will run assorted things on their phone. Unless there is some sort of whitelist, some of these things will be malware. This is based on decades of experience, and nobody has found a way around it. It's possible to try to detect malware, either on installation or by monitoring execution, but neither of these will work in general. Blacklists don't work. Checking signatures is a form of blacklist. For anything a piece of malware is likely to do, legitimate software is likely to do, and knowing whether a certain data connection is legitimate or not is arbitrarily difficult.
To repeat, the only way to allow the average user to do safe computing is to restrict that user to a set of programs that can be pre-checked. That is precisely what you do with your CentOS box: you allow your wife and children to install software only from a set of curated repositories. Most people don't have a highly competent computer person to do this for them, and for most people the walled garden is the only way to avoid serious malware.
I'd say that ranked-choice voting would be much more significant in changing results than a second primary. I'd like to see that in place, but I seem to be a minority in that.
Ranked choice would have made no difference in the Democratic primaries, but IIRC the Republicans have some winner-take-all states, and it might have had a big impact there.
Obama is trying to stay peaceful. There's lots of room between "more hawkish than Obama" and "going to get us into a major quagmire-style war".
Ignoring the Second Amendment for the sake of argument, guns have significant legitimate uses. They can be used for hunting, shooting at the range, and self-defense, all of which are legal in the US, and lots of people do use guns for those purposes.
It's easy to use guns to commit crimes. I suspect a gun seller would be in trouble if he or she sold a weapon with the knowledge that it was going to be used illegally, or if the purchaser did not have the right to carry a firearm.
From a legal point of view, the right comparison is someone who helps other people violate copyright on a massive scale vs. someone who hangs around in bad neighborhoods and sells guns to known criminals who clearly intend to do something illegal with them. I think that, if both were caught, the latter guy would be in more trouble than the former.
As for the torrent file being prima facie illegal, I suspect there are arguments to be made. Since the defendant didn't show up to court, the defendant couldn't present any of those arguments,
The Pirate Bay exists for the primary purpose of facilitating copyright infringement, which is illegal in every developed nation. There's going to be some law or another that covers it in pretty much any jurisdiction.
And this would be different from other presidential elections I've lived through in what way? You stated a near-truism and plugged 2016 in where it said $YEAR.
Clinton had some authority in changing document classification, FWIW. I don't know how that applies here.
Also, legal or not, Clinton made a judgment call on what had to be done. Prosecute her for decisions like that and you run a large risk of crippling US diplomacy.
The circumstance was that she couldn't get the document she needed through standard classified channels, and she decided that getting the document was more important than strictly obeying the classification laws.
At some point, rigid security procedures are going to hinder getting things done, and there needs to be ways, official or unofficial, to bypass them if the need is urgent. Clinton was the Secretary of State, and decided it was better to send the document to her through unclassified channels than not to send it at all. She may have not set things up right, but at the time she needed the thing it was too late for that. Diplomacy can be time-sensitive.
I'm not saying this because I'm a Clinton supporter. I'd support any other Cabinet-level official in doing the same thing on occasion, D or R.
If they were that prejudiced against Republicans, why did Kasich do so well on Politifact? He was rated as about as honest as Clinton and Sanders.
The reason Politifact seems biased against Republicans right now is that there are a lot of Republicans who are lying. Religious fanatics tend to say things based on what they want to be true rather than what's true, and Trump of course is a liar. The Republican party in general is anti-inconvenient-science, currently more so than the Democrats.
I'd like to see the Republican Party come back to where it was some time ago, but it seems determined to attain irrational ideological purity at the expense of anything else - at least until the voters rebel and pick a candidate who isn't a hard-line conventional ideologically driven Republican.
Ventura wasn't that bad a manager, and the surplus-to-deficit change was largely not his fault. Minnesota relies heavily on its income tax for revenue, which means its revenue is more affected by the economy than usual. I'm not calling him a good governor, but he wasn't as bad as some people think.
The day after he was elected, I heard person after person say "At least it wasn't", followed by one of two names.
Some of them were clearly incompetent (Fiorina, Carson). Some of them were far to the right of the Republican Party, which isn't primarily composed of far-right-wing religious fanatics (although it's got more than its share of them). You've got a point in that what mainstream candidates they had did poorly (like Bush), but there were a lot that were less acceptable to the Republican rank and file than Trump. (You may find that frightening. I do.)
Why do you think she'll get us into big wars? She did vote for the Iraq invasion, but so did many other people, who were deceived by the White House. She didn't get us into any boots-on-the-ground shooting commitments, as far as I noticed.
Okay, what did Clinton do wrong with Benghazi? She had limited resources, and Congress refused to provide the additional resources she asked for. She distributed her security forces in a reasonable way, and that's all she could do. Once the attack started, there was nothing she could do to affect the outcome. If you're accusing her of causing the deaths of diplomats, everything that happened after the attack is irrelevant.
She went through more than a dozen Congressional inquiries from a very hostile Congress, and none of them was able to pin wrongdoing on her.
It's things like the constant harping on Benghazi that make me slow to believe anything bad I hear about her, since so much of what bad stuff I hear is malicious lies and half-truths.
A second primary would have had no effect. The Democratic nomination has been a two-horse race from the start, with delegates going to only Sanders and Clinton. The result was pretty decisive: Clinton led by hundreds of pledged delegates. In the Republican race, Trump has a majority of the delegates. In primaries and caucuses with multiple candidates, he topped out at about 40% of the vote. When it was down to Trump, Cruz, and Kasich, Trump started winning majorities. If Trump merely had the largest number of delegates, but not a majority, a second primary might change the result, but that's not the case.
There's also an expectation that, if you buy a cup of coffee and it comes with cream and sugar, that there will be a safe and obvious way to put the cream and sugar into the coffee. Had the cup been able to function without the lid, there would have been no injury and no lawsuit.
In an urban area, discharging a firearm in public is likely to be illegal, because of the danger to others. You're probably having a camera record an illegal act that people are going to notice. Firing a paintball is likely to be safer legally.
I write stuff for my employer, and it's theirs (work for hire). They pay me well every two weeks.
Now suppose I were to write a good novel. That's a fair amount of unpaid work. Now, suppose I self-publish electronically. The only way I earn money is if people buy my book, and each purchase gives me a little money. Assume that lots of people like it enough so they'd pay for it, and my adoring fans are happy to give me enough money to encourage me and support me while I work on another book. How should that work?
Now, suppose I self-publish something I've already written (which wouldn't qualify as "good" by most definitions). Same mechanics. I've written a novel that not many people like (my wife said it was readable, and in the second half of the book she didn't notice it being amateurish). Very few people like it enough to pay for it. However, I've done the same thing as in the previous paragraph, and the only differences are quality and how much people in general like it. Should I be paid for it? If so, how much and how should this be determined?
The easy solution is to pay me some money for each copy of my book sold. That self-regulates to get me an economically reasonable amount of money. However, it requires copyright.