He did not have to answer the questions at all, due to the Fifth at a minimum, and to the irrelevance you mention. He could at least have deferred to his attorney. Instead he elected, of his own free will, to lie. This is a crime.
It was even worse than that. Not only did he perjure himself he also coached other witnesses and suborned perjury. The original case was a workplace sexual harassment case which would have otherwise been a huge deal were it not Bill Clinton. As you said, he could have simply taken the 5th but he chose to lie.
We need to make the undocumented workers legal so they can be taxed.
This is a myth that won't die. Most "undocumented workers" already pay the full suite of taxes.
First, realize that most of the taxes that you pay aren't income taxes. There's a hefty gasoline tax (both state and federal), taxes on most stuff that you buy (here in TN we even pay sales tax on groceries), property taxes, etc. There are consumption taxes everywhere.
So that leaves "income tax". Well, the IRS will give out a tax id to undocumented workers so that they can work and pay taxes. Yes, I know people who have these. Of the ones who don't, many use someone else's SSN to work. That means they're paying into social security and medicare even though they'll never be able to legally collect.
For their income levels, there's rarely any actual federal income tax. They do pay social security and medicare. In all, 5/6 of undocumented workers pay federal income "tax" (meaning social security, medicare, and whatever tax there is). The rest are paid under the table, but they are in the minority.
To make it simple: there's not some huge federal tax gains if we suddenly "legalize" all the undocumented workers in the country. It would have no effect at all on federal tax receipts.
Even without acting as a bridge to external people, simply having an educate but non-technical resource on hand is useful.
If you can't explain your project to your manager in terms they can understand, you have no hope of explaining it to the end-users, upper management, budget committees, etc. If your non-technical manager sees through your bullshit, its your clue you are doing it wrong.
Just as the act of merely explaining a problem to another programmer will often yield insight into the solution (without the other programmer saying a single word, or perhaps paying all that much attention), explaining stuff to a non-technical manager often helps with the design and implementation. The questions they ask will also be asked by others.
I agree with what you say, but the problem is giving this person authority over the group. You could have such a person who is within the group but not over it. My wife actually fulfills that role for me in my business, with a couple of select customers filling in if other knowledge is required that she doesn't have.
In my only actual "job" I had a non-technical manager who was good for most of the reasons that you say, but her cluelessness seriously held our group back in various ways. Her inability to understand at any level what we did and what a reasonable way to do it would be caused endless frustration. The "interfacing with other groups" and all that didn't work as she was too clueless and the rest of us had to carry on that responsibility. We were the internal IT department for an IT department within a larger organization, so all of these problems were amplified as the rest of the department was a bunch of nerds, also.
On the other hand, she did take time to teach me how to write project proposals and stuff like that in which she excelled. However, that means that in the end I had acquired her extremely limited skill set myself and added it to my otherwise very marketable skill set in programming, which made her of even *less* value to our team.
In case you think I'm pissed because I got burned, quite the opposite. She fought for me like nobody and even mentioned when I quit that my pay increase (as a percentage) during my time there was the highest in our department. I liked her as a person and think that she would have been highly effective in the right job. She had the motivation, was physically attractive (say what you want - it matters), and intelligence to be great at a lot of things. Tech just wasn't one of them.
The first past the post voting system in America will always reinforce the two party setup we have. Third party voting can send a message in a lopsided election but in anything close, it's dangerous. It is arguably the reason we even had GWB in the first place. Gore probably would have won had he not lost so many votes to the Green party.
And Bush 1 would have definitely been reelected had it not been for Perot. Given that, it's difficult to guess what the 2000 election would have even looked like were it not for 3rd parties 8 years earlier.
Note, by the way, that Perot was a 3rd party candidate who actually could have won. Read up on it if you're not familiar with the whole story.
If I'm driving on the freeway, holding the gas pedal steady, and suddenly notice the car is speeding up, I don't think "gee, it must be the small fluctuations in the pressure I'm applying to the pedal, since the engine is the primary source of energy". I start looking at other factors, like a downward slope.
So, how does "no warming in the last 15 years" fit into your analogy? Remember that we're talking about the sun right now in this conversation because of the fact that there's been no warming for some years - breaking the various computer models - and some folks are saying the sun is the reason. There's also the fact that solar radiation has been dropping for some time:
He didn't take the money, Treasury chose to invest the money under direction of both the Bush and Obama administrations, in order to keep GM and its supply chain from collapsing. While they lost money on the face of it, the economy gained value, likely in excess of the $10B loss. If the end result exceeds the scenario where government did nothing, then government did it's job by stabilizing the economy.
The harm to our economy from the various bailouts far outweighs the money spent and lost in these things. A free market works well if allowed to, but it requires a feedback cycle. Do well, be rewarded. Do stupid shit, be punished. We've allowed them to keep the reward side but collectivized the punishment side.
Imagine being unable to feel pain. Sounds great, right? It's terrible:
"Many things they couldn’t anticipate. Ashlyn’s baby teeth posed big problems. She would chew her lips bloody in her sleep, bite through her tongue while eating, and once even stuck a finger in her mouth and stripped flesh from it."
This is what we're doing to big business in America. They can do stupid shit and we pay for it. Their execs still pay themselves bonuses as if they did a good job. There's no impetus for these businesses to do well, to truly prosper, and to be innovative. None. Your rich uncle will bail you out if you have a problem, but he'll let you keep the money if you do well. In that scenario it doesn't matter what you do.
We've broken the feedback cycle. GM should have been allowed to go bankrupt. It would have, in the long run, been a blip. They are a huge part of the car market and the only way for that hole to have been filled would have been for competently managed companies to buy their assets and continue production on their lines. Competently managed. Note
Instead, they get to do whatever they were doing before. It ran them into a hole then, it will again.
The real harm is that new and innovative companies can't compete against the government-backed crap. That harms us all. Greatly. Far more than the few billion that we lost.
Honestly, the Chinese have more than a trillion dollars of our debt and the fact that we prop up their entire economy by buying stuff from them. The Chinese government wants our country to succeed, otherwise their economy goes in the toilet. And, frankly, we would survive that far easier than they would. They wouldn't even be able to pull a pyrrhic victory out of that one.
This is just like when the FBI catches a "terrorist" who turns out to be some loser who was goaded into trading his stereo speakers for a couple of grenades that he could throw into a mall.
It's really time for congress to set up in the budget that every single time these people come up with some total bullshit they lose 10% of their funding. It's pretty clear at this point that these agencies are more interested in concocting reasons for them to stay in business.
Netflix may use freebsd internally, but the movies are stored on amazon s3 and served from there. So, no, freebsd doesn't account for 1/3 of the internet traffic.
I have nothing against freebsd and have used it extensively in business.
What if the entire MKULTRA project was a scam meant to cause the USSR to waste resources to close this imaginary weapons gap? A few "top secret" documents leaked here; a few rumours there; Common sense says no, but there's always a nagging little doubt in the back of the mind to drive the necessary paranoia. It's perfect.
That's actually what Ronald Reagan's "Star Wars" program was. It drove them nuts and we didn't even have to build anything.
Are you mad? Thats the number one way to give a healthy hive AFB or something else nasty and I personally like my beehives and don't feel like burning them down because I gave them AFB from tainted honey.
Yes, if only there were a way for bees to make their own honey......
Actually, atheism of this sort is a religion. It's now even an evangelical religion - they're trying to spread it.
Oh, wait, "ha, ha, atheism is a religion like not collecting stamps is a hobby! ha ha ha". Yeah, when was the last time someone went around telling everybody that they don't collect stamps and neither should you?
Amen! I'm a Christian and ardent "evolutionist" and I have to put up with listening to ID all the time. It is never presented as a complete scientific framework, rather I'll be discussing some biological feature and the word "design" will pop up in the conversation, getting louder and more frequent until I give in. At that point, I explain that what we call "science" is more properly called "natural science" and seeks to provide natural explanations for our observations. ID is a supernatural explanation so it falls outside the realm of natural science. It's also intellectually lazy; anything that they can't comprehend is simply explained away with hands thrown in the air and "well, God did it". Thank God actual scientists actually seek out the truth, as we would still be living in the stone age with their level of thought.
This is typically due to eating too much starch and junk food. The problem isn't caused by being poor, but rather is correlated with the same bad financial habits
The biggest problem is this: As soon as you're rich, everybody who's ever known you, or kinda known somebody who's known you, or is working for a good cause comes knocking to ask for a handout.
Read about the guy I was talking about. He bought a mansion, a million dollars worth of cars, a lear jet - all in the first year. He blew $12M in the first year. It had nothing to do with people hitting him up for cash - he blew it.
But in addition, George Bray thinks that socioeconomic factors play into physicians' lack of enthusiasm for treating obesity because obesity is, disproportionately, a disease of poverty.
Poverty is the inability to meet basic needs - water, food, clothing and shelter. People in true poverty are underweight and often die from malnutrition.
In the US, the lower classes (who are "poor") have a big problem with obesity. This is typically due to eating too much starch and junk food. The problem isn't caused by being poor, but rather is correlated with the same bad financial habits - specifically the inability to delay gratification - that's makes them poor in the first place. This doesn't describe *everybody* who is poor in America, but it seems to be a majority. Listen to Dave Ramsey for an hour and you'll hear people who are poor and yet make $100,000/year. Actually, just read a story yesterday about a guy who won $27,000,000 in powerball and died penniless a few years later.
I eat all the meat I want and I never gain weight. It's the starches and sugars that cause problems - meat and fat doesn't make you gain weight if you're not eating a bunch of sugar and starch.
'Young people, rightly, are sensitive to the needs to preserve their privacy and to retain internet freedom. And by the way, so am I,' responded the President. 'That's part of not just our First Amendment rights and expectations in this country, but it's particularly something that young people care about..
This is a former constitutional lawyer saying that privacy concerns are a First Amendment concern. WT-actual-F? This is clearly Fourth amendment territory, but oh well. I mean, this is the president after all: we don't need facts when we have authority.
Also, the suggestion that this issue is all the more vital because young people care about it? What smarmy nonsense. It's a bloody constitutional crisis being characterized as an MTV award.
I came here to say the same thing. His obvious misunderstanding of the Constitution in this and other contexts kind of makes me question the whole "constitutional scholar" label.
Slashdot Mirror
Dude lied while under oath. Full stop.
He did not have to answer the questions at all, due to the Fifth at a minimum, and to the irrelevance you mention. He could at least have deferred to his attorney. Instead he elected, of his own free will, to lie. This is a crime.
It was even worse than that. Not only did he perjure himself he also coached other witnesses and suborned perjury. The original case was a workplace sexual harassment case which would have otherwise been a huge deal were it not Bill Clinton. As you said, he could have simply taken the 5th but he chose to lie.
Social programs
Really, when? And don't bother telling me about the *temporary* SNAP increase being allowed to expire.
when someone tries to school me about how the English system of measurements are arbitrary unlike the metric system.
We need to make the undocumented workers legal so they can be taxed.
This is a myth that won't die. Most "undocumented workers" already pay the full suite of taxes.
First, realize that most of the taxes that you pay aren't income taxes. There's a hefty gasoline tax (both state and federal), taxes on most stuff that you buy (here in TN we even pay sales tax on groceries), property taxes, etc. There are consumption taxes everywhere.
So that leaves "income tax". Well, the IRS will give out a tax id to undocumented workers so that they can work and pay taxes. Yes, I know people who have these. Of the ones who don't, many use someone else's SSN to work. That means they're paying into social security and medicare even though they'll never be able to legally collect.
For their income levels, there's rarely any actual federal income tax. They do pay social security and medicare. In all, 5/6 of undocumented workers pay federal income "tax" (meaning social security, medicare, and whatever tax there is). The rest are paid under the table, but they are in the minority.
To make it simple: there's not some huge federal tax gains if we suddenly "legalize" all the undocumented workers in the country. It would have no effect at all on federal tax receipts.
Even without acting as a bridge to external people, simply having an educate but non-technical resource on hand is useful.
If you can't explain your project to your manager in terms they can understand, you have no hope of explaining it to the end-users, upper management, budget committees, etc. If your non-technical manager sees through your bullshit, its your clue you are doing it wrong.
Just as the act of merely explaining a problem to another programmer will often yield insight into the solution (without the other programmer saying a single word, or perhaps paying all that much attention), explaining stuff to a non-technical manager often helps with the design and implementation. The questions they ask will also be asked by others.
I agree with what you say, but the problem is giving this person authority over the group. You could have such a person who is within the group but not over it. My wife actually fulfills that role for me in my business, with a couple of select customers filling in if other knowledge is required that she doesn't have.
In my only actual "job" I had a non-technical manager who was good for most of the reasons that you say, but her cluelessness seriously held our group back in various ways. Her inability to understand at any level what we did and what a reasonable way to do it would be caused endless frustration. The "interfacing with other groups" and all that didn't work as she was too clueless and the rest of us had to carry on that responsibility. We were the internal IT department for an IT department within a larger organization, so all of these problems were amplified as the rest of the department was a bunch of nerds, also.
On the other hand, she did take time to teach me how to write project proposals and stuff like that in which she excelled. However, that means that in the end I had acquired her extremely limited skill set myself and added it to my otherwise very marketable skill set in programming, which made her of even *less* value to our team.
In case you think I'm pissed because I got burned, quite the opposite. She fought for me like nobody and even mentioned when I quit that my pay increase (as a percentage) during my time there was the highest in our department. I liked her as a person and think that she would have been highly effective in the right job. She had the motivation, was physically attractive (say what you want - it matters), and intelligence to be great at a lot of things. Tech just wasn't one of them.
Facts don't matter when you're in the middle of a Kool Aid drinking frenzy....
And your point is? That you are a late coming moron?
I'm going to be kind: Christmas is December 25, not December 24. "TODAY IS CHRISTMAS" is false. Today is the day before Christmas.
The first past the post voting system in America will always reinforce the two party setup we have. Third party voting can send a message in a lopsided election but in anything close, it's dangerous. It is arguably the reason we even had GWB in the first place. Gore probably would have won had he not lost so many votes to the Green party.
And Bush 1 would have definitely been reelected had it not been for Perot. Given that, it's difficult to guess what the 2000 election would have even looked like were it not for 3rd parties 8 years earlier.
Note, by the way, that Perot was a 3rd party candidate who actually could have won. Read up on it if you're not familiar with the whole story.
For you morons who don't get it to the slightest: TODAY IS CHRISTMAS!
For those who may come later, note that "today" is actually December 24. Feel free to come to your own conclusions about who's the moron...
If I'm driving on the freeway, holding the gas pedal steady, and suddenly notice the car is speeding up, I don't think "gee, it must be the small fluctuations in the pressure I'm applying to the pedal, since the engine is the primary source of energy". I start looking at other factors, like a downward slope.
So, how does "no warming in the last 15 years" fit into your analogy? Remember that we're talking about the sun right now in this conversation because of the fact that there's been no warming for some years - breaking the various computer models - and some folks are saying the sun is the reason. There's also the fact that solar radiation has been dropping for some time:
http://www.ibtimes.com/recurring-drop-solar-radiation-possible-reason-cold-weather-322355
Maybe you should take a look at the Ford testimony about the bailout. You know, Ford? The car company that *didn't* take any bailout funds?
Apparently you don't know Ford:
http://blogs.cars.com/kickingtires/2010/12/report-ford-took-federal-funds-too.html
He didn't take the money, Treasury chose to invest the money under direction of both the Bush and Obama administrations, in order to keep GM and its supply chain from collapsing. While they lost money on the face of it, the economy gained value, likely in excess of the $10B loss. If the end result exceeds the scenario where government did nothing, then government did it's job by stabilizing the economy.
The harm to our economy from the various bailouts far outweighs the money spent and lost in these things. A free market works well if allowed to, but it requires a feedback cycle. Do well, be rewarded. Do stupid shit, be punished. We've allowed them to keep the reward side but collectivized the punishment side.
Imagine being unable to feel pain. Sounds great, right? It's terrible:
http://www.nbcnews.com/id/6379795/
"Many things they couldn’t anticipate. Ashlyn’s baby teeth posed big problems. She would chew her lips bloody in her sleep, bite through her tongue while eating, and once even stuck a finger in her mouth and stripped flesh from it."
This is what we're doing to big business in America. They can do stupid shit and we pay for it. Their execs still pay themselves bonuses as if they did a good job. There's no impetus for these businesses to do well, to truly prosper, and to be innovative. None. Your rich uncle will bail you out if you have a problem, but he'll let you keep the money if you do well. In that scenario it doesn't matter what you do.
We've broken the feedback cycle. GM should have been allowed to go bankrupt. It would have, in the long run, been a blip. They are a huge part of the car market and the only way for that hole to have been filled would have been for competently managed companies to buy their assets and continue production on their lines. Competently managed. Note
Instead, they get to do whatever they were doing before. It ran them into a hole then, it will again.
The real harm is that new and innovative companies can't compete against the government-backed crap. That harms us all. Greatly. Far more than the few billion that we lost.
Honestly, the Chinese have more than a trillion dollars of our debt and the fact that we prop up their entire economy by buying stuff from them. The Chinese government wants our country to succeed, otherwise their economy goes in the toilet. And, frankly, we would survive that far easier than they would. They wouldn't even be able to pull a pyrrhic victory out of that one.
This is just like when the FBI catches a "terrorist" who turns out to be some loser who was goaded into trading his stereo speakers for a couple of grenades that he could throw into a mall.
It's really time for congress to set up in the budget that every single time these people come up with some total bullshit they lose 10% of their funding. It's pretty clear at this point that these agencies are more interested in concocting reasons for them to stay in business.
You may want to pose that question to Netflix. They account for about 1/3 of the traffic on the internet and all that traffic is served from FreeBSD servers.
Netflix may use freebsd internally, but the movies are stored on amazon s3 and served from there. So, no, freebsd doesn't account for 1/3 of the internet traffic.
I have nothing against freebsd and have used it extensively in business.
Very little was actually built; just enough to make the thing seem legit.
See here:
http://rt.com/politics/russian-chief-star-wars-762/
What if the entire MKULTRA project was a scam meant to cause the USSR to waste resources to close this imaginary weapons gap? A few "top secret" documents leaked here; a few rumours there; Common sense says no, but there's always a nagging little doubt in the back of the mind to drive the necessary paranoia. It's perfect.
That's actually what Ronald Reagan's "Star Wars" program was. It drove them nuts and we didn't even have to build anything.
Feed bees honey not sugar?
Are you mad? Thats the number one way to give a healthy hive AFB or something else nasty and I personally like my beehives and don't feel like burning them down because I gave them AFB from tainted honey.
Yes, if only there were a way for bees to make their own honey......
Actually, atheism of this sort is a religion. It's now even an evangelical religion - they're trying to spread it.
Oh, wait, "ha, ha, atheism is a religion like not collecting stamps is a hobby! ha ha ha". Yeah, when was the last time someone went around telling everybody that they don't collect stamps and neither should you?
Amen! I'm a Christian and ardent "evolutionist" and I have to put up with listening to ID all the time. It is never presented as a complete scientific framework, rather I'll be discussing some biological feature and the word "design" will pop up in the conversation, getting louder and more frequent until I give in. At that point, I explain that what we call "science" is more properly called "natural science" and seeks to provide natural explanations for our observations. ID is a supernatural explanation so it falls outside the realm of natural science. It's also intellectually lazy; anything that they can't comprehend is simply explained away with hands thrown in the air and "well, God did it". Thank God actual scientists actually seek out the truth, as we would still be living in the stone age with their level of thought.
This is typically due to eating too much starch and junk food. The problem isn't caused by being poor, but rather is correlated with the same bad financial habits
The biggest problem is this: As soon as you're rich, everybody who's ever known you, or kinda known somebody who's known you, or is working for a good cause comes knocking to ask for a handout.
Read about the guy I was talking about. He bought a mansion, a million dollars worth of cars, a lear jet - all in the first year. He blew $12M in the first year. It had nothing to do with people hitting him up for cash - he blew it.
They're "poor", not in poverty. Two different things.
Yes, mod as "troll" - much easier than making a counterargument.
Poverty is the inability to meet basic needs - water, food, clothing and shelter. People in true poverty are underweight and often die from malnutrition.
In the US, the lower classes (who are "poor") have a big problem with obesity. This is typically due to eating too much starch and junk food. The problem isn't caused by being poor, but rather is correlated with the same bad financial habits - specifically the inability to delay gratification - that's makes them poor in the first place. This doesn't describe *everybody* who is poor in America, but it seems to be a majority. Listen to Dave Ramsey for an hour and you'll hear people who are poor and yet make $100,000/year. Actually, just read a story yesterday about a guy who won $27,000,000 in powerball and died penniless a few years later.
I eat all the meat I want and I never gain weight. It's the starches and sugars that cause problems - meat and fat doesn't make you gain weight if you're not eating a bunch of sugar and starch.
'Young people, rightly, are sensitive to the needs to preserve their privacy and to retain internet freedom. And by the way, so am I,' responded the President. 'That's part of not just our First Amendment rights and expectations in this country, but it's particularly something that young people care about..
This is a former constitutional lawyer saying that privacy concerns are a First Amendment concern. WT-actual-F? This is clearly Fourth amendment territory, but oh well. I mean, this is the president after all: we don't need facts when we have authority.
Also, the suggestion that this issue is all the more vital because young people care about it? What smarmy nonsense. It's a bloody constitutional crisis being characterized as an MTV award.
I came here to say the same thing. His obvious misunderstanding of the Constitution in this and other contexts kind of makes me question the whole "constitutional scholar" label.