The revenue an artist can expect from a performance is marginal.
I'm afraid you're "pwned" on this one. Live performances are essentially the only way a band can make their own livings at music. They sure as hell can't make a living off of selling music through the modern Robber Barons we laughingly call the record companies.
Bands tour and perform because it makes them the GREATER part of their livings from music. Of course, record companies are now taking even that away from bands who are foolish enough to sign with them, by placing clauses in contracts that give the companies control over touring.
Bands who sign with record companies are really just slaves. The contracts are essentially lottery tickets and only ever pay off for certain bands who "hit it big". If anything, your statement must be changed to:
The revenue an artist can expect from a record contract is marginal.
Isn't there a standard joke which lists the ingredients and instructions to something like "apple surprise", and the end instruction says "take the knife and stab the person you're serving"? Yeah, THAT would be surprising.
If you're trying to be precise about "more", then you're making a non-point. The land is finite, but large, and Human usage of it is a vastly smaller value. On all this finite land, there's vastly more space on which to develop... as development proceeds apace, duh! I see homes being built all the time. MORE MORE MORE, you twit.
Like I said, it's bullshit sloganeering and it only serves to turn people's brains off to continue to housing bubble.
Sorry, Ace, but ever since I joined the workforce in the 1980s, and lived in Ohio, Colorado and Massachusetts, it was common truth that renting was more expensive payment-wise than buying. The key thing was that it was HARD to qualify for a home loan, unlike the fucking stupidity we indulge in today of handing a mortgage to anyone who can fog a mirror held near their nostrils.
People rented since you didn't have to go through the rectal examination of their finances. Sure, some landlords were more picky than others, but generally they didn't check your fucking credit history either. If you had a job, and your last landlord said you were OK, then you could land in nearly any rental property that you could afford.
Now this sensible system is destroyed. Landlords became pickier than banks. Banks lost their fucking minds and dropped the cost of credit to historically low levels. So people are "buying" homes that they'll never pay off. Legions of people who rationally should have remained renters, became "capitalists"... and immediately became slaves to the banks, since the dirty little secret of capitalism is that you have to actually have some capital.
Sure, property strongly tends to have a "value floor". But being on a $300K payment schedule for a $150K house is brutal, and is nearly as unsustainable as being on a $150K payment schedule for a $0 house.
Property taxation alone is a very strong force in compelling people to abandon houses whose liability exceeds actual worth. Remember how many millions of people bought into this housing bubble not to live in those homes, but to cash out of them as they flip them to the next fools. These are not actual home-owners or home-livers. They are pursuing highly risky paper wealth as they effectively rent property from lenders due to the ruinous terms of their loans.
You people have to wake up from your terrible financial habits or the Depression of the 1930s will return to America. Please stop being stupid. Please stop GAMBLING.
One thing about land...they're not making any more of it.
How do you explain new housing construction then?
This "not making more land" sloganeering is about as much bullshit as "liberating Iraq". Just stop it. Honestly, you sound like a moron. Land is finite, but in comparison to Human development and usage, its so vast that there's no truth whatsoever to inferring that there's some shortage.
The only "shortage of land" involves the high concentrations of desire around a few square miles in select urban areas. THAT'S ALL. These square miles get bidded up to billions of dollars, while thousands of square miles in the same or next state are essentially ignored.
That's not a shortage. That's just pervasive mental illness -- a.k.a. an investment mania.
That's true, but perhaps I should point out that "rugged" consumer products are difficult to find. There's simply no margin in them, and with millions of dorks with credit cards thinking that they're rich (or they're going to be rich once they sell their bubbled home), the higher-priced toys become the performing products.
It's like the SUV situation: they've gobbled up automobile market share. If you want a cheaply repaired, efficient machine, you're just out of luck.
I find it very difficult to buy anything, anymore. I want stuff that will last a long time and is repairable. But even at higher prices, the producers aren't interested in supplying such items to me. I find myself searching garage sales and donation stores for the old stuff that people used to value.
In an insane society, where people drive themselves into sickness, indebtedness and drunkenness by so-called pursuit of "success", the man who espouses taking it easy is going to seem insane.
Sorry to burst your beloved Western Civilization Bubble, but I'M not the person "needing a vacation". The ones who should be taking time off are the wackos working themselves to death to lock up society into a 100% "corporate hell state".
History shows us well enough that when the barriers for prosperity are high enough and artificial enough, they get torn down through revolutionary acts, ranging from the civil disobediences, up to outright acts of war. Vast populations of pampered fuckshits like yourself refuse to acknowledge it, but it happens anyway, and then you'll be scraping the dirt after The Fall like your brethren anyway.
Revolutionary convulsions are unplanned and irresistable. You may as well pout that revolutions are "illegal" and therefore can't succeed. All revolutions are illegal, so the legality of a revolution is simply a straw man... much like your assertion that civilization collapses like I posited are "insane". Catastrophic changes happen, and only grow more likely when people assume "nothing's wrong" and the old mythological fallback position of "it can't happen here". Deal with it... but don't bother making an emotional and non-evidentiary dismissal of such truths, since it just makes you obviously talk like a fuckhead or 12-year-old.
OK, I can see that. That's probably why Vandenberg AFB was tapped as a USAF launch site. Equally so with regard to ineptitude in planning, it seems that Vandenberg failed as a launch center. The USAF (of which I was a dubious member for 4 years) made an investment it wasn't able to exploit (i.e. the Shuttle), and then compounded that error by doing it again (i.e. Vandenberg).
Well, I didn't mean to imply it. I did mean to say that NASA has been under the heel of a fickle process that is not in line with a government program. Aerospace development has long term implications that require similar long term investment, much in line with developing a new fighter jet. (And sure, this does lead to the possibility of throwing good money after bad.)
The people who are for pattents wont care what Stallman says because he is just too Wacked out on the issue to be useful.
Stallman only seems wacko since he is sitting in a culture gone completely mad with Imperial moneylust. In an insane culture, Stallman's sanity is going to seem insane.
The pro-patent crowd is riding a wave of Imperial insanity as far as it will get them. They know that if they "lose" this year, that they an just keep pushing their agenda next year and will likely win... since the culture itself is corrupted by an utterly stupid worship of wealth. The pro-patent crowd can just keep waving the money flag and will eventually win legal authority.
By such methods and in such an environment, corporations are going to end up owning everything, and there will be terrible wars over it since the only thing that supports said ownership are pieces of paper and electronic records. Masses of people will come to realize that the only things that stand in the way of their prosperity will be ephemeral items of corporate authorization. Faced with poverty, a piece of paper is going to be ripped up quickly by the victim of such centralization of power.
Launching and satellite repair/retrieval should be handed over to private industry.
Sure, I'm open to these suggestions. NASA's going to change whether it wants to or (more likely) not.
Would you have wanted the government to run the railroads?
Funny you would mention that, considering that at the time of railroad expansion across the West of the US, the railroads ran the government.
But other than that particular aside, I'd say YES, we should have the government give it a try for a change. A pervasive passenger railroad across the US is only going to become necessary as oil invariably becomes more expensive, and I can clearly see that industry ONLY responds to the stimulus of massive profiteering nowadays, not to the stimulus of fulfilling needs attached to modest profits.
These insatiable demands for profits are NOT what capitalism was about. Hence, I'm not willing to let supply and demand let a "natural" market take place, as one might hope would happen once oil prices gave the impetus for the development of high-speed rail. No natural market can develop in this environment of highly unnatural predatory capitalism.
From your tone, I'm sure you strenuously disagree, so I'd like to know what you intend to do about hypercapitalism -- where looting and cronyism are completely out of control. I'd also like to know what you intend to do about corporate controls of the government, much like the days of the rail barons. American government has become almost entirely corrupted so that it is a business service organization that has little energy to spare for ensuring the rights of the common man.
What you're talking about is markedly exampled in ALL OTHER transportation systems. Cars, trains, boats, airplanes... all these have subclasses of vehicles that perform their jobs with regard to differing concerns like number of passengers, bulk of cargo, and distances traveled. However, NASA tried to shoehorn most space transportation needs into ONE VEHICLE.
For a parallel, look at the SUV. It attempts to be a person-mover as well as a cargo-hauler. It fails significantly on both counts due to energy and maintenance costs. The Space Shuttle is the SUV of the space transportation system. We should have used instead a system of at least 2 subclasses of vehicles as you intimated: small winged mission craft, and large boost containers.
Since America has embraced the SUV, I don't expect NASA to understand the transportation-vehicle subclass mentality at all. Hence, NASA is going to ride the Shuttle down to its doom as surely as the American consumer is going to ride his SUV to his own doom.
The sources are any dedicated reading of the news for the last 20 years. Stop playing dumb.
Credit where credit's due, NASA has a good deep space network, and also does a good job on individual probes.
Other than that, NASA is a just a PhD jobs program that has extreme skill in launching taxpayer money into orbit. I'm not a fan of privatization, but NASA's bloated ineptitude is just screaming for it... and as well, it will get the too-fickle Congress of their back with their on-again, off-again funding and design requirements.
NASA should return to providing "services" to space customers. To wit: launching and satellite repair/retrieval. The explorative section of NASA (runs probes and DSN) should be split off and made the obvious welfare baby (which I have little trouble with).
I don't have all the answers for fixing NASA, But it's broke, and unless they fix themselves, we taxpayers through our reps are going to fix it for them, and we'll fix 'em good if that's to be the case. Incompetence is just an incompetent's way of throwing down the glove of challenge to the rest of us.
I don't care if small inventors can no longer afford to apply for a patent
Then the government should get out of the patenting business. Government isn't a service industry for the wealthy and corporate -- becuase if it becomes so, we're going to overthrow it violently, and what will become of your fucking stock portfolio then?
At least have the decency to advocate fairness in your perverted viewpoint. If the government no longer serves the smallest inventor, then change the funding of the entire patenting system (the USPTO and patent courts) to be a pay-to-play system. Then, any beneficiary of this system must pay upfront costs of all examination, contest and enforcement actions. Literally, if a corporation wants to defend its patent in court, it must pay a staggering fee to operate said court for the corporate-owned patent system. Literally, if a corporation wants to stop somebody from infringing, they must pay a staggering fee for police to show up and confiscate products. The power of government will then cost the patent holders directly since they are the ONLY beneficiaries, instead of being offloaded onto the taxpayers who are NOT the beneficiaries.
There's privatization for ya, Chum. Dare to be honest enough to advocate that?
Of course it is. Gee, I wonder why PEs are leaving the USPTO? Maybe because like in EVERY DYSFUNCTIONAL COMPANY, the difference between theory and practice is EXTREME? Duh.
PEs are leaving since they know they are under pressure to rubber-stamp applications without regard to proper examination (and more to the point, REJECTION on the basis of prior art and obviousness). Probably, the PEs who try to properly examine a patent app cross their bosses time and time again, leading to a wholesale drop in morale.
This exodus is only going to lead to an even easier rubber-stamping process. The American public had better fucking wake up. The USPTO has been completely subverted by ONE customer -- the patent applicants (uniformly, corporations). The USPTO has no regard whatsoever for the OTHER customer: the American citizen, who requires patents to be innovative and not obvious, in order to qualify for the process of exchanging monopolization for disclosure.
Unfortunately, the chances of getting such an organization fixed in this hypercorporate political environment is essentially ZERO.
Firstly, you nonchalantly toss out "those who took out those variable interest rate loans will become slaves to the banks" while dimissing the case that "the economy will probably survive without going into a major depression". In two sentences you manage to contradict yourself.
Secondly, nobody is a slave to a bank when they can just walk away from the object in question. People are just going to walk away from those homes and the bank will simply have to eat the difference. Result: Depression.
The scale of the defaults, bankruptcies and so on in America over the next 8 years is going to be unprecedented in American history. People had far more real assets during the 1930s Depression, so ours is going to be much, much worse. And all I hear from people like you is that "no worry, some people will be inconvenienced". Sorry, but your lacksadaisical approach is rapidly becoming obviously bullshit to those with half a brain and one eye open.
Was there a declaration of war? I am not clear at all on that.
Response from Republican Mouth Bois:
"OH NO! Bombs in London!! We were right all along!!! Lookit the casualties!!!! THIS IS NO TIME TO BE QUESTIONING AUTHORITY!!!!!"
Of course, the truth is that, no, the US Congress never declared a war over 911*. Going into such a formality is too much risk for the highly risk-averse Congressmen. They instead dote and fret while Bush uses essentially a free hand in the Middle East to kill much of the towelheads that dared to sit over the petroleum that the US wants.
The Iraq War Resolution of 2002 is as close as the Congress ever got. It just gave Bush a "blank check" for attacking Iraq, and left most of the sensible oversight under Bush's umbrella also. Basically, the Congress told Bush to do whatever he wanted militarily in Iraq, for as long as he wanted. But it wasn't a declaration of war.
* Of course, you've have to explain in this case what exactly Iraq had to do with 911. The answer: NOTHING. So it was better not to make it formal. Iraq is just Bush's oil grab, prompted by his Saudi connections.
History. Perhaps you've heard of it. History tells us numerous times that when a right is given an arbitrary exception that denies it, that that exception is mainstreamed so that more and more people are caught by it. The horrendous abuses of the RICO statutes is a clear example of that in modern history.
... because their echo-chamber blog friends...
The ONLY "echo chamber" predominating American politics is the Republican Echo Chamber operating under the war fever generated by fear and hatred. So that means you'd know EXACTLY what an echo chamber sounds like, Chum, since you're participating in one on an hourly basis with sentiments like yours.
The illegal holding of Jose Padilla is a threat to EVERY American citizen. His legal status is CLEAR, yet government officials refuse to obey the US Constitution. Only Republican Mouth Bois think otherwise.
I gave several reasons the government might not want to proceed to trial in this case earlier in the thread.
Unfortuantely, the US Constitution makes your reasons moot. You can come up with reasons all fucking day, but if the result is unconstitutional behavior, you are the bad guy.
Try him or let him go. These are the ONLY two legal options for the US government. At the very least, American citizens are entitled to speedy trials in the case of criminal accusations.
I do know that the US is at war, something that a lot of people seem to want to willfully ignore.
Bzzt! Wrong. Your beloved US Congress didn't declare a war, hence your legality in executing people on that basis is simply ZERO.
If you want war powers, you should bother to have the fucking balls to declare a war.
And don't try the "we don't know the enemy" myth that somehow precludes declaring war on a nation. America invaded 2 countries and shot at both nation's defenders. America also blatantly usurped the legal governments of both these nations. You declared war in everything but name -- hence legal name. The "grey area" argument is simply your own creation to absolve yourself of any blame when you want to do something nasty. The rest of the civilized world knows full well that that is what you're up to.
Your perception of his social worth and overall political tendencies is irrelevent to the ferocity by which you should be defending his rights to a speedy and legal trial. If they can do it to him, they will eventually get around to doing it to YOU.
People accused of crimes are the people most in need of the most stringent observation of their rights, for precisely the lacksadaisical attitudes like yours of the people around them. So, please repeat after me:
CRIMINALS HAVE RIGHTS.
CRIMINALS HAVE RIGHTS.
etc.
Please continue repeating this statement until you understand what the US legal system SHOULD be doing, thus what the citizens MUST be supporting.
The only thing [large companies] have an advantage in is bargraining power with suppliers due to size of orders.
The companies who supply Wal-Mart are finding out that this is not an advantage. They make the deal at first, then the size of the order takes over their business, then Wal-Mart demands that the price continue to drop below profit level, then they either lose a large share of their business or go out of business. Wal-Mart then moves on to destroy another smaller company in the same fashion.
This is not an advantage -- not even to Wal-Mart, who has to constantly break business relationships due to the viciousness of the cycle. This is like taking a drug that makes you feel pretty good, then later on it progressively kills you. It's going to take some years for the shareholders of these smaller companies to wise up and realize that dealing with such "bargaining power" is likely to be fatal, hence they will demand that their companies avoid dealing with the "Death Stars" of the corporate world.
Move to France. Well, I suppose that is difficult as their immigration policies are a real bitch, but you would feel at home there.
A real bitch? Only to Americans who have no understanding how a real civilized nation arranges its affairs. Real civilized nations have stringent immigration policies, unlike America, where cheap labor is much desired by the elite and rather stupid climber dupes in the middle class.
Also like most real civilized nations, France has silly little things like socialized health care and a welfare state that actually helps support the citizens in times of need instead of attacking them constantly at the behest of the elite... unlike America, with the sink or swim mentality much promoted by those in the strongest boats. With socialized medicine and an overall individual-welfare state, there is a real society that takes real money to run, and inviting hordes of immigrants only breaks the system.
In short, Republican Mouth Boi, your agenda is showing. Taxes are the cost of running a civilization. Since a real civilization costs something to run, somebody's got to pay it. The current insanity in America -- where nobody wants to pay taxes, especially the wealthy and corporate -- only means that America's dim level of civilization is going to sink beyond the level of visibility. This result is called barbarity, and it's what's running the very geographic areas and cultures that America is currently attacking -- as like calls to like, I guess.
Of course, there's another way to do things, the socialist way.
How many times do we have to hear some hypercapitalist drone mouthing the false dichotomy of "only capitalism OR only socialism"? How many times do we have to hear the lies that America wasn't a populist society that supported socialistic controls upon enterprise?
Welcome to Slashdot. We like to point out the glaring logical faults in your propagandistic rhetoric. Go back to Fox News if this all makes you uncomfortable.
Why do I even try?
Because the modern Tokyo Rose of America, Rush Limbaugh, has given you hope that propaganda will win the day for White Christian Wealth in an increasingly Brown Pagan Poor society. DUH.
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The revenue an artist can expect from a performance is marginal.
I'm afraid you're "pwned" on this one. Live performances are essentially the only way a band can make their own livings at music. They sure as hell can't make a living off of selling music through the modern Robber Barons we laughingly call the record companies.
Bands tour and perform because it makes them the GREATER part of their livings from music. Of course, record companies are now taking even that away from bands who are foolish enough to sign with them, by placing clauses in contracts that give the companies control over touring.
Bands who sign with record companies are really just slaves. The contracts are essentially lottery tickets and only ever pay off for certain bands who "hit it big". If anything, your statement must be changed to:
The revenue an artist can expect from a record contract is marginal.
Isn't there a standard joke which lists the ingredients and instructions to something like "apple surprise", and the end instruction says "take the knife and stab the person you're serving"? Yeah, THAT would be surprising.
If you're trying to be precise about "more", then you're making a non-point. The land is finite, but large, and Human usage of it is a vastly smaller value. On all this finite land, there's vastly more space on which to develop ... as development proceeds apace, duh! I see homes being built all the time. MORE MORE MORE, you twit.
Like I said, it's bullshit sloganeering and it only serves to turn people's brains off to continue to housing bubble.
Fucknut.
Sorry, Ace, but ever since I joined the workforce in the 1980s, and lived in Ohio, Colorado and Massachusetts, it was common truth that renting was more expensive payment-wise than buying. The key thing was that it was HARD to qualify for a home loan, unlike the fucking stupidity we indulge in today of handing a mortgage to anyone who can fog a mirror held near their nostrils.
... and immediately became slaves to the banks, since the dirty little secret of capitalism is that you have to actually have some capital.
People rented since you didn't have to go through the rectal examination of their finances. Sure, some landlords were more picky than others, but generally they didn't check your fucking credit history either. If you had a job, and your last landlord said you were OK, then you could land in nearly any rental property that you could afford.
Now this sensible system is destroyed. Landlords became pickier than banks. Banks lost their fucking minds and dropped the cost of credit to historically low levels. So people are "buying" homes that they'll never pay off. Legions of people who rationally should have remained renters, became "capitalists"
Sure, property strongly tends to have a "value floor". But being on a $300K payment schedule for a $150K house is brutal, and is nearly as unsustainable as being on a $150K payment schedule for a $0 house.
Property taxation alone is a very strong force in compelling people to abandon houses whose liability exceeds actual worth. Remember how many millions of people bought into this housing bubble not to live in those homes, but to cash out of them as they flip them to the next fools. These are not actual home-owners or home-livers. They are pursuing highly risky paper wealth as they effectively rent property from lenders due to the ruinous terms of their loans.
You people have to wake up from your terrible financial habits or the Depression of the 1930s will return to America. Please stop being stupid. Please stop GAMBLING.
One thing about land...they're not making any more of it.
How do you explain new housing construction then?
This "not making more land" sloganeering is about as much bullshit as "liberating Iraq". Just stop it. Honestly, you sound like a moron. Land is finite, but in comparison to Human development and usage, its so vast that there's no truth whatsoever to inferring that there's some shortage.
The only "shortage of land" involves the high concentrations of desire around a few square miles in select urban areas. THAT'S ALL. These square miles get bidded up to billions of dollars, while thousands of square miles in the same or next state are essentially ignored.
That's not a shortage. That's just pervasive mental illness -- a.k.a. an investment mania.
That's true, but perhaps I should point out that "rugged" consumer products are difficult to find. There's simply no margin in them, and with millions of dorks with credit cards thinking that they're rich (or they're going to be rich once they sell their bubbled home), the higher-priced toys become the performing products.
It's like the SUV situation: they've gobbled up automobile market share. If you want a cheaply repaired, efficient machine, you're just out of luck.
I find it very difficult to buy anything, anymore. I want stuff that will last a long time and is repairable. But even at higher prices, the producers aren't interested in supplying such items to me. I find myself searching garage sales and donation stores for the old stuff that people used to value.
Like I said:
... much like your assertion that civilization collapses like I posited are "insane". Catastrophic changes happen, and only grow more likely when people assume "nothing's wrong" and the old mythological fallback position of "it can't happen here". Deal with it ... but don't bother making an emotional and non-evidentiary dismissal of such truths, since it just makes you obviously talk like a fuckhead or 12-year-old.
In an insane society, where people drive themselves into sickness, indebtedness and drunkenness by so-called pursuit of "success", the man who espouses taking it easy is going to seem insane.
Sorry to burst your beloved Western Civilization Bubble, but I'M not the person "needing a vacation". The ones who should be taking time off are the wackos working themselves to death to lock up society into a 100% "corporate hell state".
History shows us well enough that when the barriers for prosperity are high enough and artificial enough, they get torn down through revolutionary acts, ranging from the civil disobediences, up to outright acts of war. Vast populations of pampered fuckshits like yourself refuse to acknowledge it, but it happens anyway, and then you'll be scraping the dirt after The Fall like your brethren anyway.
Revolutionary convulsions are unplanned and irresistable. You may as well pout that revolutions are "illegal" and therefore can't succeed. All revolutions are illegal, so the legality of a revolution is simply a straw man
OK, I can see that. That's probably why Vandenberg AFB was tapped as a USAF launch site. Equally so with regard to ineptitude in planning, it seems that Vandenberg failed as a launch center. The USAF (of which I was a dubious member for 4 years) made an investment it wasn't able to exploit (i.e. the Shuttle), and then compounded that error by doing it again (i.e. Vandenberg).
Well, I didn't mean to imply it. I did mean to say that NASA has been under the heel of a fickle process that is not in line with a government program. Aerospace development has long term implications that require similar long term investment, much in line with developing a new fighter jet. (And sure, this does lead to the possibility of throwing good money after bad.)
The people who are for pattents wont care what Stallman says because he is just too Wacked out on the issue to be useful.
... since the culture itself is corrupted by an utterly stupid worship of wealth. The pro-patent crowd can just keep waving the money flag and will eventually win legal authority.
Stallman only seems wacko since he is sitting in a culture gone completely mad with Imperial moneylust. In an insane culture, Stallman's sanity is going to seem insane.
The pro-patent crowd is riding a wave of Imperial insanity as far as it will get them. They know that if they "lose" this year, that they an just keep pushing their agenda next year and will likely win
By such methods and in such an environment, corporations are going to end up owning everything, and there will be terrible wars over it since the only thing that supports said ownership are pieces of paper and electronic records. Masses of people will come to realize that the only things that stand in the way of their prosperity will be ephemeral items of corporate authorization. Faced with poverty, a piece of paper is going to be ripped up quickly by the victim of such centralization of power.
Launching and satellite repair/retrieval should be handed over to private industry.
Sure, I'm open to these suggestions. NASA's going to change whether it wants to or (more likely) not.
Would you have wanted the government to run the railroads?
Funny you would mention that, considering that at the time of railroad expansion across the West of the US, the railroads ran the government.
But other than that particular aside, I'd say YES, we should have the government give it a try for a change. A pervasive passenger railroad across the US is only going to become necessary as oil invariably becomes more expensive, and I can clearly see that industry ONLY responds to the stimulus of massive profiteering nowadays, not to the stimulus of fulfilling needs attached to modest profits.
These insatiable demands for profits are NOT what capitalism was about. Hence, I'm not willing to let supply and demand let a "natural" market take place, as one might hope would happen once oil prices gave the impetus for the development of high-speed rail. No natural market can develop in this environment of highly unnatural predatory capitalism.
From your tone, I'm sure you strenuously disagree, so I'd like to know what you intend to do about hypercapitalism -- where looting and cronyism are completely out of control. I'd also like to know what you intend to do about corporate controls of the government, much like the days of the rail barons. American government has become almost entirely corrupted so that it is a business service organization that has little energy to spare for ensuring the rights of the common man.
What you're talking about is markedly exampled in ALL OTHER transportation systems. Cars, trains, boats, airplanes ... all these have subclasses of vehicles that perform their jobs with regard to differing concerns like number of passengers, bulk of cargo, and distances traveled. However, NASA tried to shoehorn most space transportation needs into ONE VEHICLE.
For a parallel, look at the SUV. It attempts to be a person-mover as well as a cargo-hauler. It fails significantly on both counts due to energy and maintenance costs. The Space Shuttle is the SUV of the space transportation system. We should have used instead a system of at least 2 subclasses of vehicles as you intimated: small winged mission craft, and large boost containers.
Since America has embraced the SUV, I don't expect NASA to understand the transportation-vehicle subclass mentality at all. Hence, NASA is going to ride the Shuttle down to its doom as surely as the American consumer is going to ride his SUV to his own doom.
The sources are any dedicated reading of the news for the last 20 years. Stop playing dumb.
... and as well, it will get the too-fickle Congress of their back with their on-again, off-again funding and design requirements.
Credit where credit's due, NASA has a good deep space network, and also does a good job on individual probes.
Other than that, NASA is a just a PhD jobs program that has extreme skill in launching taxpayer money into orbit. I'm not a fan of privatization, but NASA's bloated ineptitude is just screaming for it
NASA should return to providing "services" to space customers. To wit: launching and satellite repair/retrieval. The explorative section of NASA (runs probes and DSN) should be split off and made the obvious welfare baby (which I have little trouble with).
I don't have all the answers for fixing NASA, But it's broke, and unless they fix themselves, we taxpayers through our reps are going to fix it for them, and we'll fix 'em good if that's to be the case. Incompetence is just an incompetent's way of throwing down the glove of challenge to the rest of us.
I don't care if small inventors can no longer afford to apply for a patent
Then the government should get out of the patenting business. Government isn't a service industry for the wealthy and corporate -- becuase if it becomes so, we're going to overthrow it violently, and what will become of your fucking stock portfolio then?
At least have the decency to advocate fairness in your perverted viewpoint. If the government no longer serves the smallest inventor, then change the funding of the entire patenting system (the USPTO and patent courts) to be a pay-to-play system. Then, any beneficiary of this system must pay upfront costs of all examination, contest and enforcement actions. Literally, if a corporation wants to defend its patent in court, it must pay a staggering fee to operate said court for the corporate-owned patent system. Literally, if a corporation wants to stop somebody from infringing, they must pay a staggering fee for police to show up and confiscate products. The power of government will then cost the patent holders directly since they are the ONLY beneficiaries, instead of being offloaded onto the taxpayers who are NOT the beneficiaries.
There's privatization for ya, Chum. Dare to be honest enough to advocate that?
Of course it is. Gee, I wonder why PEs are leaving the USPTO? Maybe because like in EVERY DYSFUNCTIONAL COMPANY, the difference between theory and practice is EXTREME? Duh.
PEs are leaving since they know they are under pressure to rubber-stamp applications without regard to proper examination (and more to the point, REJECTION on the basis of prior art and obviousness). Probably, the PEs who try to properly examine a patent app cross their bosses time and time again, leading to a wholesale drop in morale.
This exodus is only going to lead to an even easier rubber-stamping process. The American public had better fucking wake up. The USPTO has been completely subverted by ONE customer -- the patent applicants (uniformly, corporations). The USPTO has no regard whatsoever for the OTHER customer: the American citizen, who requires patents to be innovative and not obvious, in order to qualify for the process of exchanging monopolization for disclosure.
Unfortunately, the chances of getting such an organization fixed in this hypercorporate political environment is essentially ZERO.
Firstly, you nonchalantly toss out "those who took out those variable interest rate loans will become slaves to the banks" while dimissing the case that "the economy will probably survive without going into a major depression". In two sentences you manage to contradict yourself.
Secondly, nobody is a slave to a bank when they can just walk away from the object in question. People are just going to walk away from those homes and the bank will simply have to eat the difference. Result: Depression.
The scale of the defaults, bankruptcies and so on in America over the next 8 years is going to be unprecedented in American history. People had far more real assets during the 1930s Depression, so ours is going to be much, much worse. And all I hear from people like you is that "no worry, some people will be inconvenienced". Sorry, but your lacksadaisical approach is rapidly becoming obviously bullshit to those with half a brain and one eye open.
Was there a declaration of war? I am not clear at all on that.
Response from Republican Mouth Bois:
"OH NO! Bombs in London!! We were right all along!!! Lookit the casualties!!!! THIS IS NO TIME TO BE QUESTIONING AUTHORITY!!!!!"
Of course, the truth is that, no, the US Congress never declared a war over 911*. Going into such a formality is too much risk for the highly risk-averse Congressmen. They instead dote and fret while Bush uses essentially a free hand in the Middle East to kill much of the towelheads that dared to sit over the petroleum that the US wants.
The Iraq War Resolution of 2002 is as close as the Congress ever got. It just gave Bush a "blank check" for attacking Iraq, and left most of the sensible oversight under Bush's umbrella also. Basically, the Congress told Bush to do whatever he wanted militarily in Iraq, for as long as he wanted. But it wasn't a declaration of war.
* Of course, you've have to explain in this case what exactly Iraq had to do with 911. The answer: NOTHING. So it was better not to make it formal. Iraq is just Bush's oil grab, prompted by his Saudi connections.
And how do you come to this conclusion?
... because their echo-chamber blog friends ...
History. Perhaps you've heard of it. History tells us numerous times that when a right is given an arbitrary exception that denies it, that that exception is mainstreamed so that more and more people are caught by it. The horrendous abuses of the RICO statutes is a clear example of that in modern history.
The ONLY "echo chamber" predominating American politics is the Republican Echo Chamber operating under the war fever generated by fear and hatred. So that means you'd know EXACTLY what an echo chamber sounds like, Chum, since you're participating in one on an hourly basis with sentiments like yours.
The illegal holding of Jose Padilla is a threat to EVERY American citizen. His legal status is CLEAR, yet government officials refuse to obey the US Constitution. Only Republican Mouth Bois think otherwise.
I gave several reasons the government might not want to proceed to trial in this case earlier in the thread.
Unfortuantely, the US Constitution makes your reasons moot. You can come up with reasons all fucking day, but if the result is unconstitutional behavior, you are the bad guy.
Try him or let him go. These are the ONLY two legal options for the US government. At the very least, American citizens are entitled to speedy trials in the case of criminal accusations.
I do know that the US is at war, something that a lot of people seem to want to willfully ignore.
... you Imperialist ASSHOLE.
Bzzt! Wrong. Your beloved US Congress didn't declare a war, hence your legality in executing people on that basis is simply ZERO.
If you want war powers, you should bother to have the fucking balls to declare a war.
And don't try the "we don't know the enemy" myth that somehow precludes declaring war on a nation. America invaded 2 countries and shot at both nation's defenders. America also blatantly usurped the legal governments of both these nations. You declared war in everything but name -- hence legal name. The "grey area" argument is simply your own creation to absolve yourself of any blame when you want to do something nasty. The rest of the civilized world knows full well that that is what you're up to.
Your perception of his social worth and overall political tendencies is irrelevent to the ferocity by which you should be defending his rights to a speedy and legal trial. If they can do it to him, they will eventually get around to doing it to YOU.
People accused of crimes are the people most in need of the most stringent observation of their rights, for precisely the lacksadaisical attitudes like yours of the people around them. So, please repeat after me:
CRIMINALS HAVE RIGHTS.
CRIMINALS HAVE RIGHTS.
etc.
Please continue repeating this statement until you understand what the US legal system SHOULD be doing, thus what the citizens MUST be supporting.
The only thing [large companies] have an advantage in is bargraining power with suppliers due to size of orders.
The companies who supply Wal-Mart are finding out that this is not an advantage. They make the deal at first, then the size of the order takes over their business, then Wal-Mart demands that the price continue to drop below profit level, then they either lose a large share of their business or go out of business. Wal-Mart then moves on to destroy another smaller company in the same fashion.
This is not an advantage -- not even to Wal-Mart, who has to constantly break business relationships due to the viciousness of the cycle. This is like taking a drug that makes you feel pretty good, then later on it progressively kills you. It's going to take some years for the shareholders of these smaller companies to wise up and realize that dealing with such "bargaining power" is likely to be fatal, hence they will demand that their companies avoid dealing with the "Death Stars" of the corporate world.
Move to France. Well, I suppose that is difficult as their immigration policies are a real bitch, but you would feel at home there.
... unlike America, with the sink or swim mentality much promoted by those in the strongest boats. With socialized medicine and an overall individual-welfare state, there is a real society that takes real money to run, and inviting hordes of immigrants only breaks the system.
A real bitch? Only to Americans who have no understanding how a real civilized nation arranges its affairs. Real civilized nations have stringent immigration policies, unlike America, where cheap labor is much desired by the elite and rather stupid climber dupes in the middle class.
Also like most real civilized nations, France has silly little things like socialized health care and a welfare state that actually helps support the citizens in times of need instead of attacking them constantly at the behest of the elite
In short, Republican Mouth Boi, your agenda is showing. Taxes are the cost of running a civilization. Since a real civilization costs something to run, somebody's got to pay it. The current insanity in America -- where nobody wants to pay taxes, especially the wealthy and corporate -- only means that America's dim level of civilization is going to sink beyond the level of visibility. This result is called barbarity, and it's what's running the very geographic areas and cultures that America is currently attacking -- as like calls to like, I guess.
Of course, there's another way to do things, the socialist way.
How many times do we have to hear some hypercapitalist drone mouthing the false dichotomy of "only capitalism OR only socialism"? How many times do we have to hear the lies that America wasn't a populist society that supported socialistic controls upon enterprise?
Welcome to Slashdot. We like to point out the glaring logical faults in your propagandistic rhetoric. Go back to Fox News if this all makes you uncomfortable.
Why do I even try?
Because the modern Tokyo Rose of America, Rush Limbaugh, has given you hope that propaganda will win the day for White Christian Wealth in an increasingly Brown Pagan Poor society. DUH.