Right I think that is sorta the problem. We have been spoon fed this idea that boomers are the most entitled generation ever and perhaps at the time they were but I think its the people that experienced childhood in the roaring 90s and their teen years in the early 2000's when it still looked like you could somehow get rich by taking a loss year over year with your online "business".
It may be that besides a few piercings and somewhat questionable taste in music, Gen X and at little past (Late 70's and very early 80's) folks are actually the most grounded in reality.
We have a whole bunch of people that grew up getting a little to much of what they wanted and being told what a special snow flake they are, while being rewarded for failure that now they don't want to work in an industry like IT Sec.
Which has its glamorous moments, actually, but most of the time is thankless drudgery, like all "work".
You should enjoy what you do but not expect to enjoy all of what you do. Its the second part that is lost on so many of these people. Its lost on them that we would not have words like "work" and "task" in our language if we liked doing everything, that has to get done.
A well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the People to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.
Actually if you parse it carefully the "A well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free State" is being offered as support for not infringing the right of the People to bear arms. The argument is militia is required for the security of a free state, the right to bear arms is a requirement to have a militia. The right to bear arms clause is NOT however dependent on the militia clause.
The Bill of Rights doesn't give you freedoms. It defines what Freedoms you have, preexisting apart from Government, specifically the Federal Government. This is not a trivial difference.
You left out the most important part though. It also forbids the Government from infringing on those rights.
You can't verify everything independently. Yes it should be possible to prove a cryptographic system is secure with math, but most don't have the know how, and those that do don't have the time. So you do have to trust someone somewhere down the line.
Which leaves you with needed to make some choices about trust. First you have the transitive property, you can use the personal opinions of people you already do trust to help reach trust judgements about others.
Next you got to go with experience, has this person proven dependable before? After than you have to move to agenda analysis.
We might say that Bruce's lively hood depends on him being perceived as a reliable expert. He would at least appear to have more to lose by knowing misleading people and eventually being exposed than he has to gain doing otherwise. We can also say we are not aware have having been deceived by Bruce before; at least to the degree what he is saying makes sense and the risk to me is low enough to not feel the need to go into deep analysis of the software and protocols on my own; I'll take Bruce at his word if he says something is broken, it probably is.
Conversely we think we have been knowingly deceived by the government intelligence agencies over and over again and have pretty solid evidence of that. With that in mind my default position is distrust anything they have to say. If they say something is secure, I must assume its not unless I can get some degree of independent verification. If they something is broken I have to assume that may be the case or they may be trying to steer me and others away from something that is useful. Again needs to be checked out independently.
They did. But only after threatening the fiscal stability of the country, and only because they failed at the proper legislative paths.
No not after, they passed legislation that pretty much preserved the status quo except it removed funding for ONE law, the response from the left was a "refusal to negotiate" and THAT is what let the clock run down to the wire. The "proper legislative paths" are for appropriations to start in the House and be sent to the Senate; which is exactly what happened. Then they are supposed to have a conference committee but the DNC and the president refused to sit down.
The DNC kept trying to call the TEA party hostage takers but the facts are they were the ones trying to manipulate the Constitutional process. There is no escaping that really.
Probably because he knew his vote against it was symbolic, and not part of a mad attempt to run the country off the rails.
Except he is the one constantly reminding everyone how its 'must pass' legislation, if its so import it can't be fooled with than he had no business fooling with it, symbolic or otherwise. Again the fact here is whatever the risk level may have been Obama himself helped to cement the long standing precedent that is okay to vote against raising the debt ceiling.
Sorry but the shit stinks no matter who is shoveling it.
The thing is we have or at least had plenty of warheads. If we simply stopped with the disarming there would be little need for expensive new technology. Even if someone did develop and deploy a fair effective missile shield if you have enough missiles and warheads to overwhelm it we are fine, no?
It seems to me we could just maintain our current stock we would have an effective deterrent against even remarkably superior technology. As long as we can get our birds in the air before the enemy's hit and as long as enough of them will get through to enemy defense to effectively destroy them I don't see why efficiency is of much importance. So we have to fire 30 missiles as long as couple can be expected to make it through they remain an effective deterrent. right?
Not only that, 'limited government' just means even more power for corporations (aka dictatorship and more corporate control of the law, less environmental regulations, more pollution, etc).
No it does not mean that. That is a lie the Democrats keeps telling to thwart the Republicans who are lying about trying to implement limited government. Limited government DISEMPOWERS corporations. It removes barriers to bring products into the market place which enables smaller cottage players into the game. We only have BIG corporations BECAUSE OF BIG GOVERNMENT. None of the mega banks would have survived the financial crisis without the BIG GOVERNMENT BAILOUTS; without BIG GOVERNMENT we would have nothing but SMALL BANKS today. Without FDIC we could never have had mega banks in the first place.
BIG Government and BIG corporations go hand in hand. Even look back in time. Which industries were most abusive: rail, mining, oil would be likely candidates and hmm which industries did the Government have the biggest roles in....
There are certainly some corner cases like shared resources "environmental regulation" where the free market alone might create some perverse and undesirable incentives, but in the vast vast majority of cases more regulation means more regulatory capture. It reduces competition making incumbent players more secure and lets them get bigger. When they get bigger they get more influence, which they in turn used to get more regulation that they might pretend not to like for public spectral but secretly support because they know it cements them in place.
Look at Amazon they are not even trying to hide it. They took advantage of the sales tax loop hole as a small org but once they go big suddenly they were for closing it because its going to make it easier for them stay on top with their specialty stores. Tax compliance is hard, unless you a big enough operation you can handle the overhead. So now its much much much harder for anyone to start up niche webstore and sell in multiple states, Amazon though just has to register a domain and change some style sheets. Funny how that works....
Incorrect, the conflict between tea party values and those of others caused the shutdown. The tea party folks in the house passed legislation the senate and president were free to inact. They also opted for the shutdown.
Explain why do we even have a bicamera system that explicitly requires appropriations to start in a specific body if it was not the intention said body should be able to use that power as policy tool, a check on the other parts of government?
Unless you have been brainwashed by the Obama apologists the answer is obviously none. Obama voted against lifting the debt celining when he was in the minority, he along with Reid and Pelosi used budget reconciliation to get healthcare passed in the first place. They are all using the exact same playbook and tactics. So if the Tea Party folks are bad actors for it so is basically everyone else in national office.
No I think you and the MSM just don't like their agenda and resort to name calling rather than debating their ideas.
Some people are obese, yes, and should be charged more in a fair world.
And for at least some portion of the obese they have a glandular or other metabolic condition they may have been born with or genetically predisposed too also. Lots of people (probably most) are fat because they are lazy and don't (or didn't) take care of themselves but there certainly are many who its something they can't help because they were born that way.
The only 'fair' thing is for people to simply pay the 'real' costs of conveying them, whatever function of mass, volume, height, width, depth that might be.
The only facts are that Apple can read iMessages, and that this was always well known and obvious.
Any encrypted messaging scheme where some third party handles the keys and the cipher text pretty much implies said third party *can* see the messages in clear text.
This is even the case of asymmetric crypto because if you obtain the public key through the same channel the cipher text is to be sent over you can be man in the middle attacked easily.
Honestly if security is of primary concern third party key management is FAIL.
They need to take in premiums, more than what they pay out in claims and desired profit, less whatever they expect to make investing in other financial instruments before they have to payout.
When they underwrite collision and comp on the vehicle you will simple pay more because they will be aware of the unusually high cost associated with repairing your vehicle and being more likely to need to total it.
If enough cars start using this technology liability will go up and everyone's cost of driving will be higher as well.
Right cutting military spending to say what China spends on its military could easily take 1/5 of our deficit off the table (at least if you maintain the accounting fiction SS pays for itself). Does it solve the problem no, but no one thing will. Its been said to move a mountain you do it one shovel full at a time.
Lots people are going to now jump in and bitch about how SS does pay for itself. Fine taken as individual accounts that's true, the value of the fund and interest does cover the outlay, but its also true the money has been spent on other things, lent to the treasury. So now the money must come from general funds.
What amazes me is that those people seriously considered a situation that could have had a devastating economical effect on the US.
You could say the very same thing about any big legislation. Many people myself included think this healthcare reform might have devastating long term economic effects on our nation yet it was considered and passed
Things like this cause nations to implode. A bankrupt, non-functional state has time and again led to violent overthrow and civil war.
Citation please, when has this happened in recent history exactly? Ecuador, and Iceland both defaulted and both again have access to credit and both economies are at least arguably the better for it. The world does not look like it did 70 years ago all indications point to the rules having changed somewhat.
This is what their game of chicken was risking. And when you listen to some of their backers they would welcome this in the hopes to build a different state from the ashes.
Again citation please, who exactly has called for building a different state from the ashes? Anyone actually in the House or Senate? Anyone who is a top line political contributor? or did you just mean well some commentators on Slashdot?
The only parents responsible are those of the girl who killed herself. The world is tough place if you don't teach you kid enough coping skills to deal with words, you are failure as a parent.
If you are parent its impractical to monitor what your kid does all the time, at least once they reach school age. You certainly can pay enough attention to them to know if they are contemplating killing themselves and do something about it. They girls parents should been able to see things were very wrong, should have taken her to get some medical or psychological attention where should would probably have been hospitalized. Instead of trying to arrest children for teasing each other parents need to pay attention to their kids.
If you really study the problem its pretty clearly a spending one. People moan all day about the corporate taxes not collected but they fail to realize that its that if not for the off shoring of assets and other tax avoiding loops holes we'd have some of the highest corporate tax rates in the world. The big internationals would simple leave for greener pastures.
As far as wealthy individuals dodging taxes you really are talking tiny sums of money compared to federal spending.
The big revenue gains if there are any pretty much need to come from taxing what most of us consider to be the middle class, or the upper end thereof any way. That family of four earning just a little more than 250K Obama keeps talking about. The thing is if you hike the taxes on them given demographically where they live its likely to have palpable and negative impact on their standard of living. They probably live near a big city on one of our coasts and all their income spoken for in debt service on property, or some incredibly high rent. Start trying to actually extract that 35% tax from their employer and that great paying job will probably shift to someone in Ireland.
Here is where the GOP is so stupid and the DNC is so smart. All the DNCs talk of revenues is a rope a dope. They know the result of "talking" about revenues will make most GOP members start frothing at the mouth and appear crazy, they will expend tons of political capital trying to block. The DNC won't raise taxes or if they do it would be a paltry sum because they know how fragile the recovery is, they tell us so every day. Just look how fast they gave away the "single payer" concept for health care reform. What they wanted was a corporate giveaway from the start. They let the GOP burn a bunch of energy fighting a "public option" that was never to be, rather than direct all the energy at killing the effort entirely.
The reality is they only answer is to cut spending, and it has to be
1. Discretionary ( not because it makes much gains but its easiest ) the sequester has been really successful. It got done because it spread the pain around. Despite liberal screams about how the sky was surely to fall, its had little measurable impact on main street, if it lowered GDP in any its almost strictly an accounting matter.
2. Defense, we don't need a military and defense industry that is 17 times larger than our nearest competitor. We simply don't need it. Our fellow NATO signatories need to buck up and meet their 2% spending commitments to secure Europe and we need to get out of the intervention business in the Middle east. At the end of the day we are secure against attack because we have the bomb, and SAM capability to strike anyone anywhere; it removes the need to have an outsized conventional defense force. We should have a conventional military force that is formidable enough the likes of China and Russia don't consider a conventional war with us a practical option and no more so.
3. Entitlements probably the hardest to do even as a libertarian I think we need some safety net, although their needs to be a point where we shed the burden of supporting those who won't help themselves as well. What we have in place needs to be phased out over a long period of time to because people have their lives structured around it, and its groups of people that are less able to adapt. The biggest government shrink and savings are probably to be had here but its going to take two generations to unwind, minimaly so those savings are far away.
If a Judge were to construe the device having a perfectly function micro-usb charging inlet basically anywhere on the device save like the back of it so it won't sit/lay down properly as "flipping the bird at them" I had say that person needs some perspective.
Frankly as a consumer I'd be perfectly happy if Apple did this. I'd be able to borrow a cable / transformer from just about anyone if I needed a quick charge, and could enjoy the feature superiority of the lightning.
It is difficult to have this debate unless we know for sure whether this radiation is from Fukushima or whether it is naturally occurring background radiation
For anyone considering going then you can't know, and at this point it matters little what anyone says. There have been so many denials, and incorrect information put out by TEPCO and the government there how could anyone trust anything they say now?
Should we be sanguine about these sorts of problems because they're not the worst possible scenario? Is that an acceptable excuse?
To some degree yes, mistakes happen, especially with large complex systems. We should count having avoided the worst cases scenario as a success and see what can be done to mitigate the failure mode that did occur in the future, and the answer to that question might very well be nothing or nothing less costly than the future number of anticipated similar failures.
What I don't get is how its an answer to the Tesla at all. This thing is a plugin hybrid, the Tesla is an all electric. Its not really the same animal at all.
Slashdot Mirror
Right I think that is sorta the problem. We have been spoon fed this idea that boomers are the most entitled generation ever and perhaps at the time they were but I think its the people that experienced childhood in the roaring 90s and their teen years in the early 2000's when it still looked like you could somehow get rich by taking a loss year over year with your online "business".
It may be that besides a few piercings and somewhat questionable taste in music, Gen X and at little past (Late 70's and very early 80's) folks are actually the most grounded in reality.
We have a whole bunch of people that grew up getting a little to much of what they wanted and being told what a special snow flake they are, while being rewarded for failure that now they don't want to work in an industry like IT Sec.
Which has its glamorous moments, actually, but most of the time is thankless drudgery, like all "work".
You should enjoy what you do but not expect to enjoy all of what you do. Its the second part that is lost on so many of these people. Its lost on them that we would not have words like "work" and "task" in our language if we liked doing everything, that has to get done.
They now have cameras, character recognition and databases that can track you pretty much anywhere.
What we NEED is a court to rule that data-mining constitutes an ersatz search and is protected.
A well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the People to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.
Actually if you parse it carefully the "A well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free State" is being offered as support for not infringing the right of the People to bear arms. The argument is militia is required for the security of a free state, the right to bear arms is a requirement to have a militia. The right to bear arms clause is NOT however dependent on the militia clause.
The Bill of Rights doesn't give you freedoms. It defines what Freedoms you have, preexisting apart from Government, specifically the Federal Government. This is not a trivial difference.
You left out the most important part though. It also forbids the Government from infringing on those rights.
For get gun, everyone who owns a kitten knife by this logic. This has to be one of the more insane legal decisions I have ever seen/read.
If this gets to any court level were it can become precedent, the fourth amendment is meaningless.
You can't verify everything independently. Yes it should be possible to prove a cryptographic system is secure with math, but most don't have the know how, and those that do don't have the time. So you do have to trust someone somewhere down the line.
Which leaves you with needed to make some choices about trust. First you have the transitive property, you can use the personal opinions of people you already do trust to help reach trust judgements about others.
Next you got to go with experience, has this person proven dependable before? After than you have to move to agenda analysis.
We might say that Bruce's lively hood depends on him being perceived as a reliable expert. He would at least appear to have more to lose by knowing misleading people and eventually being exposed than he has to gain doing otherwise. We can also say we are not aware have having been deceived by Bruce before; at least to the degree what he is saying makes sense and the risk to me is low enough to not feel the need to go into deep analysis of the software and protocols on my own; I'll take Bruce at his word if he says something is broken, it probably is.
Conversely we think we have been knowingly deceived by the government intelligence agencies over and over again and have pretty solid evidence of that. With that in mind my default position is distrust anything they have to say. If they say something is secure, I must assume its not unless I can get some degree of independent verification. If they something is broken I have to assume that may be the case or they may be trying to steer me and others away from something that is useful. Again needs to be checked out independently.
Very informative, thanks
They did. But only after threatening the fiscal stability of the country, and only because they failed at the proper legislative paths.
No not after, they passed legislation that pretty much preserved the status quo except it removed funding for ONE law, the response from the left was a "refusal to negotiate" and THAT is what let the clock run down to the wire. The "proper legislative paths" are for appropriations to start in the House and be sent to the Senate; which is exactly what happened. Then they are supposed to have a conference committee but the DNC and the president refused to sit down.
The DNC kept trying to call the TEA party hostage takers but the facts are they were the ones trying to manipulate the Constitutional process. There is no escaping that really.
Probably because he knew his vote against it was symbolic, and not part of a mad attempt to run the country off the rails.
Except he is the one constantly reminding everyone how its 'must pass' legislation, if its so import it can't be fooled with than he had no business fooling with it, symbolic or otherwise. Again the fact here is whatever the risk level may have been Obama himself helped to cement the long standing precedent that is okay to vote against raising the debt ceiling.
Sorry but the shit stinks no matter who is shoveling it.
The thing is we have or at least had plenty of warheads. If we simply stopped with the disarming there would be little need for expensive new technology. Even if someone did develop and deploy a fair effective missile shield if you have enough missiles and warheads to overwhelm it we are fine, no?
It seems to me we could just maintain our current stock we would have an effective deterrent against even remarkably superior technology. As long as we can get our birds in the air before the enemy's hit and as long as enough of them will get through to enemy defense to effectively destroy them I don't see why efficiency is of much importance. So we have to fire 30 missiles as long as couple can be expected to make it through they remain an effective deterrent. right?
Not only that, 'limited government' just means even more power for corporations (aka dictatorship and more corporate control of the law, less environmental regulations, more pollution, etc).
No it does not mean that. That is a lie the Democrats keeps telling to thwart the Republicans who are lying about trying to implement limited government. Limited government DISEMPOWERS corporations. It removes barriers to bring products into the market place which enables smaller cottage players into the game. We only have BIG corporations BECAUSE OF BIG GOVERNMENT. None of the mega banks would have survived the financial crisis without the BIG GOVERNMENT BAILOUTS; without BIG GOVERNMENT we would have nothing but SMALL BANKS today. Without FDIC we could never have had mega banks in the first place.
BIG Government and BIG corporations go hand in hand. Even look back in time. Which industries were most abusive: rail, mining, oil would be likely candidates and hmm which industries did the Government have the biggest roles in....
There are certainly some corner cases like shared resources "environmental regulation" where the free market alone might create some perverse and undesirable incentives, but in the vast vast majority of cases more regulation means more regulatory capture. It reduces competition making incumbent players more secure and lets them get bigger. When they get bigger they get more influence, which they in turn used to get more regulation that they might pretend not to like for public spectral but secretly support because they know it cements them in place.
Look at Amazon they are not even trying to hide it. They took advantage of the sales tax loop hole as a small org but once they go big suddenly they were for closing it because its going to make it easier for them stay on top with their specialty stores. Tax compliance is hard, unless you a big enough operation you can handle the overhead. So now its much much much harder for anyone to start up niche webstore and sell in multiple states, Amazon though just has to register a domain and change some style sheets. Funny how that works....
Incorrect, the conflict between tea party values and those of others caused the shutdown. The tea party folks in the house passed legislation the senate and president were free to inact. They also opted for the shutdown.
Explain why do we even have a bicamera system that explicitly requires appropriations to start in a specific body if it was not the intention said body should be able to use that power as policy tool, a check on the other parts of government?
Unless you have been brainwashed by the Obama apologists the answer is obviously none.
Obama voted against lifting the debt celining when he was in the minority, he along with Reid and Pelosi used budget reconciliation to get healthcare passed in the first place. They are all using the exact same playbook and tactics. So if the Tea Party folks are bad actors for it so is basically everyone else in national office.
No I think you and the MSM just don't like their agenda and resort to name calling rather than debating their ideas.
It doesn't need to be repaid.
You and I might agree on that but I doubt the FED ownership feels that way.
Some people are obese, yes, and should be charged more in a fair world.
And for at least some portion of the obese they have a glandular or other metabolic condition they may have been born with or genetically predisposed too also. Lots of people (probably most) are fat because they are lazy and don't (or didn't) take care of themselves but there certainly are many who its something they can't help because they were born that way.
The only 'fair' thing is for people to simply pay the 'real' costs of conveying them, whatever function of mass, volume, height, width, depth that might be.
The only facts are that Apple can read iMessages, and that this was always well known and obvious.
Any encrypted messaging scheme where some third party handles the keys and the cipher text pretty much implies said third party *can* see the messages in clear text.
This is even the case of asymmetric crypto because if you obtain the public key through the same channel the cipher text is to be sent over you can be man in the middle attacked easily.
Honestly if security is of primary concern third party key management is FAIL.
You do understand how insurance works don't you?
They need to take in premiums, more than what they pay out in claims and desired profit, less whatever they expect to make investing in other financial instruments before they have to payout.
When they underwrite collision and comp on the vehicle you will simple pay more because they will be aware of the unusually high cost associated with repairing your vehicle and being more likely to need to total it.
If enough cars start using this technology liability will go up and everyone's cost of driving will be higher as well.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weimar_republic -- Hardly reflects the modern world.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_Dawn_(political_party) -- Maybe if there had be a true default as in recongnized by everyone as such with the debt written down there would be less tumult we don't know.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish_Civil_War -- Again not terribly recent.
Right cutting military spending to say what China spends on its military could easily take 1/5 of our deficit off the table (at least if you maintain the accounting fiction SS pays for itself). Does it solve the problem no, but no one thing will. Its been said to move a mountain you do it one shovel full at a time.
Lots people are going to now jump in and bitch about how SS does pay for itself. Fine taken as individual accounts that's true, the value of the fund and interest does cover the outlay, but its also true the money has been spent on other things, lent to the treasury. So now the money must come from general funds.
What amazes me is that those people seriously considered a situation that could have had a devastating economical effect on the US.
You could say the very same thing about any big legislation. Many people myself included think this healthcare reform might have devastating long term economic effects on our nation yet it was considered and passed
Things like this cause nations to implode. A bankrupt, non-functional state has time and again led to violent overthrow and civil war.
Citation please, when has this happened in recent history exactly? Ecuador, and Iceland both defaulted and both again have access to credit and both economies are at least arguably the better for it. The world does not look like it did 70 years ago all indications point to the rules having changed somewhat.
This is what their game of chicken was risking. And when you listen to some of their backers they would welcome this in the hopes to build a different state from the ashes.
Again citation please, who exactly has called for building a different state from the ashes? Anyone actually in the House or Senate? Anyone who is a top line political contributor? or did you just mean well some commentators on Slashdot?
Only their vision is really frightening.
Many say the same about those currently in power.
The only parents responsible are those of the girl who killed herself. The world is tough place if you don't teach you kid enough coping skills to deal with words, you are failure as a parent.
If you are parent its impractical to monitor what your kid does all the time, at least once they reach school age. You certainly can pay enough attention to them to know if they are contemplating killing themselves and do something about it. They girls parents should been able to see things were very wrong, should have taken her to get some medical or psychological attention where should would probably have been hospitalized. Instead of trying to arrest children for teasing each other parents need to pay attention to their kids.
If you really study the problem its pretty clearly a spending one. People moan all day about the corporate taxes not collected but they fail to realize that its that if not for the off shoring of assets and other tax avoiding loops holes we'd have some of the highest corporate tax rates in the world. The big internationals would simple leave for greener pastures.
As far as wealthy individuals dodging taxes you really are talking tiny sums of money compared to federal spending.
The big revenue gains if there are any pretty much need to come from taxing what most of us consider to be the middle class, or the upper end thereof any way. That family of four earning just a little more than 250K Obama keeps talking about. The thing is if you hike the taxes on them given demographically where they live its likely to have palpable and negative impact on their standard of living. They probably live near a big city on one of our coasts and all their income spoken for in debt service on property, or some incredibly high rent. Start trying to actually extract that 35% tax from their employer and that great paying job will probably shift to someone in Ireland.
Here is where the GOP is so stupid and the DNC is so smart. All the DNCs talk of revenues is a rope a dope. They know the result of "talking" about revenues will make most GOP members start frothing at the mouth and appear crazy, they will expend tons of political capital trying to block. The DNC won't raise taxes or if they do it would be a paltry sum because they know how fragile the recovery is, they tell us so every day. Just look how fast they gave away the "single payer" concept for health care reform. What they wanted was a corporate giveaway from the start. They let the GOP burn a bunch of energy fighting a "public option" that was never to be, rather than direct all the energy at killing the effort entirely.
The reality is they only answer is to cut spending, and it has to be
1. Discretionary ( not because it makes much gains but its easiest ) the sequester has been really successful. It got done because it spread the pain around. Despite liberal screams about how the sky was surely to fall, its had little measurable impact on main street, if it lowered GDP in any its almost strictly an accounting matter.
2. Defense, we don't need a military and defense industry that is 17 times larger than our nearest competitor. We simply don't need it. Our fellow NATO signatories need to buck up and meet their 2% spending commitments to secure Europe and we need to get out of the intervention business in the Middle east. At the end of the day we are secure against attack because we have the bomb, and SAM capability to strike anyone anywhere; it removes the need to have an outsized conventional defense force. We should have a conventional military force that is formidable enough the likes of China and Russia don't consider a conventional war with us a practical option and no more so.
3. Entitlements probably the hardest to do even as a libertarian I think we need some safety net, although their needs to be a point where we shed the burden of supporting those who won't help themselves as well. What we have in place needs to be phased out over a long period of time to because people have their lives structured around it, and its groups of people that are less able to adapt. The biggest government shrink and savings are probably to be had here but its going to take two generations to unwind, minimaly so those savings are far away.
If a Judge were to construe the device having a perfectly function micro-usb charging inlet basically anywhere on the device save like the back of it so it won't sit/lay down properly as "flipping the bird at them" I had say that person needs some perspective.
Frankly as a consumer I'd be perfectly happy if Apple did this. I'd be able to borrow a cable / transformer from just about anyone if I needed a quick charge, and could enjoy the feature superiority of the lightning.
It is difficult to have this debate unless we know for sure whether this radiation is from Fukushima or whether it is naturally occurring background radiation
For anyone considering going then you can't know, and at this point it matters little what anyone says. There have been so many denials, and incorrect information put out by TEPCO and the government there how could anyone trust anything they say now?
So you don't mind if they go hunting in the neighborhood? You're fine with it if your neighbors plow up the lawn, plant crops, and get a cow?
I am fine with all of that. Although if you try hunting on my lawn, I'll consider you a poacher and a legitimate target.
Should we be sanguine about these sorts of problems because they're not the worst possible scenario? Is that an acceptable excuse?
To some degree yes, mistakes happen, especially with large complex systems. We should count having avoided the worst cases scenario as a success and see what can be done to mitigate the failure mode that did occur in the future, and the answer to that question might very well be nothing or nothing less costly than the future number of anticipated similar failures.
What I don't get is how its an answer to the Tesla at all. This thing is a plugin hybrid, the Tesla is an all electric. Its not really the same animal at all.