The abortion issue irritates the crap out of me. I put it right up there with "Staying out of my doctor's office." I agree that it is a socially undesirable, and even barbaric process; however I think that our society is such that it conspires to keep effective birth control and education away from young people, and punishes them (through lost opportunities) for carrying the child to term.
Removing those obstacles and scaling back the demonization of sex and sexuality by the moral conservatives might actually help reduce the number of abortions, something which trying to outlaw it probably won't.
I'm not sure what you mean regarding teachers; I want them to be agents of education, not of someones agenda, and that education should be secular. If you want non-secular education, send your kid to a religious school.
I'm not sure you can call someone a fiscal conservative who believes in government spending. Milton Friedman is (in many ways) my definition of a fiscal conservative, and he was pretty much anti-government spending. It's Keynes who was pro-government spending, and while the Republicans pay lip service to Friedman, it's Keynes they follow. All (mainstream) economists are for free trade, so you can't use that to differentiate.
[sarcasm]As opposed to Bush, who, as we all know, was a great respecter of the Constitution.[/sarcasm]
Obama is an expert on the Constitution to a level that is hard to even define...He taught Constitutional law at one of the most prestigious law schools in the country. So it's not unreasonable that he may have criticisms of the document, the same way any expert may have criticisms of things under his area of expertise.
But I do not think that he has anything like the arrogance and disrespect for the law and the Constitution that has been shown in the last 8 years, and having anyone imply that with a straight face makes me laugh.
Look someone in the eye and say, "In the US we don't torture prisoners of war, we don't unilaterally invade other countries, we don't imprison our citizens without a trial, and we don't allow the government to spy on citizens without due process of law."
If you can look back on the last 8 years without feeling sick with shame, there is a problem.
Bipartisanship is a good thing...if you don't have the unshakable certainty that everything you do is right.
I'm always open to the idea that my views aren't perfect. The biggest problem I have with the Republicans and the Social Right, is that they are certain that everything they do is perfect, and everyone who disagrees is not only wrong, but also a bad, evil person.
It's amusing that they even turn on other politicians who are conservative, just not as conservative as they are. I've got one of the most conservative democrats in the entire house in my district, and the republicans spend millions every election cycle trying to unseat him...A guy who votes with Bush more often than he votes with his own party, and yet that's not enough for them, he has to be a complete republican robot.
Frankly the 1-party thing was a drum I beat for 6 years, and I'm tired of beating on it. The Republicans need a good old fashioned asswhipping to kick their sorry asses back toward the middle and maybe, maybe to kick some of the damn social conservatives back into their caves. At the very least their massive arrogance needs to have some holes shot in it.
When good Sentors like Chuck Hagel and Arlen Specter are called traitors to their party because they don't suck up to the social conservatives, there is something seriously wrong.
The absolute LAST thing we need in this country is two parties who think they've got the right to legislate how we live our lives.
Frankly the damn Republicans are so fiscally irresponsible right now that I don't see how anyone could vote for them on a purely economic basis.
The primary benefit of a dem landslide (for me) is that it may give the republicans a wakeup bitchslap that this social conservative crap only flies with the minority of the population. I'd love to see some real fiscal conservatives in office, but the "I hate taxes and abortions, but I love pork" crowd make me sick.
Actually, Adam Smith (the guy who basically invented Capitalism) was also in favor of the rich being taxed at a higher rate than the poor, so that's not a good argument.
True Socialism is more about community property and state ownership of businesses than it is about progressive taxation.
It's outstanding how in an election where I didn't start off hating either candidate, McCain's choice of talking points (and running mate) brought me to the point of incoherent spitting fury...I had to read the transcripts of the last few debates because I couldn't stand to actually listen.
I just refuse to vote for someone who ran a filthy campaign whose only issue was "the other guy sucks." That's my favorite logical fallacy, the "argument from ignorance": the other guy is bad, so we must be better.
McCain was a guy I'd have voted for in 2000...Hell, I did vote for him in the primary. And I think this country wouldn't be worse off if he'd been president for the last 8 years. But he sold his soul for the brass ring this time around, and that level of intellectual whoredom I cannot abide.
The thing is, Steam, though DRM, isn't anything like as intrusive as SECUROM...Hell, it even provides features that are actually useful, this service being another example of same. Install Steam on a new machine, log in, and have it rebuild your whole setup. That's pretty cool.
In World War I one of the countermeasures the Russian's used against the possibility of a German invasion was to use a different gauge of railroad; the rationale was that the German's wouldn't be able to support their troops without rail, the German trains wouldn't be able to run on Russian tracks, and therefore they wouldn't be able to sustain an advance.
This practice cost the Russians a vast amount of trade revenue due to the inefficiencies of the system, and in the end it was all for nothing.
The Germans, not being morons, allowed the Russians to advance into German territory and then pulled the same trick on them: surrounding and destroying forces who had effectively cut their own supply lines by advancing past the end of their own rail lines.
So yes, on the one hand, making your system incompatible with the "enemy" system may have advantages, but it also has dramatic disadvantages. You won't have the benefit of the rest of the worlds security research, you won't benefit from the advances on more popular systems, and you won't be in a position to be aggressive with your resources because you'll have the same problems working on other people's networks as they'll have on yours.
Mostly secure isn't good enough. There is no reason to continue using MD5; it's not like there aren't better alternatives, and it's not like it's growing more secure with time.
Checks and credit cards are absurdly easy to fake in the modern world. Banks need to get off their asses and roll out a new system...With the billion dollar bonuses that they keep giving themselves, I'm not too sympathetic of the cost.
The bright side is that the drop in gas prices is a bigger stimulus than all the rest of the stimuli combined, when spread across the whole economy.
And, on the plus side, a drop in gas prices doesn't make it bonus time for ANY CEO.
I agree with you that recessions are largely mental, but I think this one has been building for too long for a purely mental comeback...The last dip was so industry-centric that the rest of the business world just roamed on, business as usual, no cuts, no reorganizations, and now it's biting them on the ass.
Anything is easier to change than Slackware; package managers and dependency checkers will make your life astoundingly easier.
Of course, in a University environment it's not a bad thing to have to do everything from scratch, but I think it's more valuable to learn to create your own packages, etc, than to learn to manage everything from source/binaries.
That being said, the biggest difference is likely in how "bleeding edge" the software is. Ubuntu will (necessarily) be more up to date, but that's not always a good thing.
I disagree that it even has merit in a perfect world. You know what the easiest way to assess the value of an asset is? Sell it.
Until the point at which the asset is sold, its value is pure conjecture. Whose house is worth exactly its assessed value? In this market?
Instead of grafting a crappy arbitrary value onto an asset, a task whose only benefit is to provide economic welfare for appraisers, why not simply tax at the point where the value of the asset is irrevocably and objectively set?
Ask the banks how they feel about the current "Mark to Market" rules that are causing them so much headache...They have assets that are worth twice their current "objective" value, which they can't sell without taking a huge loss on the actual value of the asset.
Sib poster is unfortunately correct. DO NOT LOOK. There is nothing to be done but wait it out, and when you look you start thinking irrationally...At this point in time it's a paper loss...It means nothing. When you pull out, it becomes real, and you'll probably pick up some nice tax liability on top of that (the pickle on your shit sandwich, as it were).
People who are pulling out when they're 20-30 percent down blow my mind. Wait it out.
Markets have very little to do with the overall economic climate, and can't be predicted easily because they crash for psychological reasons far more than for actual economic reasons. Most of the current market chaos can be attributed to panicking plumbers pulling their pennies preemptively.
The ability to predict short-term market fluxuations has nothing to do with setting a proper fiscal policy or applying tax stimuli or setting import/export tariffs or a wide range of other serious economic issues.
In all seriousness, we have enough ghetto TLDs already...Shelling out 200k for a TLD that may languish in obscurity forever sounds like a risky proposition.
The only real use I see for it is for sites that are forced to register massive numbers of subdomains: having your own TLD would give you a lot of flexibility in that situation. Otherwise? I'm just not getting it.
Campaign finance law, and winner-take-all elections perpetuate the system. If all national candidates had equal time and equal money, then we'd be in much better shape. If the electoral college votes from a state were split along the voting lines of the state, it would be a better system. If there was a constitutional amendment on the ballot that guaranteed those things, I'd vote for it in a second.
Until then, I'm voting for the person who is going to make me less crazy for the next four years.
It's one of those sitiuations where both sides have their good points. The free market system is by far the most efficient system. This has been proven over and over again by economic performance after free market reforms. On the down side, the free market is a boom and bust market. It has extreme highs, and it has extreme lows, and it's not fun to live on a rollercoaster.
On the other hand you have the socialist/protectionist model, where the market is severely constrained to fit a social/ideological agenda. This results in high prices, low productivity, high unemployment, and stagnation. On the other hand, it's stable, and there is less fear of living in a cardboard box.
Put them together and you get a more productive economy with milder cycles, more jobs, but with social programs to take care of those who can't take care of themselves.
The only real question is how much free market and how much protected market? Everyone has different views. I think we recently bounced a bit too free (in a few areas) in America, though then we made a massive socialist rebound with the bailout, so how the hell that balances I have no idea.
On the other hand, a lot of countries (cough in europe cough) have such high protective tariffs and such restrictive labor laws that their economic growth is weak, stagnant, or negative, and their unemployment is high. It doesn't really benefit anyone if 80% of the country has guaranteed (overpaid) work, but loses 60% of their income to pay for the 20% who can't get jobs.
In short, just because you like your religion, it doesn't mean other people can't like theirs too. And the real answer, as always, lies in between.
I just can't stand the social conservatives. It's cyclical, whether they're dixiecrats or neo-con republicans, I hate 'em.
Frankly, I think one of the biggest reasons that I'd like to see the republicans get flat trounced this election is so that the republican party could shake itself down, and get back to its conservative roots.
Ethanol is a stealth farm subsidy, so I agree. But that was a Republican agenda.
As for blaming the dem congress for the flop in the markets, it just doesn't work that way. This particular market crap has been brewing for 8-10 years, and the blame falls squarely on the people who were in the best position to see it and stop it, which is Bush and his republican congress. I'm far from happy with the dem congress and their lack of leadership, but they can't be held accountable for inheriting someone else's mess.
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The abortion issue irritates the crap out of me. I put it right up there with "Staying out of my doctor's office." I agree that it is a socially undesirable, and even barbaric process; however I think that our society is such that it conspires to keep effective birth control and education away from young people, and punishes them (through lost opportunities) for carrying the child to term.
Removing those obstacles and scaling back the demonization of sex and sexuality by the moral conservatives might actually help reduce the number of abortions, something which trying to outlaw it probably won't.
I'm not sure what you mean regarding teachers; I want them to be agents of education, not of someones agenda, and that education should be secular. If you want non-secular education, send your kid to a religious school.
I'm not sure you can call someone a fiscal conservative who believes in government spending. Milton Friedman is (in many ways) my definition of a fiscal conservative, and he was pretty much anti-government spending. It's Keynes who was pro-government spending, and while the Republicans pay lip service to Friedman, it's Keynes they follow. All (mainstream) economists are for free trade, so you can't use that to differentiate.
[sarcasm]As opposed to Bush, who, as we all know, was a great respecter of the Constitution.[/sarcasm]
Obama is an expert on the Constitution to a level that is hard to even define...He taught Constitutional law at one of the most prestigious law schools in the country. So it's not unreasonable that he may have criticisms of the document, the same way any expert may have criticisms of things under his area of expertise.
But I do not think that he has anything like the arrogance and disrespect for the law and the Constitution that has been shown in the last 8 years, and having anyone imply that with a straight face makes me laugh.
Afford a tank of gas? Think about retiring?
Look someone in the eye and say, "In the US we don't torture prisoners of war, we don't unilaterally invade other countries, we don't imprison our citizens without a trial, and we don't allow the government to spy on citizens without due process of law."
If you can look back on the last 8 years without feeling sick with shame, there is a problem.
Bipartisanship is a good thing...if you don't have the unshakable certainty that everything you do is right.
I'm always open to the idea that my views aren't perfect. The biggest problem I have with the Republicans and the Social Right, is that they are certain that everything they do is perfect, and everyone who disagrees is not only wrong, but also a bad, evil person.
It's amusing that they even turn on other politicians who are conservative, just not as conservative as they are. I've got one of the most conservative democrats in the entire house in my district, and the republicans spend millions every election cycle trying to unseat him...A guy who votes with Bush more often than he votes with his own party, and yet that's not enough for them, he has to be a complete republican robot.
Frankly the 1-party thing was a drum I beat for 6 years, and I'm tired of beating on it. The Republicans need a good old fashioned asswhipping to kick their sorry asses back toward the middle and maybe, maybe to kick some of the damn social conservatives back into their caves. At the very least their massive arrogance needs to have some holes shot in it.
When good Sentors like Chuck Hagel and Arlen Specter are called traitors to their party because they don't suck up to the social conservatives, there is something seriously wrong.
The absolute LAST thing we need in this country is two parties who think they've got the right to legislate how we live our lives.
Frankly the damn Republicans are so fiscally irresponsible right now that I don't see how anyone could vote for them on a purely economic basis.
The primary benefit of a dem landslide (for me) is that it may give the republicans a wakeup bitchslap that this social conservative crap only flies with the minority of the population. I'd love to see some real fiscal conservatives in office, but the "I hate taxes and abortions, but I love pork" crowd make me sick.
Actually, Adam Smith (the guy who basically invented Capitalism) was also in favor of the rich being taxed at a higher rate than the poor, so that's not a good argument.
True Socialism is more about community property and state ownership of businesses than it is about progressive taxation.
I find your intolerance intolerable.
It's outstanding how in an election where I didn't start off hating either candidate, McCain's choice of talking points (and running mate) brought me to the point of incoherent spitting fury...I had to read the transcripts of the last few debates because I couldn't stand to actually listen.
I just refuse to vote for someone who ran a filthy campaign whose only issue was "the other guy sucks." That's my favorite logical fallacy, the "argument from ignorance": the other guy is bad, so we must be better.
McCain was a guy I'd have voted for in 2000...Hell, I did vote for him in the primary. And I think this country wouldn't be worse off if he'd been president for the last 8 years. But he sold his soul for the brass ring this time around, and that level of intellectual whoredom I cannot abide.
The thing is, Steam, though DRM, isn't anything like as intrusive as SECUROM...Hell, it even provides features that are actually useful, this service being another example of same. Install Steam on a new machine, log in, and have it rebuild your whole setup. That's pretty cool.
That's why people put up with Steam.
In World War I one of the countermeasures the Russian's used against the possibility of a German invasion was to use a different gauge of railroad; the rationale was that the German's wouldn't be able to support their troops without rail, the German trains wouldn't be able to run on Russian tracks, and therefore they wouldn't be able to sustain an advance.
This practice cost the Russians a vast amount of trade revenue due to the inefficiencies of the system, and in the end it was all for nothing.
The Germans, not being morons, allowed the Russians to advance into German territory and then pulled the same trick on them: surrounding and destroying forces who had effectively cut their own supply lines by advancing past the end of their own rail lines.
So yes, on the one hand, making your system incompatible with the "enemy" system may have advantages, but it also has dramatic disadvantages. You won't have the benefit of the rest of the worlds security research, you won't benefit from the advances on more popular systems, and you won't be in a position to be aggressive with your resources because you'll have the same problems working on other people's networks as they'll have on yours.
Mostly secure isn't good enough. There is no reason to continue using MD5; it's not like there aren't better alternatives, and it's not like it's growing more secure with time.
Checks and credit cards are absurdly easy to fake in the modern world. Banks need to get off their asses and roll out a new system...With the billion dollar bonuses that they keep giving themselves, I'm not too sympathetic of the cost.
The bright side is that the drop in gas prices is a bigger stimulus than all the rest of the stimuli combined, when spread across the whole economy.
And, on the plus side, a drop in gas prices doesn't make it bonus time for ANY CEO.
I agree with you that recessions are largely mental, but I think this one has been building for too long for a purely mental comeback...The last dip was so industry-centric that the rest of the business world just roamed on, business as usual, no cuts, no reorganizations, and now it's biting them on the ass.
Anything is easier to change than Slackware; package managers and dependency checkers will make your life astoundingly easier.
Of course, in a University environment it's not a bad thing to have to do everything from scratch, but I think it's more valuable to learn to create your own packages, etc, than to learn to manage everything from source/binaries.
That being said, the biggest difference is likely in how "bleeding edge" the software is. Ubuntu will (necessarily) be more up to date, but that's not always a good thing.
Sadly, the low price of gas is a better recession indicator than the low price of stocks.
I disagree that it even has merit in a perfect world. You know what the easiest way to assess the value of an asset is? Sell it.
Until the point at which the asset is sold, its value is pure conjecture. Whose house is worth exactly its assessed value? In this market?
Instead of grafting a crappy arbitrary value onto an asset, a task whose only benefit is to provide economic welfare for appraisers, why not simply tax at the point where the value of the asset is irrevocably and objectively set?
Ask the banks how they feel about the current "Mark to Market" rules that are causing them so much headache...They have assets that are worth twice their current "objective" value, which they can't sell without taking a huge loss on the actual value of the asset.
Sib poster is unfortunately correct. DO NOT LOOK. There is nothing to be done but wait it out, and when you look you start thinking irrationally...At this point in time it's a paper loss...It means nothing. When you pull out, it becomes real, and you'll probably pick up some nice tax liability on top of that (the pickle on your shit sandwich, as it were).
People who are pulling out when they're 20-30 percent down blow my mind. Wait it out.
Markets have very little to do with the overall economic climate, and can't be predicted easily because they crash for psychological reasons far more than for actual economic reasons. Most of the current market chaos can be attributed to panicking plumbers pulling their pennies preemptively.
The ability to predict short-term market fluxuations has nothing to do with setting a proper fiscal policy or applying tax stimuli or setting import/export tariffs or a wide range of other serious economic issues.
More than it's worth? Sex.com never even came close to making back it's...hem...wad.
That's the only plus I see from the hefty price tag...Maybe the bastards will bankrupt themselves.
In all seriousness, we have enough ghetto TLDs already...Shelling out 200k for a TLD that may languish in obscurity forever sounds like a risky proposition.
The only real use I see for it is for sites that are forced to register massive numbers of subdomains: having your own TLD would give you a lot of flexibility in that situation. Otherwise? I'm just not getting it.
Campaign finance law, and winner-take-all elections perpetuate the system. If all national candidates had equal time and equal money, then we'd be in much better shape. If the electoral college votes from a state were split along the voting lines of the state, it would be a better system. If there was a constitutional amendment on the ballot that guaranteed those things, I'd vote for it in a second.
Until then, I'm voting for the person who is going to make me less crazy for the next four years.
And then the socialists chime in...
It's one of those sitiuations where both sides have their good points. The free market system is by far the most efficient system. This has been proven over and over again by economic performance after free market reforms. On the down side, the free market is a boom and bust market. It has extreme highs, and it has extreme lows, and it's not fun to live on a rollercoaster.
On the other hand you have the socialist/protectionist model, where the market is severely constrained to fit a social/ideological agenda. This results in high prices, low productivity, high unemployment, and stagnation. On the other hand, it's stable, and there is less fear of living in a cardboard box.
Put them together and you get a more productive economy with milder cycles, more jobs, but with social programs to take care of those who can't take care of themselves.
The only real question is how much free market and how much protected market? Everyone has different views. I think we recently bounced a bit too free (in a few areas) in America, though then we made a massive socialist rebound with the bailout, so how the hell that balances I have no idea.
On the other hand, a lot of countries (cough in europe cough) have such high protective tariffs and such restrictive labor laws that their economic growth is weak, stagnant, or negative, and their unemployment is high. It doesn't really benefit anyone if 80% of the country has guaranteed (overpaid) work, but loses 60% of their income to pay for the 20% who can't get jobs.
In short, just because you like your religion, it doesn't mean other people can't like theirs too. And the real answer, as always, lies in between.
I just can't stand the social conservatives. It's cyclical, whether they're dixiecrats or neo-con republicans, I hate 'em.
Frankly, I think one of the biggest reasons that I'd like to see the republicans get flat trounced this election is so that the republican party could shake itself down, and get back to its conservative roots.
Ethanol is a stealth farm subsidy, so I agree. But that was a Republican agenda.
As for blaming the dem congress for the flop in the markets, it just doesn't work that way. This particular market crap has been brewing for 8-10 years, and the blame falls squarely on the people who were in the best position to see it and stop it, which is Bush and his republican congress. I'm far from happy with the dem congress and their lack of leadership, but they can't be held accountable for inheriting someone else's mess.