Well, one other view is that in a stable society, people recognize that there will be a statistic of criminal behavior that no level of legal assault or preparation will be able to destroy. Hence, if the laws were sufficient before the crimnal act was performed, then they are sufficient afterward, too.
Fusion? Dipshit. Fusion is certainly clean... certainly uncontaminated of any useful results after 30 years of research. It certainly is wasting your time, since it has wasted your tax money. Wake up. Big Science is a scam... a hidden welfare system. Demonetize the welfare queens we call "researchers". If fusion was really so promising, it would also be lucrative for a company to provide, hence it would be worth investing in. Q.E.D.
The only credible "terror threats to centralized power" are it's own stockholders, the CA legislature, and of course the power brokers. They've caused plenty of economic damage already.
Actual physical, damage-causing attacks are far down on the threat list. Wake up. You're buying the propaganda that you're supposed to be living in fear, while the real damage is being done by your own countrymen using your own institutions.
Let's see now, hmm, let's say that I'm an Intel stockholder. I see my company trying to capitalize on solar cells. I see my company proposing to use current plant for said solar cells. I see that these cells make less profit than the computing chips that Intel normally makes.
Obviously you are not one of the people with even moderate property holdings. The NIMBYs tend to be the ones with expensive properties, and especially are the ones with moderate property that is highly sensitive to "market conditions" (i.e. homes that will not increase in price if those oh-so-unsightly windmills go up anywhere within sight of said homes).
I hope that when all those windmills are put up in the poorer sections of country *, that the local folk will be the ones to see the cost benefits.
* Acutally, it will be the border areas between urban wealth and rural poverty. The windmills will be too unsightly in urbania, and too expensive in ruralia.
I live in Toledo, Ohio. You are absolutely correct.
But don't worry. This wrap-and-claim thing will self-correct itself as more and more Midwesterners leave the area for places less destitute. At least, you will have hundreds of thousands leave the MW via the "join the military" route.
Ohio is a great place to be from. Those with sense and ambition choose to leave. I made the singular mistake of coming back to the family+friends zone, and will soon correct that mistake. I've never before seen so many Jesusfish in my fucking life, here lately, and I look forward to moving to a much more secular area. At the same time, I don't expect to hear the word "President" said with as much crusading zeal and spiritual awe. {retching sound}
Sure. But I don't mind. Using the existence of a competitor is still actual competition. If the Dutch gain significant concessions from Microsoft, then I'm happy. Half the problem in the supply of the software world is Microsoft's overriding presence. If we can knock their prices down on discounting, the Microsoft Monolith will become less of a problem for the world.
On that note, I can't wait for the Chinese Microsoft to become visible. The press is pretending no such thing exists, but it's out there in some embryonic form, and it will undoubtedly be a major software force for over 1 billion Orientals. (Er, when I say "Chinese Microsoft", I don't mean "Microsoft subsidiary operating in China/Orient", I mean "Chinese OS provider with a lock on the Oriental market like Microsoft does on the West's".)
Where have YOU been for the last 30 years? Milking funding systems is the unwritten law of academia.
It sure is funny seeing people commonly hurl such an accusation of "milking the system" at government and unionized workers (yes, often true accusations), yet at the same time people are unwilling to accuse academics of the same social crime.
This is probably the common attitude since people in general are not willing to believe that the "smart" people (i.e. academics) are able to stoop so low, but are perfectly willing to believe that the "dumb" people (i.e. government and unionized workers) are.
It's just the expression of class warfare in another disguising cloak. But I well know what the fuck it is. Academics working on Big Science projects are enormous welfare queens.
HOW ELSE DO YOU EXPLAIN BILLIONS SPENT WITH NOTHING TO SHOW FOR IT!?!?
Wanker. Your attempt to continue the coverup is just sickening. I'm glad I'm able to draw you sick fucks out into the open on forums like/. and K5. Your own mouth condemns you.
I urged my Congresscritters to kill off the Superconducting Supercollider (Superexpensive Superporkbarrel...) project, and I have no regrets at the outcome.
Big Science was spiraling out of control. (Arguably, NASA is still waaaay out of control.) It's time we started punishing the Fusionites for their decades upon decades of colossal failures.
I say take their funding to zero! You cannot reward incompetence and then expect sound results. I'm perfectly happy leaving it for other governments and private industry to take the risks of developing fusion power methods. If only America had a fucking brain and work ethic, we wouldn't need to take such drastic steps.
Kill fusion research public funding. Decades of funding! Nothing to show for it! This is obscene! Those welfare queens will have to find real work for a change.
Your implied support of elitism is truly frightening. There have been too many events throughout American history where justice was done by jury nullification. The government too often goes looney and attempts to use law against those who dissent. Jury nullification stands in the way of that. You may as well use the same arguments against guns... after all, are you, Mr. Citizen, more qualified to use that weapon over your local weapon representative (i.e. police)?
The mechanics of government often oppose the common man. This is why we have votes, guns, and juries.
When you pass enough laws, everyone becomes a criminal. That truth alone makes jury nullification mandatory for actual social justice.
one laptop I can take with me between home and work
But that wasn't the assertion in the parent posting. Laptops were alleged to replace all computers, yes, even your machine at home.
Laptops are a niche product. No more, no less. And niche products are expensive. You probably paid a premium for the mobility. And that's just fine... as long as you admit that you DID pay a premium.
$50/mo? Are you insane?
Get out much? Fifty bucks is the price of market-leader broadband in Toledo OH... purchased by thousands. You may be able to wrangle a "deal" (i.e. it has all kinds of conditions designed to trip you up) here for DSL at $30/mo, but then so can you wrangle a "deal" for an $8/mo dialup. Dialup still wins the cost contest, hands down.
Remember, Yuppie, America simply isn't a couple of square miles here and there of built-up downtown areas, bristling with wifi.
Quite a strawman you've got going there.
Call it what you will, but the irrational exuberance of the 1990s is over. Now it's time to pay for burning investment capital like it was cordwood. For instance: How's that job coming along, pal? Enjoying some job security? How's it going being able to afford a house? Liking the price of gas lately? How about that heating bill, huh?
On average, you have been hit with the overall reduction in the American standard of living somewhere. Either you work longer hours, or gave up raising a family to pursue jobs, or gave up a big car for a fuel-efficient one... but you did get hit, somewhere. And the impacts are spreading. For example, I'm now finally seeing a widespread unemployment fate for those with Bachelor's degrees. All that 1990s smugness has finally risen like a tide of bullshit and is drowning the BA's. Live by the sword, die by the sword.
P.S. I'm not buying your company's fucking stock, either. It's time for your class of person to learn what's it's like running a real business, day by day, for decades... not just a pump-and-dump scam that runs for 24 months before the collapse.
I think the laptop market is nearing saturation in the U.S. A few years back, we thought the desktop PC would die off; laptops would become so inexpensive and so powerful that there would be no reason to purchase a desktop. That notion, however, has proved to be untrue.
Who's "we"? It must have been the same "we" that thought Internet retailing would prevail over brick-and-mortar stores, and that we would all retire at 45 fattened by Internet stocks.
Laptops have always been elite items. I will probably never afford one... considering:
it's expensive, duh
the batteries die and cannot be cheaply replaced
the display dies and cannot be cheaply replaced
are you seeing a pattern here, yet?
Another case in point: dialups. Why do they still exist? Answer: Because they are a whole fuck of a lot cheaper than this elitist broadband stuff. $15/mo vs. $50/mo... that's a no brainer for many Americans with their exposure to the real economy (i.e. constant threat of un- and under-employment).
America is the land of people drunk on spending. And that's the only reason to think that "we" thought that laptops would prevail.
It's high time for the yuppie class to admit there was no New Economy, and there never will be. People have to work to produce things, and very little work gets done from a laptop on some tropical beach.
Re:ECON 101 for techies
on
Offshoring IT
·
· Score: 1
Wrong.
Too many people that I meet simply cannot think critically. They have a very difficult time with abstraction. And they are unable to "carry the metaphor" once metaphors are used to revealed the zany Deep Secrets of Computers to them.
Now, critical thinking and abstraction apply to many tasks in the real world. (Which in part certainly explains why my city's traffic is usually so fucked up (i.e. the use of nepotism and unions to choose laborers and managers, over outmoded things like merit and ability), but I digress.) But these things strongly apply to technical work like "making those damned computers and networking equipment work together for useful purposes".
What I'm perhaps trying to say is that overall mental capacity for IT work is large on average. But it's not really required for things like a meat salesman... who in my experience is more apt to use alcohol consumption as his primary skill. The half of that that was jesting, allows that many professions have things like social skills, which have little connection to critical thinking and mathematical abstractions.
The root of your confusion probably exists deep in the soil of IT known as "the techie" who is being pushed more and more to simply be an "IT monkey". Instead of properly preparing for the work, analyzing it, executing it, then recovering from it, the IT monkey is expected to perform an ever-shrinking set of defined tasks and then continue onto the next task. We've seen this done for many years to the people on the telephones who struggled to solve customer problems remotely. The tasks were narrowed and the wages fell significantly. But the physically-present techie is also following the same path to irrelevence.
Just doing what you're told, within the scope of a contract largely written by drunk executives in bars (yes, that's what happened in the contract that I was outsourced under... these morons actually admitted to it), doesn't make for a convincing case of IT mental sophistication. But that's a business fad, not a reality move, so that's where I think you mislead yourself in your judgment.
P.S. Your expressiveness and written style are just appalling. Please read more books and seek to duplicate better writing styles.
Name.Full:Lon Horiuchi Occupation:government sniper Address.Home:293 Shady Lane, Colorado Springs CO USA 80828-3392 Phone.Home:719-349-2932
So much for THAT idea. Any comprehensive database of persons will be purged of all the elements that protect the ruling class, including their own information. That makes a worldwide "database of persons" automatically useless except as a weapon against the lower classes.
Remember, like guns, databases can be used AGAINST the ruling class. That determines how regulated, applicable and widespread they are.
And I think similarly and as well about what Clinton did to the Democrats. The DLC and the PNAC, among others, have brought true fanaticism into American politics like it was in the early Cold War.
But still, a cult of personality still requires a vast retinue of followers. I can't just slap blame upon a few politicans at the top of the Imperial organization. For every Darth Vader or Moff Tarkin, there must be thousands to tens of thousands of of administrators, directing hundreds of thousands to millions of Imperial troopers and other operatives. The entire system is leaning heavily Fascist. The lean is so pronounced and the mass doing the leaning is so large, that it is now inevitable. People are going to start disappearing in America soon. The secret death squads may only be 2 years away now. After all, America has been running death squads around the world for about 2 generations, so all she has to do is bring them home for a "domestic op".
The United States is being converted into a Third World type of society. There will be masses of poor who will be willing to do almost anything they are told to do for just a few "nap" (i.e. the North American Peso) more. Atop this mass of desperation, there will be a few percent of people whose only real worry is being killed when their car breaks down anywhere inside the continual, low-level war zone known as "99% of America". In such an arrangement, there will be plenty of money to toss in an elitist direction like NASA. Why not? The Federal Budget is a fucking huge credit card, and the working poor are the ones footing more and more of the monthly bill.
America's rich has discovered globalism, hence they really don't need to satisfy the basic demands of America's workers any longer. We workers can now be killed off at the convenience of this ruling class. Iraq is a good start at draining America of excess manual laborers. I'm sure we can get tens of thousands more "useless eaters" killed off when Iran is invaded. North Korea will demand hundreds of thousands of American dead. When a horse or dog is no longer useful, you put it down, don't you? It's just a fucking animal.
We wouldn't have heard much in public about some song about the "12 Days of Christmas" if it had some line in it about "nine ladies fucking", now would we? Makes caroling in the neighborhood a wee bit awkward, eh.
Some people try to "stick it to you on shipping", because that "shipping and handling" charge is mostly their profit margin.
I've purchased only 1 thing online, via eBay. They tacked on a mandatory $1 insurance charge, but then the package arrived, there was no insurance mark at all. I checked with the post office -- that package was not insured. This was because that $1 "insurance" charge was actually part of their profit margin.
Using the nickel-and-dime extra charges as support for profits is as old as the hills. And it can happen at any level of the economy. Heck, once the car companies started squeezing their Tier1, 2 and 3 suppliers, the supplier response was... itemized charges, of course!
It's not a matter of the existence of being grateful, but the quantity of being grateful. You can then move onward to issues of quality... say, over dinner.
I hate to burst your bubble, but people aren't waiting. People buy big-ticket items like cars and homes at the drop of a hat. The banks are promoting this foolishness, of course, since they want to "stay competitive". The housing bubble is so huge that it's difficult to talk about, like the elephant in the living room.
A large number of you are gonna be screwed when automation and outsourcing leaves you in your 40s and 50s without a job.
Roger that. I see people living in complete denial that by age 55 they will find themselves in the un- and under-employment zone. I see plenty of non-IT workers who have fallen under the gore-spattered wheels of this particular trend. But people don't want to see that trend. They don't want to acknowledge that by the time they "retire":
the retirement age will have moved up significantly, so they really can't retire anyway
their last 15 working years will be plagued with un- and under-employment
retirement benefits will be cut, forcing them to continue working
A real economic hell is coming for the 'Boomers. And they won't be able to sell their overpriced homes to compensate for it. The more people refuse to see this, the worse it will be by the time it hits.
Unless it is WW3 i don't see any chance of a draft being brought back. It was a disaster for Vietnam to say the least. Both parties know it would be political suicide as well UNLESS again we were invaded by some agressor.
If Vitenam was such a disaster, then why are we fighting Vietnam 2.0 (i.e. Iraq), here over 30 years later?
The answer is that America learned nothing from Vietnam 1.0. Hence I fully expect a draft. In the Vietnam draft, not one Congressional son was scooped up by it. I expect the same this time around.
Both the monied parties support the nanny-state. It only gets them more power, and the people are far too spineless, apathetic, or frankly supportive (due to their use of the nanny-state to line their own pockets -- as any corporate exec does) to put a stop to it.
Both classes (right- and left-wing) of leader are big spenders. Both classes believe in the existence of a huge or powerful government in order to enact their Fascist agenda.
Hence the grandfather posting is correct. Professors generally only ladle out the philosophy of this sort of government.
Fortunately for individual liberty, the probability of a "terrorist"-nuked American city is rising rapidly to 1.0. The Empire will then fall into a paroxysm of violence, and thus cease to matter in international affairs. The rest of the world will breathe a bit easier for the lack of overt Imperial force, and will watch sadly as people in America will be perfectly free... free to die by violence, hunger and cold.
Shit, as far as that goes, I can't wait. I couldn't even vote for the candidate I wanted in the last Presidential election, so as far as I'm concerned, WAR HAS ALREADY BEEN DECLARED.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, one other view is that in a stable society, people recognize that there will be a statistic of criminal behavior that no level of legal assault or preparation will be able to destroy. Hence, if the laws were sufficient before the crimnal act was performed, then they are sufficient afterward, too.
Fusion? Dipshit. Fusion is certainly clean ... certainly uncontaminated of any useful results after 30 years of research. It certainly is wasting your time, since it has wasted your tax money. Wake up. Big Science is a scam ... a hidden welfare system. Demonetize the welfare queens we call "researchers". If fusion was really so promising, it would also be lucrative for a company to provide, hence it would be worth investing in. Q.E.D.
The only credible "terror threats to centralized power" are it's own stockholders, the CA legislature, and of course the power brokers. They've caused plenty of economic damage already.
Actual physical, damage-causing attacks are far down on the threat list. Wake up. You're buying the propaganda that you're supposed to be living in fear, while the real damage is being done by your own countrymen using your own institutions.
Let's see now, hmm, let's say that I'm an Intel stockholder. I see my company trying to capitalize on solar cells. I see my company proposing to use current plant for said solar cells. I see that these cells make less profit than the computing chips that Intel normally makes.
Well, that's the end of THAT proposal.
Obviously you are not one of the people with even moderate property holdings. The NIMBYs tend to be the ones with expensive properties, and especially are the ones with moderate property that is highly sensitive to "market conditions" (i.e. homes that will not increase in price if those oh-so-unsightly windmills go up anywhere within sight of said homes).
I hope that when all those windmills are put up in the poorer sections of country *, that the local folk will be the ones to see the cost benefits.
* Acutally, it will be the border areas between urban wealth and rural poverty. The windmills will be too unsightly in urbania, and too expensive in ruralia.
I live in Toledo, Ohio. You are absolutely correct.
But don't worry. This wrap-and-claim thing will self-correct itself as more and more Midwesterners leave the area for places less destitute. At least, you will have hundreds of thousands leave the MW via the "join the military" route.
Ohio is a great place to be from. Those with sense and ambition choose to leave. I made the singular mistake of coming back to the family+friends zone, and will soon correct that mistake. I've never before seen so many Jesusfish in my fucking life, here lately, and I look forward to moving to a much more secular area. At the same time, I don't expect to hear the word "President" said with as much crusading zeal and spiritual awe. {retching sound}
Sure. But I don't mind. Using the existence of a competitor is still actual competition. If the Dutch gain significant concessions from Microsoft, then I'm happy. Half the problem in the supply of the software world is Microsoft's overriding presence. If we can knock their prices down on discounting, the Microsoft Monolith will become less of a problem for the world.
On that note, I can't wait for the Chinese Microsoft to become visible. The press is pretending no such thing exists, but it's out there in some embryonic form, and it will undoubtedly be a major software force for over 1 billion Orientals. (Er, when I say "Chinese Microsoft", I don't mean "Microsoft subsidiary operating in China/Orient", I mean "Chinese OS provider with a lock on the Oriental market like Microsoft does on the West's".)
Where have YOU been for the last 30 years? Milking funding systems is the unwritten law of academia.
/. and K5. Your own mouth condemns you.
It sure is funny seeing people commonly hurl such an accusation of "milking the system" at government and unionized workers (yes, often true accusations), yet at the same time people are unwilling to accuse academics of the same social crime.
This is probably the common attitude since people in general are not willing to believe that the "smart" people (i.e. academics) are able to stoop so low, but are perfectly willing to believe that the "dumb" people (i.e. government and unionized workers) are.
It's just the expression of class warfare in another disguising cloak. But I well know what the fuck it is. Academics working on Big Science projects are enormous welfare queens.
HOW ELSE DO YOU EXPLAIN BILLIONS SPENT WITH NOTHING TO SHOW FOR IT!?!?
Wanker. Your attempt to continue the coverup is just sickening. I'm glad I'm able to draw you sick fucks out into the open on forums like
I don't buy this fusion bullshit any further.
...) project, and I have no regrets at the outcome.
I urged my Congresscritters to kill off the Superconducting Supercollider (Superexpensive Superporkbarrel
Big Science was spiraling out of control. (Arguably, NASA is still waaaay out of control.) It's time we started punishing the Fusionites for their decades upon decades of colossal failures.
I say take their funding to zero! You cannot reward incompetence and then expect sound results. I'm perfectly happy leaving it for other governments and private industry to take the risks of developing fusion power methods. If only America had a fucking brain and work ethic, we wouldn't need to take such drastic steps.
Kill fusion research public funding. Decades of funding! Nothing to show for it! This is obscene! Those welfare queens will have to find real work for a change.
Your implied support of elitism is truly frightening. There have been too many events throughout American history where justice was done by jury nullification. The government too often goes looney and attempts to use law against those who dissent. Jury nullification stands in the way of that. You may as well use the same arguments against guns ... after all, are you, Mr. Citizen, more qualified to use that weapon over your local weapon representative (i.e. police)?
The mechanics of government often oppose the common man. This is why we have votes, guns, and juries.
When you pass enough laws, everyone becomes a criminal. That truth alone makes jury nullification mandatory for actual social justice.
one laptop I can take with me between home and work
... as long as you admit that you DID pay a premium.
... purchased by thousands. You may be able to wrangle a "deal" (i.e. it has all kinds of conditions designed to trip you up) here for DSL at $30/mo, but then so can you wrangle a "deal" for an $8/mo dialup. Dialup still wins the cost contest, hands down.
... but you did get hit, somewhere. And the impacts are spreading. For example, I'm now finally seeing a widespread unemployment fate for those with Bachelor's degrees. All that 1990s smugness has finally risen like a tide of bullshit and is drowning the BA's. Live by the sword, die by the sword.
... not just a pump-and-dump scam that runs for 24 months before the collapse.
But that wasn't the assertion in the parent posting. Laptops were alleged to replace all computers, yes, even your machine at home.
Laptops are a niche product. No more, no less. And niche products are expensive. You probably paid a premium for the mobility. And that's just fine
$50/mo? Are you insane?
Get out much? Fifty bucks is the price of market-leader broadband in Toledo OH
Remember, Yuppie, America simply isn't a couple of square miles here and there of built-up downtown areas, bristling with wifi.
Quite a strawman you've got going there.
Call it what you will, but the irrational exuberance of the 1990s is over. Now it's time to pay for burning investment capital like it was cordwood. For instance: How's that job coming along, pal? Enjoying some job security? How's it going being able to afford a house? Liking the price of gas lately? How about that heating bill, huh?
On average, you have been hit with the overall reduction in the American standard of living somewhere. Either you work longer hours, or gave up raising a family to pursue jobs, or gave up a big car for a fuel-efficient one
P.S. I'm not buying your company's fucking stock, either. It's time for your class of person to learn what's it's like running a real business, day by day, for decades
- microcode
- entertainment
- high-speed pizza delivery
Let's face it, punching code is one thingWho's "we"? It must have been the same "we" that thought Internet retailing would prevail over brick-and-mortar stores, and that we would all retire at 45 fattened by Internet stocks.
Laptops have always been elite items. I will probably never afford one
- it's expensive, duh
- the batteries die and cannot be cheaply replaced
- the display dies and cannot be cheaply replaced
- are you seeing a pattern here, yet?
Another case in point: dialups. Why do they still exist? Answer: Because they are a whole fuck of a lot cheaper than this elitist broadband stuff. $15/mo vs. $50/moAmerica is the land of people drunk on spending. And that's the only reason to think that "we" thought that laptops would prevail.
It's high time for the yuppie class to admit there was no New Economy, and there never will be. People have to work to produce things, and very little work gets done from a laptop on some tropical beach.
Wrong.
... who in my experience is more apt to use alcohol consumption as his primary skill. The half of that that was jesting, allows that many professions have things like social skills, which have little connection to critical thinking and mathematical abstractions.
... these morons actually admitted to it), doesn't make for a convincing case of IT mental sophistication. But that's a business fad, not a reality move, so that's where I think you mislead yourself in your judgment.
Too many people that I meet simply cannot think critically. They have a very difficult time with abstraction. And they are unable to "carry the metaphor" once metaphors are used to revealed the zany Deep Secrets of Computers to them.
Now, critical thinking and abstraction apply to many tasks in the real world. (Which in part certainly explains why my city's traffic is usually so fucked up (i.e. the use of nepotism and unions to choose laborers and managers, over outmoded things like merit and ability), but I digress.) But these things strongly apply to technical work like "making those damned computers and networking equipment work together for useful purposes".
What I'm perhaps trying to say is that overall mental capacity for IT work is large on average. But it's not really required for things like a meat salesman
The root of your confusion probably exists deep in the soil of IT known as "the techie" who is being pushed more and more to simply be an "IT monkey". Instead of properly preparing for the work, analyzing it, executing it, then recovering from it, the IT monkey is expected to perform an ever-shrinking set of defined tasks and then continue onto the next task. We've seen this done for many years to the people on the telephones who struggled to solve customer problems remotely. The tasks were narrowed and the wages fell significantly. But the physically-present techie is also following the same path to irrelevence.
Just doing what you're told, within the scope of a contract largely written by drunk executives in bars (yes, that's what happened in the contract that I was outsourced under
P.S. Your expressiveness and written style are just appalling. Please read more books and seek to duplicate better writing styles.
Yeah, I can see it now ...
Name.Full: Lon Horiuchi
Occupation: government sniper
Address.Home: 293 Shady Lane, Colorado Springs CO USA 80828-3392
Phone.Home: 719-349-2932
So much for THAT idea. Any comprehensive database of persons will be purged of all the elements that protect the ruling class, including their own information. That makes a worldwide "database of persons" automatically useless except as a weapon against the lower classes.
Remember, like guns, databases can be used AGAINST the ruling class. That determines how regulated, applicable and widespread they are.
And I think similarly and as well about what Clinton did to the Democrats. The DLC and the PNAC, among others, have brought true fanaticism into American politics like it was in the early Cold War.
But still, a cult of personality still requires a vast retinue of followers. I can't just slap blame upon a few politicans at the top of the Imperial organization. For every Darth Vader or Moff Tarkin, there must be thousands to tens of thousands of of administrators, directing hundreds of thousands to millions of Imperial troopers and other operatives. The entire system is leaning heavily Fascist. The lean is so pronounced and the mass doing the leaning is so large, that it is now inevitable. People are going to start disappearing in America soon. The secret death squads may only be 2 years away now. After all, America has been running death squads around the world for about 2 generations, so all she has to do is bring them home for a "domestic op".
It's a good era to be armed in America.
The United States is being converted into a Third World type of society. There will be masses of poor who will be willing to do almost anything they are told to do for just a few "nap" (i.e. the North American Peso) more. Atop this mass of desperation, there will be a few percent of people whose only real worry is being killed when their car breaks down anywhere inside the continual, low-level war zone known as "99% of America". In such an arrangement, there will be plenty of money to toss in an elitist direction like NASA. Why not? The Federal Budget is a fucking huge credit card, and the working poor are the ones footing more and more of the monthly bill.
America's rich has discovered globalism, hence they really don't need to satisfy the basic demands of America's workers any longer. We workers can now be killed off at the convenience of this ruling class. Iraq is a good start at draining America of excess manual laborers. I'm sure we can get tens of thousands more "useless eaters" killed off when Iran is invaded. North Korea will demand hundreds of thousands of American dead. When a horse or dog is no longer useful, you put it down, don't you? It's just a fucking animal.
We wouldn't have heard much in public about some song about the "12 Days of Christmas" if it had some line in it about "nine ladies fucking", now would we? Makes caroling in the neighborhood a wee bit awkward, eh.
Some people try to "stick it to you on shipping", because that "shipping and handling" charge is mostly their profit margin.
... itemized charges, of course!
I've purchased only 1 thing online, via eBay. They tacked on a mandatory $1 insurance charge, but then the package arrived, there was no insurance mark at all. I checked with the post office -- that package was not insured. This was because that $1 "insurance" charge was actually part of their profit margin.
Using the nickel-and-dime extra charges as support for profits is as old as the hills. And it can happen at any level of the economy. Heck, once the car companies started squeezing their Tier1, 2 and 3 suppliers, the supplier response was
That's because nobody likes you. Life's tough; get a helmet.
It's not a matter of the existence of being grateful, but the quantity of being grateful. You can then move onward to issues of quality ... say, over dinner.
I hate to burst your bubble, but people aren't waiting. People buy big-ticket items like cars and homes at the drop of a hat. The banks are promoting this foolishness, of course, since they want to "stay competitive". The housing bubble is so huge that it's difficult to talk about, like the elephant in the living room.
Roger that. I see people living in complete denial that by age 55 they will find themselves in the un- and under-employment zone. I see plenty of non-IT workers who have fallen under the gore-spattered wheels of this particular trend. But people don't want to see that trend. They don't want to acknowledge that by the time they "retire":
- the retirement age will have moved up significantly, so they really can't retire anyway
- their last 15 working years will be plagued with un- and under-employment
- retirement benefits will be cut, forcing them to continue working
A real economic hell is coming for the 'Boomers. And they won't be able to sell their overpriced homes to compensate for it. The more people refuse to see this, the worse it will be by the time it hits.Unless it is WW3 i don't see any chance of a draft being brought back. It was a disaster for Vietnam to say the least. Both parties know it would be political suicide as well UNLESS again we were invaded by some agressor.
If Vitenam was such a disaster, then why are we fighting Vietnam 2.0 (i.e. Iraq), here over 30 years later?
The answer is that America learned nothing from Vietnam 1.0. Hence I fully expect a draft. In the Vietnam draft, not one Congressional son was scooped up by it. I expect the same this time around.
Both the monied parties support the nanny-state. It only gets them more power, and the people are far too spineless, apathetic, or frankly supportive (due to their use of the nanny-state to line their own pockets -- as any corporate exec does) to put a stop to it.
... free to die by violence, hunger and cold.
Both classes (right- and left-wing) of leader are big spenders. Both classes believe in the existence of a huge or powerful government in order to enact their Fascist agenda.
Hence the grandfather posting is correct. Professors generally only ladle out the philosophy of this sort of government.
Fortunately for individual liberty, the probability of a "terrorist"-nuked American city is rising rapidly to 1.0. The Empire will then fall into a paroxysm of violence, and thus cease to matter in international affairs. The rest of the world will breathe a bit easier for the lack of overt Imperial force, and will watch sadly as people in America will be perfectly free
Shit, as far as that goes, I can't wait. I couldn't even vote for the candidate I wanted in the last Presidential election, so as far as I'm concerned, WAR HAS ALREADY BEEN DECLARED.