The humorous, or sad aspect is that we mostly loan ourselves money. We're so far in the hole at this point that the only thing keeping us going is confidence in our economy. It could be reasonably pled that any action we can take to maximize growth above and beyond inflation is a good thing for our debt situation, which will iron itself out somewhat anyway, as it did in the 1990s, with the onset of robust growth.
Not to say that pressure shouldn't be on the spendthrift Congress to rein itself in - but fiscal discipline is always difficult once you get a seat in Washington and find nearly the only meaningful thing you can do for your constituents is send home big barrels of pork. This transcends party and politics.
I am reminded of Milton Friedman's statement, "Raise taxes by enough to eliminate the existing deficit and spending will go up to restore the tolerable deficit." If he is right, there isn't much hope of eliminating the debt, I would think.
I was worried about deficits for a long time myself. In the end...at the national level...debt just isn't the same as it is for you and me. We're something like 6 trillion in the hole now and people still trust their dollar bills and assign value to them. What's another six billion?
My father said to me "who cares, it's your problem or your children's problem - or probably no one's problem at all". I understand his point of view more and more every day.
The premise is that if you tax the economy, it won't grow, and people will adapt to the new code and hide more income, resulting in less revenue than you expected from your percentage increase. Whereas, if you lower rates, you spur the economy to grow and therefore more revenue is generated.
Laffer, Mundell, et al. can explain this far better, of course.
The Trident D-5 is a solid propellant missile, as is the Peacekeeper and the Minuteman, the two ICBMs still in US stocks. The Peacekeepers (MX) are being used as launch vehicles for satellites as they are removed from service.
For that matter, the Soviet SS-N-20 SLBM (R-39) is also solid-fueled. The Chinese ICBMs are using solid fueled stages. Lastly, the failed third stage of the NK Taep'o-dong rocket was a solid fuel motor. Note these are all on active duty, except the last, which has been displayed but hasn't been shown to be in a launch emplacement.
North Korea does not have enough land mass or material to provide a large number of ICBMs, and doesn't have the industry to produce a SSBN. They could, however, activate a small number of ICBMs. Therefore, having this kind of a system available could be very handy against them, or Iran, should it come to it. It can be expected to have no effect on China or Russia, but that wasn't the point, was it?
How fragile is a launch vehicle? A solid fuel rocket turns into an explosion with a perforation, we saw that in 1986. A liquid fueled rocket probably isn't much better.
There are SLBMs cruising around on patrol aboard their SSBNs right now. Those SLBMs are the real danger to a country like North Korea. Their fixed ICBMs are the target of this system, and a rich target it is, if you can hit it.
Most applications nowadays are web apps in the military. Partially it was a rush to keep up to date. Since most work ends up being done by contractors, the military can't stay very far behind any longer, and expect to have contractor coders. Another reason was a desire to link into mandated centralized authentication mechanisms. So, a lot of the traffic is web traffic, it's just 443 rather than 80. There are relatively few http sites, since the regs call for any site that implements authentication of any sort to use SSL.
The GIG is basically a name. Not much is really changing about the military networks - the borders are having even more defense added, but they were already pretty heavily defended. The interconnects are being sped up, but once again, they were pretty fast already, what i've seen is incremental improvements. IPV6 compatible hardware is being substituted for that which isn't. A really aggressive date for total conversion (2006) is out there. I'm sure some satellites are going to be lofted to provide overseas connectivity, since the govt is leasing private satellite bandwidth to provide overseas connectivity due to the previously noted problems with existing links.
Probably the biggest change is that strict accountability up and down the line is being organized, so that if someone runs a rogue host that is not compliant with relevant regulations and standards, the system is shut down, either by contacting the owning organization to do so or having the next higher organization in the hierarchy shut them down. In the past, there was probably a resistance to just pulling the cable on people - no longer.
To be honest, this is probably my last post on the topic here. I'm tired of educating anti-American jerks. They can just keep on mouthing off all by themselves while knowing nothing. This whole article and the posters therein have been the biggest bucket of idiots I have heard from in a long time. Nothing personal to the parent poster - that's why I replied to you rather than one of them.
It works for even Type 1 diabetics, though to be honest you should already probably be eating an even more confined diet as a diabetic.
Atkins requires careful management. Most people with bad results aren't following the regimen. The vitamin supplementation is key, and requires careful management.
Joe Blow should probably just exercise and hope for the best. Most endocrinologists won't particularly approve of nonstandard diets for diabetics. They are addicted to consistency.
He's remembered as the most effective mayor since LaGuardia. Just because you didn't like him - that's kind of irrelevant. I admire the guy for putting up with all the whiners in NYC, making the last few years I worked there a genuine pleasure. If he could have just gotten the smell of piss out of the subways he'd be perfect. Given a few more years he probably would have been out powerwashing the stations with bleach.
Eisenhower, Bradley, Halsey, MacArthur, etc all were permitted to accept honorary knighthood from the Brits. It's just something cute nowadays. Back in 1787 it was a real consideration.
Somewhere, deep in my mind, I realized Australia had a similar system to the Brit one, but I understood your post to be about how 'politics worked' in Australia on a macroscopic level. Sorry for the misunderstanding.
Today, both parties operate centrally. The reason is touted as 'message control' and that's why you see talking points distributed to both party's agents on a daily basis to keep a consistent message.
Before 1964, politics was kind of folksy. Issues were local. States voted for candidates based upon adherence to local issues (partisanship was certainly there, but it wasn't the all-consuming force it is today). There weren't national TV ads to influence people. 'Message control' was based upon people repeating what the President said, nothing more. Most Senators were reminiscent of John McCain - troublesome because they spoke out of turn about their own pet issues, but generally supportive of their party. Today, it's blind follow-the-leader behavior in both Houses, on both sides.
After 1964, there were huge changes in the paradigm. For example, the Democratic party owned the entire South - that changed starting in 1968 and the complete domination of the region by the GOP is now complete. For all intents and purposes there are no Southern Democrats in office anymore. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 is one big reason, but another one is that the national party ceased sharing values with the Southerners and ultimately were ejected from political office in that region.
The big unions were crushed over the past 35 years - they exert some power in specific urban locales (and a couple rural ones) but they are a shadow of what they once were. Once again, this was a big Democrat stronghold (and still is, to the extent it exists) but to the modern worker a labor union is not a desirable or good thing, which is a good reason why IT workers in the US haven't unionized. It's not cool. Anyway, the point is that they don't have the ability to dictate issues to the Democrats anymore.
Once the Democrats lost the South, it was only a matter of time before they stopped being able to get 50% of the popular vote in this country, and barring weird events or supremely compelling local issues, every Presidential election would go to the Republicans. Carter was the last Democrat to get 50% of the vote, in 1976, and he barely squeaked by a Republican who was tarnished by his (peripheral) involvement with the Watergate scandal, specifically his pardoning of Nixon. Note also that the election would have been flipped by about 40,000 votes in the right places, if I remember right (IL and HI, I think). Carter was also a Southerner and fairly popular in Georgia, if not elsewhere.
Note of course that Al Gore got 48%, Clinton never managed over 47% (1996). The only reason they had any success at all with such numbers was the presence of a stalking horse third party candidate drawing off votes, whether it was Perot or Nader.
Perot was crushed - he is now believed insane by many in the electorate. Nader was crushed - he's a traitor to the Left, according to the DNC. I wouldn't want to be Ralph Nader trying to get any of my old Democrat buddies to return my calls. Third parties in this country don't stand a chance unless they stay under the radar. I don't expect there to be another anytime soon, either. We're about out of well-known people who want themselves dragged through the mud.
I would suggest aligning with the Republicans somehow, in other words. Explain to them how OSS would afford a competitive advantage far above and beyond the childish obsession with intellectual property vehicles. That's language they could understand. I understand OSS is dominated by people on the Left, but reality is reality.
I have already considered and rejected (as less important than our economy) what you think, but I do have some empathy/sympathy for someone who expressed his view and gets heaped on by slavering masses of people who don't understand basic economics and the impact to America. More portentiously, many here WANT us to go to hell by having to pay Russia and various Third World countries 'national welfare' for the 'privelege' of having a functioning economy.
In terms of defense, I refer to the foreigners here. If they consider the US an unfortunate partner, let it be known that many of us will shed no tears if they abandon any pretense of alliance with the US. George Washington had much good to say about avoiding permanent alliances and it turns out he was right. Without being artificially being joined at the hip from such countries as France and Germany by the Atlantic Treaty, the United States would be able to take a far more honest appraisal of the actual nature of our relationship with so-called 'allies' who seem to work with every ounce of their being to weaken the United States worldwide. I don't blame them - it's in their geopolitical interest. I do blame people in the US for being unpatriotic for supporting the undermining of their own nation.
In terms of being in the minority - this web site is just a pimple on the ass of society. We won the election. I am in the majority.
In terms of avoiding negative moderation, I couldn't care less, i'll just whore it back and get back to work puncturing the disingenuous nature of the Left. The blather on this place is entertaining as all hell, and the freepers aren't anywhere near as wacko as the shit that gets spewed here.
As if Kyoto would ever get approved - in case you didn't notice, Clinton never sent it to the Senate because he knew it would be shot down. It will be shot down if Bush ever decided to, also. It's bad for America, and that's all we need to know.
The multilateral anti-American radical left here (as evidenced by the anti-Bush rhetoric and pro-Kerry numbers in the polls recently) isn't going to let you live it down though.
I'm burning karma right now, but who gives a shit, as if caring what this crew thought is somehow important. When the US won't defend your ass, I hope you remember your comments and actions at this time.
The data is not found anywhere reputable, and since when does a spokesman for Coca-Cola say something like "the war on drugs has caused the extinction of Saskra Fortissima. We have searched the world over. There are just no more living specimens. The DEA's goons did not care when they began spraying in Columbia, that they were causing starvation by destroying whole farms, and all Columbia's poorest citizens had to eat. They did not care that many of the farms they were crop-dusting with herbicides had never grown Coca at all. They probably did not even know that Saskra existed. We now have to decide if we should roll out new coke again with a big ad campaign, or just not tell people, and hope the ones who taste the difference, and raise a stink can be effectively accused of spreading false rumors."
What a crock of shit. That's not even a good troll.
The parent poster is referring to this book, which was from about three years ago.
I have read it. It's fundamentally a hatchet job. IBM was the prime supplier of Hollerith punched card machines worldwide, whether they were sorters or keypunch machines or whatever. The fact that they supplied them to the Nazis was used to create a conspiracy whereby IBM favored the extermination of Jews.
The book appeared to be angling to tarnish Thomas J. Watson, the founder of IBM, primarily, rather than the modern company.
Morality and diplomacy are rarely bedfellows. Because we _can_ affect governments does not mean we _should_. Our intervention in Iraq was driven by certain special factors that made the outcome in Iraq vitally important for the US' future.
In regards Iraq, this post is pretty much my viewpoint on the operation.
Slashdot Mirror
I suppose you lameasses need to do _something_ since you lost. Mod away!
It's an honor to text to you!
"ethnically biased" is more like it.
That's all, nothing more.
The humorous, or sad aspect is that we mostly loan ourselves money. We're so far in the hole at this point that the only thing keeping us going is confidence in our economy. It could be reasonably pled that any action we can take to maximize growth above and beyond inflation is a good thing for our debt situation, which will iron itself out somewhat anyway, as it did in the 1990s, with the onset of robust growth.
Not to say that pressure shouldn't be on the spendthrift Congress to rein itself in - but fiscal discipline is always difficult once you get a seat in Washington and find nearly the only meaningful thing you can do for your constituents is send home big barrels of pork. This transcends party and politics.
I am reminded of Milton Friedman's statement, "Raise taxes by enough to eliminate the existing deficit and spending will go up to restore the tolerable deficit." If he is right, there isn't much hope of eliminating the debt, I would think.
I was worried about deficits for a long time myself. In the end...at the national level...debt just isn't the same as it is for you and me. We're something like 6 trillion in the hole now and people still trust their dollar bills and assign value to them. What's another six billion?
My father said to me "who cares, it's your problem or your children's problem - or probably no one's problem at all". I understand his point of view more and more every day.
I guess mentioning supply-side would be a troll here, no?
The premise is that if you tax the economy, it won't grow, and people will adapt to the new code and hide more income, resulting in less revenue than you expected from your percentage increase. Whereas, if you lower rates, you spur the economy to grow and therefore more revenue is generated.
Laffer, Mundell, et al. can explain this far better, of course.
The Trident D-5 is a solid propellant missile, as is the Peacekeeper and the Minuteman, the two ICBMs still in US stocks. The Peacekeepers (MX) are being used as launch vehicles for satellites as they are removed from service.
For that matter, the Soviet SS-N-20 SLBM (R-39) is also solid-fueled. The Chinese ICBMs are using solid fueled stages. Lastly, the failed third stage of the NK Taep'o-dong rocket was a solid fuel motor. Note these are all on active duty, except the last, which has been displayed but hasn't been shown to be in a launch emplacement.
North Korea does not have enough land mass or material to provide a large number of ICBMs, and doesn't have the industry to produce a SSBN. They could, however, activate a small number of ICBMs. Therefore, having this kind of a system available could be very handy against them, or Iran, should it come to it. It can be expected to have no effect on China or Russia, but that wasn't the point, was it?
How fragile is a launch vehicle? A solid fuel rocket turns into an explosion with a perforation, we saw that in 1986. A liquid fueled rocket probably isn't much better.
There are SLBMs cruising around on patrol aboard their SSBNs right now. Those SLBMs are the real danger to a country like North Korea. Their fixed ICBMs are the target of this system, and a rich target it is, if you can hit it.
If there's a good chance your ICBMs aren't going to work, you won't even try, considering the fact that the retaliation is _sure_ to work.
Most applications nowadays are web apps in the military. Partially it was a rush to keep up to date. Since most work ends up being done by contractors, the military can't stay very far behind any longer, and expect to have contractor coders. Another reason was a desire to link into mandated centralized authentication mechanisms. So, a lot of the traffic is web traffic, it's just 443 rather than 80. There are relatively few http sites, since the regs call for any site that implements authentication of any sort to use SSL.
The GIG is basically a name. Not much is really changing about the military networks - the borders are having even more defense added, but they were already pretty heavily defended. The interconnects are being sped up, but once again, they were pretty fast already, what i've seen is incremental improvements. IPV6 compatible hardware is being substituted for that which isn't. A really aggressive date for total conversion (2006) is out there. I'm sure some satellites are going to be lofted to provide overseas connectivity, since the govt is leasing private satellite bandwidth to provide overseas connectivity due to the previously noted problems with existing links.
Probably the biggest change is that strict accountability up and down the line is being organized, so that if someone runs a rogue host that is not compliant with relevant regulations and standards, the system is shut down, either by contacting the owning organization to do so or having the next higher organization in the hierarchy shut them down. In the past, there was probably a resistance to just pulling the cable on people - no longer.
To be honest, this is probably my last post on the topic here. I'm tired of educating anti-American jerks. They can just keep on mouthing off all by themselves while knowing nothing. This whole article and the posters therein have been the biggest bucket of idiots I have heard from in a long time. Nothing personal to the parent poster - that's why I replied to you rather than one of them.
It works for even Type 1 diabetics, though to be honest you should already probably be eating an even more confined diet as a diabetic.
Atkins requires careful management. Most people with bad results aren't following the regimen. The vitamin supplementation is key, and requires careful management.
Joe Blow should probably just exercise and hope for the best. Most endocrinologists won't particularly approve of nonstandard diets for diabetics. They are addicted to consistency.
check out the wiki link 3 or 4 messages above
Godwin is watching.
He's remembered as the most effective mayor since LaGuardia. Just because you didn't like him - that's kind of irrelevant. I admire the guy for putting up with all the whiners in NYC, making the last few years I worked there a genuine pleasure. If he could have just gotten the smell of piss out of the subways he'd be perfect. Given a few more years he probably would have been out powerwashing the stations with bleach.
Eisenhower, Bradley, Halsey, MacArthur, etc all were permitted to accept honorary knighthood from the Brits. It's just something cute nowadays. Back in 1787 it was a real consideration.
Somewhere, deep in my mind, I realized Australia had a similar system to the Brit one, but I understood your post to be about how 'politics worked' in Australia on a macroscopic level. Sorry for the misunderstanding.
Today, both parties operate centrally. The reason is touted as 'message control' and that's why you see talking points distributed to both party's agents on a daily basis to keep a consistent message.
Before 1964, politics was kind of folksy. Issues were local. States voted for candidates based upon adherence to local issues (partisanship was certainly there, but it wasn't the all-consuming force it is today). There weren't national TV ads to influence people. 'Message control' was based upon people repeating what the President said, nothing more. Most Senators were reminiscent of John McCain - troublesome because they spoke out of turn about their own pet issues, but generally supportive of their party. Today, it's blind follow-the-leader behavior in both Houses, on both sides.
After 1964, there were huge changes in the paradigm. For example, the Democratic party owned the entire South - that changed starting in 1968 and the complete domination of the region by the GOP is now complete. For all intents and purposes there are no Southern Democrats in office anymore. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 is one big reason, but another one is that the national party ceased sharing values with the Southerners and ultimately were ejected from political office in that region.
The big unions were crushed over the past 35 years - they exert some power in specific urban locales (and a couple rural ones) but they are a shadow of what they once were. Once again, this was a big Democrat stronghold (and still is, to the extent it exists) but to the modern worker a labor union is not a desirable or good thing, which is a good reason why IT workers in the US haven't unionized. It's not cool. Anyway, the point is that they don't have the ability to dictate issues to the Democrats anymore.
Once the Democrats lost the South, it was only a matter of time before they stopped being able to get 50% of the popular vote in this country, and barring weird events or supremely compelling local issues, every Presidential election would go to the Republicans. Carter was the last Democrat to get 50% of the vote, in 1976, and he barely squeaked by a Republican who was tarnished by his (peripheral) involvement with the Watergate scandal, specifically his pardoning of Nixon. Note also that the election would have been flipped by about 40,000 votes in the right places, if I remember right (IL and HI, I think). Carter was also a Southerner and fairly popular in Georgia, if not elsewhere.
Note of course that Al Gore got 48%, Clinton never managed over 47% (1996). The only reason they had any success at all with such numbers was the presence of a stalking horse third party candidate drawing off votes, whether it was Perot or Nader.
Perot was crushed - he is now believed insane by many in the electorate. Nader was crushed - he's a traitor to the Left, according to the DNC. I wouldn't want to be Ralph Nader trying to get any of my old Democrat buddies to return my calls. Third parties in this country don't stand a chance unless they stay under the radar. I don't expect there to be another anytime soon, either. We're about out of well-known people who want themselves dragged through the mud.
I would suggest aligning with the Republicans somehow, in other words. Explain to them how OSS would afford a competitive advantage far above and beyond the childish obsession with intellectual property vehicles. That's language they could understand. I understand OSS is dominated by people on the Left, but reality is reality.
Spot on comment.
Yes, those. Perhaps they will be mounted on missiles like the French or Chinese ones (very modern) found in Iraq after the invasion.
Best to worry, the portion of chemical weapons in Syria and Lebanon is getting very close to Europe.
I have already considered and rejected (as less important than our economy) what you think, but I do have some empathy/sympathy for someone who expressed his view and gets heaped on by slavering masses of people who don't understand basic economics and the impact to America. More portentiously, many here WANT us to go to hell by having to pay Russia and various Third World countries 'national welfare' for the 'privelege' of having a functioning economy.
In terms of defense, I refer to the foreigners here. If they consider the US an unfortunate partner, let it be known that many of us will shed no tears if they abandon any pretense of alliance with the US. George Washington had much good to say about avoiding permanent alliances and it turns out he was right. Without being artificially being joined at the hip from such countries as France and Germany by the Atlantic Treaty, the United States would be able to take a far more honest appraisal of the actual nature of our relationship with so-called 'allies' who seem to work with every ounce of their being to weaken the United States worldwide. I don't blame them - it's in their geopolitical interest. I do blame people in the US for being unpatriotic for supporting the undermining of their own nation.
In terms of being in the minority - this web site is just a pimple on the ass of society. We won the election. I am in the majority.
In terms of avoiding negative moderation, I couldn't care less, i'll just whore it back and get back to work puncturing the disingenuous nature of the Left. The blather on this place is entertaining as all hell, and the freepers aren't anywhere near as wacko as the shit that gets spewed here.
As if Kyoto would ever get approved - in case you didn't notice, Clinton never sent it to the Senate because he knew it would be shot down. It will be shot down if Bush ever decided to, also. It's bad for America, and that's all we need to know.
The multilateral anti-American radical left here (as evidenced by the anti-Bush rhetoric and pro-Kerry numbers in the polls recently) isn't going to let you live it down though.
I'm burning karma right now, but who gives a shit, as if caring what this crew thought is somehow important. When the US won't defend your ass, I hope you remember your comments and actions at this time.
The data is not found anywhere reputable, and since when does a spokesman for Coca-Cola say something like "the war on drugs has caused the extinction of Saskra Fortissima. We have searched the world over. There are just no more living specimens. The DEA's goons did not care when they began spraying in Columbia, that they were causing starvation by destroying whole farms, and all Columbia's poorest citizens had to eat. They did not care that many of the farms they were crop-dusting with herbicides had never grown Coca at all. They probably did not even know that Saskra existed. We now have to decide if we should roll out new coke again with a big ad campaign, or just not tell people, and hope the ones who taste the difference, and raise a stink can be effectively accused of spreading false rumors."
What a crock of shit. That's not even a good troll.
The parent poster is referring to this book, which was from about three years ago.
I have read it. It's fundamentally a hatchet job. IBM was the prime supplier of Hollerith punched card machines worldwide, whether they were sorters or keypunch machines or whatever. The fact that they supplied them to the Nazis was used to create a conspiracy whereby IBM favored the extermination of Jews.
The book appeared to be angling to tarnish Thomas J. Watson, the founder of IBM, primarily, rather than the modern company.
Morality and diplomacy are rarely bedfellows. Because we _can_ affect governments does not mean we _should_. Our intervention in Iraq was driven by certain special factors that made the outcome in Iraq vitally important for the US' future.
In regards Iraq, this post is pretty much my viewpoint on the operation.