Your challenge ignores the fact that sometimes the best thing to do is nothing, and let events take their course. This is the principle behind laisez faire(sp) capitalism. If a president was urged to do something, or his agenda mandates that he do something, and he consciously doesn't, that is deliberate policy and yet no law or action was taken.
I can't do 5 n 5 right at this moment, but I will throw out some generalized easy ones....
Clinton:
didn't tax the internet or internet sales
education tax credits encouraged schoolin'
increased size of Ken Starr's office and provided employment for lawyers, entertainment industry
deadlocked an ideologically opposite congress, meaning any spending bill that went through was subject to intense scrutiny
Dubya has never used a veto so we can assume he concurs with Congressional actions:
expensive weapon systems for DOD that funnel money to stockholders instead of employees or military personnel (crusader, new stealth destroyer for navy, new fighters, etc)
SEC appointees failed to effectively regulate companies or accounting industry despite ever more obviously dubious practices
underfunds IRS so that collections actions against people making more than 100k$ are basically abandoned - this increases burden on other taxpayers and therefore reduces the services they can afford and therefore increases unemployment
congressional buddies get a rubber stamp for any cash infusions that they'd like to give to their contributers
These admittedly aren't the strongest points but they are at least valid, and this is off the top of my head....
Well, speaking as an amazingly naive person who isn't a CA resident, what I've read made it sound like the reason for the CA deficit was a vast reduction in capital gains and income tax revenue brought on by the collapse of the stock bubble and many Silicon Valley companies. Obviously, the concept of a "deficit" comes from spending money, so you can always chase your tail, but the fact that it hit all at once was at root a sharp reduction in income rather than a sharp increase in spending.
Some businesses are running out of CA. Some businesses are moving in. CA would be the 5th biggest economy in the world if it were a nation. No one can afford to ignore it as a market. It has problems, but it isn't the worst place in the world to do business.
I don't think that advocating basic health care is "providing everything for... workers." Regardless of whether you think that the government should provide health care or not, the fact is that the government already provides health care through Medicare, Medicaid, state programs, and laws that require hospitals to treat emergency room patients whether they have insurance or not. CA is trying a solution to a national problem that will not go away, even though this White House Administration would like to. There are 43 million Americans without health insurance of any kind. What is wrong with trying a new solution to the problem?
As for the other things, they of course all sound nice... but in practice only serve to discourage business and drive away jobs. There's a limit to the amount of whoring out to business that a state can do without penalizing its own citizens. To take your argument to its conclusion, we should have slave labour camps, no minimum wage, and allow unlimited pollution on private property. Most people agree that there should be limits to the amount of exploitation that businesses have. As I mentioned above, right now small businesses are ignoring the health needs of their workers, which is variously burdening the workers themselves, the government sponsered safety nets, and the taxpayers that pay for those programs. I think it is reasonable to expect the free ride to end at some point. This isn't the particular implementation I'd favour, but it might work.
An elected government has a responsibility to represent the citizens that elected it, of course, and some of the citizens apparently feel that there are good reasons to take care of non-citizens. Speaking of amazingly naive, why do you think those "illegal" immigrants are in this country? Are they simply wintering here as a vacation? They are here because they do jobs that no one else wants to do. You can argue about whether that is a good thing or not, but that is undeniably what is happening. Some citizens, although apparently not you, feel that if people are going to be in this country, they should have to follow the same laws as the rest of us. That means that they should have a license if they are driving. A license also allows some method of allowing them to have bank accounts, which decreases the cash economy, in turn decreasing theft and criminal predation upon this population.
I like the way you call my post naive and in the same sentence claim to know the "reason" behind a bill in the state legislature. Legislation rarely has a single reason. Often it is a compromise. If a majority is required to pass it, and that majority is composed of people with differing agenda, then the odds are that they have different reasons for voting that way.
The most important point is that there has to be some limit on business, and that the limits CA imposes are reasonable if unpalatable to some conservatives. My favorite Bush argument is that the economy would be "a lot worse" if he hadn't been shilling for big companies and the upper class for the last three years. How would it be worse? Would we be standing in line at soup kitchens? Would we be building new dams? Eating each other and cooking our pets to stay warm? With his argument, he can do anything at all and claim that it could have been worse. No shizit, it could have. My question is: why isn't our economy better yet?
Across the board, the school districts that spend the most per student are inner-city, failing systems like Atlanta, Washington, DC, Richmond, VA, Detroit, etc. -- usually several thousand more per student than the neighboring suburban districts.
I hope that when you make this claim you are factoring in the very different costs of living in large urban centers versus suburban and rural areas. When you say "thousands more" it makes me suspect that you are simply comparing dollars, which is at best naive and at worst deliberately misleading. When the cost of living in NYC is 3x or 4x the cost of living in Podunk, WI, it is probably going to be more expensive to educate kids in NYC.
The idea of trying to create jobs instead of increasing efficiency is a poor solution to the problem of unemployment. If creating jobs is all that matters, let's just start building highways and then tearing them out. The solution is to find ways to use excess labour productively. Personally, I think the net result of the unprecendented white collar unemployment that we've seen in the last few years will be some entry of geeks into politics, and perhaps the renewal of unions as a force in the labor market.
I've also noticed during my time as an engineer that other engineers are critical of "politics." Since trying to see things from other points of view and compromise are necessary parts of communications and therefore "politics," engineers who do communicate well or are interested in other points of view are looked down upon.
This results in a culture where we promote a weakness (no communication skills) as a virtue (disdain for politics). The only way to change this, I think, is to emphasize writing and communications coursework as well as courses where you learn how not to kill people by leaving a bolt off the diagram.
I'd think Portland's was generally higher. Wouldn't the labour pool in a city be more flexible than in small towns? OR only has a few urban areas, the rest is rural. Other than seasonal fluctuations related to farming, I'd say that rural Oregon's labour situation is a lot better than urban OR.
Yeah, then you get to pay the 1.2% Multnomah county "bonus" tax in addition to the 9% state tax, plus the new income tax the state is gonna pass. Good times! Oh, and you get to fight bridge traffic. Of course, considering Portland unemployment is like 9.6%, simply working downtown (legit, not selling the dope) means you're a sharp tack.
My transportation solution was to move three blocks away from my work. I still drive, of course, because I'm a lazy American, but the point is that I could walk if I wanted to.
I think OR residents are simply opposed to paying any tax, period. Otherwise they would have taken the rational step of a sales tax (like almost everywhere else) instead of relying upon income tax and pooping their collective pants when everyone's income goes down after the.com bubble. Of course, everyone knows that incomes don't go down, so we don't have to worry about that. Suggesting a sales tax from a political office in Oregon is like shooting yourself in the face: painful.
I think they should just tax trucks based on a percentage of the value of the goods that they carry. Since trucks are using the public highways as part of their business plan, they should cut the public in for a share.
He checked into every possible way to reduce, eliminate or otherwise restructure his student loans, but thanks to a law passed in 1998 by Clinton, he's stuck with it no matter what.
It sounds more likely that a Republican Congress wrote and passed the law, and Clinton signed it. I thought Republicans were the ones who were big on personal responsibility that, by the way, means their political supporters get paid.
The burdon of proof should rest solely on the shoulders of DirectTV.
The burden of proof is already on DirectTV's "shoulders," the problem is that the average person can't pay for a lawyer to sit in the courtroom for two years while the civil suit plays out, regardless of guilt or innocence. The problem isn't that there's no presumption of innocence. The problem is that our legal system is so difficult and costly that the average person can't defend themselves against the bottomless pockets of a litigant. How do we fix that?
That plumber's van has been in front of our house for a long time.... I didn't even know the plumbing was broken! Call me clueless! At least this public camera is clueing me in!
I agree that it is wrong (so very, very wrong) to extort money out of people by mass mailing settlement demands. Someone brought up the point, though: How else would a settlement be offered?
In other words, if we disallow this behaviour, what are we going to allow? What would you do if you had a large group of people that you needed to engage in a civil suit? I'm very interested in the ideas of the/. community, since a lot of these posts are going to be "boo-yah" kind instead of the "suggestion" kind.
MOBSTER: Give me what's in the till or I'll beat the crap out of you, wreck up the place, and sue you for hurting my knuckles. And Legs here will sue ya for emotional distress.
Some posts seem to be defending the hierarchical filesystem because "humans think in hiearchy." This seems a little specious.
Humans also think in terms of relationships. Does this mean that relational filesystems are "natural?"
I wonder if the hierarchy of filesystems is cause or effect. Are we hardwired for hierarchy, so we build machines that emulate it? Or did our cultural background happen to lead us to think hierarchically? I'm not just waving my hands; I guess I'd like to see some evidence that humans are "hierarchical" to a greater degree than they are "relational" in a state of nature. Eh?
Slashdot Mirror
Your challenge ignores the fact that sometimes the best thing to do is nothing, and let events take their course. This is the principle behind laisez faire(sp) capitalism. If a president was urged to do something, or his agenda mandates that he do something, and he consciously doesn't, that is deliberate policy and yet no law or action was taken.
I can't do 5 n 5 right at this moment, but I will throw out some generalized easy ones....
Clinton:
Dubya has never used a veto so we can assume he concurs with Congressional actions:
These admittedly aren't the strongest points but they are at least valid, and this is off the top of my head....
Well, speaking as an amazingly naive person who isn't a CA resident, what I've read made it sound like the reason for the CA deficit was a vast reduction in capital gains and income tax revenue brought on by the collapse of the stock bubble and many Silicon Valley companies. Obviously, the concept of a "deficit" comes from spending money, so you can always chase your tail, but the fact that it hit all at once was at root a sharp reduction in income rather than a sharp increase in spending.
Some businesses are running out of CA. Some businesses are moving in. CA would be the 5th biggest economy in the world if it were a nation. No one can afford to ignore it as a market. It has problems, but it isn't the worst place in the world to do business.
I don't think that advocating basic health care is "providing everything for ... workers." Regardless of whether you think that the government should provide health care or not, the fact is that the government already provides health care through Medicare, Medicaid, state programs, and laws that require hospitals to treat emergency room patients whether they have insurance or not. CA is trying a solution to a national problem that will not go away, even though this White House Administration would like to. There are 43 million Americans without health insurance of any kind. What is wrong with trying a new solution to the problem?
As for the other things, they of course all sound nice... but in practice only serve to discourage business and drive away jobs. There's a limit to the amount of whoring out to business that a state can do without penalizing its own citizens. To take your argument to its conclusion, we should have slave labour camps, no minimum wage, and allow unlimited pollution on private property. Most people agree that there should be limits to the amount of exploitation that businesses have. As I mentioned above, right now small businesses are ignoring the health needs of their workers, which is variously burdening the workers themselves, the government sponsered safety nets, and the taxpayers that pay for those programs. I think it is reasonable to expect the free ride to end at some point. This isn't the particular implementation I'd favour, but it might work.
An elected government has a responsibility to represent the citizens that elected it, of course, and some of the citizens apparently feel that there are good reasons to take care of non-citizens. Speaking of amazingly naive, why do you think those "illegal" immigrants are in this country? Are they simply wintering here as a vacation? They are here because they do jobs that no one else wants to do. You can argue about whether that is a good thing or not, but that is undeniably what is happening. Some citizens, although apparently not you, feel that if people are going to be in this country, they should have to follow the same laws as the rest of us. That means that they should have a license if they are driving. A license also allows some method of allowing them to have bank accounts, which decreases the cash economy, in turn decreasing theft and criminal predation upon this population.
I like the way you call my post naive and in the same sentence claim to know the "reason" behind a bill in the state legislature. Legislation rarely has a single reason. Often it is a compromise. If a majority is required to pass it, and that majority is composed of people with differing agenda, then the odds are that they have different reasons for voting that way.
The most important point is that there has to be some limit on business, and that the limits CA imposes are reasonable if unpalatable to some conservatives. My favorite Bush argument is that the economy would be "a lot worse" if he hadn't been shilling for big companies and the upper class for the last three years. How would it be worse? Would we be standing in line at soup kitchens? Would we be building new dams? Eating each other and cooking our pets to stay warm? With his argument, he can do anything at all and claim that it could have been worse. No shizit, it could have. My question is: why isn't our economy better yet?
Those laws are awful! They might result in the horror of
If only a cyborg from the future would come back and fight the future!
I hope that when you make this claim you are factoring in the very different costs of living in large urban centers versus suburban and rural areas. When you say "thousands more" it makes me suspect that you are simply comparing dollars, which is at best naive and at worst deliberately misleading. When the cost of living in NYC is 3x or 4x the cost of living in Podunk, WI, it is probably going to be more expensive to educate kids in NYC.
And here I thought "Penis Mightier!"
The idea of trying to create jobs instead of increasing efficiency is a poor solution to the problem of unemployment. If creating jobs is all that matters, let's just start building highways and then tearing them out. The solution is to find ways to use excess labour productively. Personally, I think the net result of the unprecendented white collar unemployment that we've seen in the last few years will be some entry of geeks into politics, and perhaps the renewal of unions as a force in the labor market.
This results in a culture where we promote a weakness (no communication skills) as a virtue (disdain for politics). The only way to change this, I think, is to emphasize writing and communications coursework as well as courses where you learn how not to kill people by leaving a bolt off the diagram.
Does it bother anyone that the meltdown of the Internet from the reporting of a single bug in MS software is a plausible scenario?
I can't find that moderation on my pulldown menu.
"Heather Has Two Copies"
Am I a member of the class if I stole MS software from a location in California sometime during the period in question?
I'd think Portland's was generally higher. Wouldn't the labour pool in a city be more flexible than in small towns? OR only has a few urban areas, the rest is rural. Other than seasonal fluctuations related to farming, I'd say that rural Oregon's labour situation is a lot better than urban OR.
There's no "U" or "S" in "BLAME."
My transportation solution was to move three blocks away from my work. I still drive, of course, because I'm a lazy American, but the point is that I could walk if I wanted to.
I think they should just tax trucks based on a percentage of the value of the goods that they carry. Since trucks are using the public highways as part of their business plan, they should cut the public in for a share.
or pay income tax.
or hug trees (at least here in Vancouver).
so there.
It sounds more likely that a Republican Congress wrote and passed the law, and Clinton signed it. I thought Republicans were the ones who were big on personal responsibility that, by the way, means their political supporters get paid.
Here we go with the fat-cat bashing...
Also, if they are looking at porn, their gods will punish them!
The burden of proof is already on DirectTV's "shoulders," the problem is that the average person can't pay for a lawyer to sit in the courtroom for two years while the civil suit plays out, regardless of guilt or innocence. The problem isn't that there's no presumption of innocence. The problem is that our legal system is so difficult and costly that the average person can't defend themselves against the bottomless pockets of a litigant. How do we fix that?
That plumber's van has been in front of our house for a long time.... I didn't even know the plumbing was broken! Call me clueless! At least this public camera is clueing me in!
I agree that it is wrong (so very, very wrong) to extort money out of people by mass mailing settlement demands. Someone brought up the point, though: How else would a settlement be offered?
In other words, if we disallow this behaviour, what are we going to allow? What would you do if you had a large group of people that you needed to engage in a civil suit? I'm very interested in the ideas of the /. community, since a lot of these posts are going to be "boo-yah" kind instead of the "suggestion" kind.
MOBSTER: Give me what's in the till or I'll beat the crap out of you, wreck up the place, and sue you for hurting my knuckles. And Legs here will sue ya for emotional distress.
LEGS: *sobs quietly*
Humans also think in terms of relationships. Does this mean that relational filesystems are "natural?"
I wonder if the hierarchy of filesystems is cause or effect. Are we hardwired for hierarchy, so we build machines that emulate it? Or did our cultural background happen to lead us to think hierarchically? I'm not just waving my hands; I guess I'd like to see some evidence that humans are "hierarchical" to a greater degree than they are "relational" in a state of nature. Eh?
Hey, you don't know what keyboard he has. He might have one of them fancy ones.