go read David Cay Johnston's new book "Perfectly Legal"
... and then correct me if I'm wrong. People with massive wealth take advantage of things like foundations to achieve tax avoidance that would appear criminal to us middle-class slobs. We just don't understand the Economy of the Billions.
The Gates family could just have written checks to people they wanted to give money to. But they chose to setup an expensive legal entity to do it. There are reasons for this related to the Economy of the Billions.
And finally, if they are going to give away billions, then why not spend millions to arrange a financial entity that saves them 100s of millions? But that's just tax avoidance, and I refuse to give them credit for altruism for that.
This is an almost pointless discussion, however. The rich are evolving larger schemes in larger numbers, in order to avoid paying taxes that you can't afford to avoid. It's part of the natural order during the fall of an Empire. I'm merely awaiting the time when the unwashed masses realize they own nothing while the very few elite own everything, and then some violent redistribution will take place. {shrug}
All good info, but -- and please correct me if I'm wrong -- people with enough money (to afford the setup and maintenance fees) like to use things like "foundations" to handle all their subsequent finances in order to avoid taxation. The donations are the price to be paid to have such a significant tax shelter (i.e. they have to give some money away in order for the foundation to justify existing as a charity).
With a foundation, Bill and Melinda can take in income or capital gains, and pay essentially no tax on them -- making a mockery of the tax system imposed on the middle class. Those two people may have charitable urges like most folks do, and a foundation certainly would be helpful if only for a logo and a "non-personal" checking account, but the untold hundreds of millions in tax breaks are the real reasons that they paid some accounting firm to setup their foundation.
If you're curious about how extreme tax breaks are getting, go read David Cay Johnston's new book "Perfectly Legal".
You know, I'm thinking of taking some vacation and touring sunny Iraq this autumn. I hear that Americans can travel freely across the country, which is only to be expected, since Bush & Company declared MISSION ACCOMPLISHED! {howls of laughter} Shit {wiping tears from eyes}, the American military doesn't even have a safe zone in fucking DOWNTOWN BAGHDAD, for crying out loud!
The point originally stated is still valid.
No, the original point was that the hand weapon is no match for a government assault. If that really was true, then America would have handily won Vietnam at least... and it didn't, since it LOST THE FUCKING WAR and ran from the country with its tail between its legs, chased by men with assault rifles (and probably no small number of pistols, wouldn't you know?). And the same is shaping up in Iraq: American forces have devolved to certain population zones, leaving the vastness of the country to remaining "insurgents" (actually, "freedom fighters for their own fucking country against a foreign invader") if they so choose to possess it.
Somebody forgot to tell you that America lost the Vietnam war. That, I could chalk up to simple reclusion on your part. But this insistence that the motivated guerilla has no chance against a "war machine" is simply false from many historical examples. Go read up your silly little ass about the Warsaw Ghetto. The German Army was invincible, right? It rolled over Europe, right? No one could stand against them, right? {more gales of laughter}
There is no way a pistol is going to take back the country from armored humvees, balckhawk helicopters and laser guided munitions. It simply will not happen.
Other munitions aside, it must be shocking the fuck out of you when another day goes by and Iraq still isn't "taken" by the American military from Iraqi "insurgents". The American military is heavily superior in armaments... yet they are still losing.
A motivated guerilla with hand weapons -- pistol, rifle, grenade, bazooka -- is a very dangerous weapon himself. This is still being proven across the world. It was proven in the Warsaw Ghetto... Vietnam... Somalia... and it is now being proven again in Iraq. And people like you still believe the Mythology of the War Machine.:^P
(Anecdote: My co-worker son is in the US Marines, and was just deployed in a Blackhawk group that serves a "hot-standby response". This means the guys sit in Blackhawks, for 6 to 8 hours at a crack, with the engines ready to fire up and the electronics already hot, so they can take off as soon as they are given a scramble order, along with the coordinates of the strike. All this, and the United States is STILL LOSING. Think about it.)
Or maybe the aliens that run our world on their supercomputer have not yet coded the rest of the universe.
Are you implying that the force is a glitch in the Matrix? That's it, I've had enough, I'm going to self substantiate RIGHT NOW and learn to like nutrient goop... ungg... urrh... $%($#(%()[NO CARRIER]
We are NOT moving towards a "cashless society". This is one of the pervasive myths promoted by too many yuppies living in an unsustainable bubble of credit-energy-time in many urban areas. Too many of them have become subordinate to an urban megasociety where financial transactions have become narrow and streamlined, which is just another way of saying "controlled".
Hey, Mr. Yuppie of the Year 2020, how about lending me ten bucks? Oh, that's right, we went "cashless" so we can't do that anymore. {BZZT!} You were wrong. People will not accept such a future.
Cashless transactions are being ADDED to our retinue of payments; they're not REPLACING them. People always want to move wealth in uncontrolled (and in fact untracked) ways. The only way to obey that desire with digicash is to open up such security holes that counterfeiting will destroy the system in months. The current credit system's restraints is a model of that. In other words, a digicash monopoly will never happen.
You have no idea how much of the American economy is black or grey, and hence is quite circumspect with digicash methods. A truely cashless society will destroy the drug trade; since drugs are highly desirable items, it only logically follows that digicash cannot prevail. After all, drugs are also quite illegal and subject to a lot of law enforcement action... yet the trade prospers nonetheless.
Furthermore, attempts to force a digicash monopoly will create a huge black market. Barter alone, right now, is strong enough to form the skeleton of that market.
Cash is still king and will remain so, despite how many millions of yuppies find it handy to get a cup of coffee at Starbucks with their plastic.
That's exactly the trap that companies fall into when they outsource. Some salesweenie who had golfed and drank with them, manages to get the stupid bastard executives to sign on the bottom line. Boom! Then the company starts paying through the nose for every exception that those goddamn drunks didn't think of when they were staggering around the golf course and bars. They end up nickel-and-dimed. My employing bank outsourced me to some scumbag "IT solutions" company, and decided to do the same thing... signing a FIVE YEAR contract, right off. What idiot signs on for such a long term for doing such a thing the first time? Now I laugh everytime some memo comes out of the bank *and* the solutions company, about either controlling events like server failures and missing metrics. Stupid bitches. It's even happening so early that I am salivating over the idea that the exec bozos who arranged all this aren't going to justify their bonuses. There aren't going to be any bonuses; the expenses just during the 1st 6 months are going to blow those away. Har har!
Spoken like a true tech elitist. "My skills are are real skills, but yours are crap." The sure fix to snobbery like yours is to hand you these "0-skill" jobs and let YOU handle them. Make sure you scan those network cables after you pull them, chump.
In fact, we may as well hand these tasks to you to do, since Sanjay Agrupta in Dehli can apparently do your oh-so-skilled job for at most 1/3rd your pay. Think of it as cross-training for the day when you won't be able to program anymore at any price.
It's alarming that you can walk down the street with such a perverse input filter. Do you even see this truck coming?
[increased options only create more cracks between them for more people to fall into] You are saying that, if we allow parents to choose which school their kids attend, it is less likely that kids will get a good education?
If parental choice was the overriding factor in the schooling of children, we'd have few problems. But such choice is one of the least significant terms in this equation. Many of our school problems revolve around parents not getting involved and making the choices that any sensible person would make. For instance, no school that brings in cops to point guns at or strip-search children should have most of its student body continuing to attend after a couple of days after said incident. What parent lets their kids be so abused? Answer: Many do, since they just don't care. Either that, or they are far too dumb to understand their kids have been institutionalized... effectively put into a prison.
If parents executed their informed choices (remember, being informed is one of those choices) then most schools with signficant problems would simply shut down due to a lack of interest... or they would be physically burned down by natural parental activist if the nation-state tries to bring violence into the obedience equation. But this essentially never happens. Why? Parents on average don't care enough about their own fucking kids to ensure they are properly treated by our educational systems.
Now, using this information as a background, let's return to our previous statements. Since parents and educational systems on average just don't care about the children, then more options (especially of such disconnection from each other) will produce all kinds of options for kids to excuse themselves from the entire educational apparatus. If you need concrete examples to make this perfectly obvious, let's look at little Michael "Mikey" Williams, male, age 11, inner-city Black. Before, the educational system was just his public grade school. If he missed class, the enforcement apparatus was simple: teachers would note his absences, report these to administrators, and eventually a truant officer would act against Mr. and Ms. Williams. What happens after the Age of Options? Well, little Mikey still skips school... but which school? His overworked mother did manage to file most of the proper forms with the old public grade school, but since they are incomplete, no one investigating can be sure what Mikey's status is. (Still not understanding me yet?) How about then Mikey is shuffled to a public charter school. Like too many such schools, administration is even worse than the actual public mainstream school. So, Mikey pulls a con on his charter-school administrator and tells him that his mother has now chosen home schooling, complete with a 1-page form that Mikey learned to forge off the Internet.
The whole point of my argument is that this type of competition can and will produce huge gaps that people will simply fall through and escape the educational apparatus almost entirely. At least these gaps will provide for more events of unexcused absence. Remember, this kind of competition is not occuring in an environment of attraction force for the people directly involved (children). Instead, children are generally repulsed from the educational system and in general must be forced into it. Once you split these forces, you are trying to make something happen on the points of a pitchfork than with a broadsword. There are simply more opportunities to escape.
I'm still mystified why this kind of thing isn't glaringly obvious to the experienced person. I figured it out in 2 seconds.
Vouchers would extend this freedom of school choice to even the poorest folks. If you are a true progressive, you should want this.
People who propose Darwinian solutions such as this one, believe themselves to be out of harm's way.
As I like to tell people: What, is the upper class going to take away my home, give me a shit car to drive, and threaten me with constant unemployement? {snort} It's already happened, Ace. I'm already part of the at-risk population. I expect to fight and die in America's coming civil war. I advocate Darwinian Solutions since we need to clear the air about many things. We need to get America's great fascist undercurrent out into the open where the real violence can take place. We need to show that America is no longer a nation or a culture and that it needs to Balkanize, where the smaller sovereign states have a chance to regain the form of Democratic Republics once again.
The modern school system is just another resultant symptom of a very sick society. It needs to burn out or fade away like all the rest of the bullshit. We need to burn this place down to the foundations and start over in the ruins. I don't expect to survive; rifle bullets don't discriminate. But after all the death, the next generations will know justice and prosperity.
You are so uneducated about the US military command and control that I hardly know where to begin with your asinine postings that attempt to excuse GWB's criminal failure to defend the US.
Each President is a Commander in Chief (CINC) of all the US military forces, from the first second after he takes his oath of office. This isn't something with any uncertainty attached to it. This is a well-defined role that has surrounded by redundant and reliable communications links for decades. Ever heard of the "football"? It's the comm package that must always be nearby the President in case has to issue launch or cancel orders for nuclear military forces. It was at Bush's inauguration, and it has never been very far from him since.
Just by being an educated US citizen, GWB knew that the WTC was attacked by Islamic extremists in 1993. He knew also that Bin Laden was on active assault status for years, at least taking credit for attacks in 1998. GWB must have been briefed before and after the inauguration about further details on all such threats. GWB also was well briefed on the possible use of jetliners to effectively "bomb" targets in the US. Just on these irrefutable facts alone, GWB cannot be excused for his lack of urgency on the morning of 911. Planes were not scrambled into affected airspaces for a long time.
A President has the authority and the means to order any military action by using the always accompanying command and control links. These were with Bush on the morning of 911. You show outrageous ignorance or shameful complacency when you say "it was only seven minutes", but 7 minutes is a long time in military command. Bush could have had planes scambled on his own authority over Washington DC, NYC and Boston within 3 minutes, probably, since hundreds of planes are always waiting on the flightlines at bases around the US for just this purpose. After all, he knew everything I said above. He knew it was possible an attack was taking place. And as CINC, it was his duty to understand and respond as quickly as possible. A "possible" attack must be treated like a "real" attack. But he didn't respond. He dawdled. He effectively sat on his hands. He failed to do his duty. Whether or not it was by incompetence or deceit, his lack of action was criminal.
These are the facts. The US Congress should have immediately impeached him on those facts alone. But, the American people isn't willing to deal with these issues. People want to pretend something entirely farcical is actually true. But don't try to pass off your ignorance or complacency as factual reality. On Slashdot, this is not the utterly controlled enviroment of Fox News -- we can call your bullshit with facts.
Abandoned [...]? What the hell are you talking about here?
If you'd bother to think about it, there will always be those who fall through the cracks of rule systems. If you are old enough to know, experience tells you that increased options only create more cracks between them for more people to fall into (potentially). To identify one prevailing line of thought, the public school system will care less about fallen person A since "the voucher system will catch them". They will hardly followup to see if that was true. The voucher system will look at fallen person A similarly; "the public school system will catch them". The point of my exposition here is that NO SYSTEM will end up catching these people. In effect, increased options (public mainstream, public charter, private, voucher, etc.) will primarily allow the more skilled students to perform better, while letting the poorer students more excuses to perform poorly. Ah, well.
[Then bad things will happen, including various deaths.]
Are you on drugs, or just trolling?
No, there's at least a 3rd answer, that being I thought things through of social consequence and made my conclusions. Tossing people out of civilized systems increases their risks of death. Those abandoned by such systems turn themselves to things like gangs, drugs, and all the trappings of "nigger culture". Need I propose to you that such things increase the risk of death?
[I'll be voting for Nader] Yeah, well, good luck with that.
Good luck to us all, I think. Unlike millions of other voters, I'm voting for a good choice, not one who is "the lesser of two evils". Lesser evil is still pretty damned evil, and as I said before, we are now paying for our generations of making such bad choices.
[America will have to survive all the theocratic fascism it can stomach.] W has not been perfect, but you are on drugs again here.
GWB is a theocratic fascist, unless you think that Nixon was a pretty good President. Any President who wipes his ass with the US Constitution is not just "not perfect", but exactly destructive to the US nation. It's a pretty sad day for a Democratic Republic to have people classified as being "on drugs" for being concerned about things like the writ of habeas corpus.
Of course, there's little that GWB has done, atrocity-wise, that hasn't received the blessings of many Americans and the majority of the US Congress. Kerry and his ilk may be flapping their lips about how GWB "lied" to them, but they are educated men (arguably, more than myself) who should well have known they were being defrauded. I knew it, easily; therefore, they should have. The weapons inspectors were reporting from Iraq all the things that the war hawks and chicken hawks didn't want to hear (namely, that they had no justification for invading Iraq). So the time-honored technique of the Big Lie was used, and here we are now with shooting wars overseas and a cultural war going on at home.
Yeah, GWB was a great choice in 2000 {sarcasm}. Nader would have been a much better choice than either of the two boobs who were running in the major parties. But most of America doesn't want sensibility. They want an Empire. Too bad that Empires always die in paroxysms of violence, followed by intense Human suffering in a pervasive cultural mediocrity.
Can't anyone ever say "a Dem would have been better" instead of things like "W kills babies for breakfast"?
Since a President primarily has impact upon foreign relations and domestic economy, Clinton scored some serious negative marks for starting off the new American Depression (which GWB inherited and then expanded). Corporations were cooking their books (i.e. fraud) routinely by the mid 1990s, and Clinton's SEC blessed it all. The Democrats have given the American people lousy executive choices for a long time. Gore was a lousy choice, and Kerry is even worse. The Anybody But Bush (ABB) philosophy
I hope that (like me) you're saving your money. By the time you reach your early 50s, you'll effectively be unemployable, as employers look at you and laugh (bad health/insurance risk; too untrainable/independent; general nonconformist). And if you're in your 30s now, there won't be a Social Security system worth mentioning by the time you need it in your mid 60s, hence you have to save even more money to cope. And there's the significant risk of a serious manual-labor (primarily, spinal) injury in your 50s since that's all the work people will condescend to let you do. You have to realistically plan for all of this NOW.
I'm 37, and I've already had so-called friends tell me things like "don't blame us because you didn't get a degree". (I've "downsized" my friends over this kind of thing. Really, it was horrible to find my own "friends" practicing class warfare against me.) It's going to get a lot more vicious for people like us before it can ever get better. We can only depend on ourselves. Save your wealth, control your expenses, and plan for an era of enforced poverty. With good judgment, you can avoid being thrown out like garbage and make a relatively good life for yourself.
You've missed a particularly critical element in the school-failure equation: administrators. I say get rid of those parasites and dump their workloads onto the teachers a la committee structures. The teachers will get full-year employment, at substantial increases in pay for taking over added work. (Example: Dump a $90K administrator, and give his work to a 3 teacher committee for $15K each. Savings: $45K.) Furthermore, they'll probably get rid of all the layers of nonsense that administrators add upon teachers just to justify their existence. Teachers should run their schools. Period.
It won't be as bad as you imply, but there will be enough students "abandoned" by the system for the rest of us to notice. Then bad things will happen, including various deaths. It's the price to pay for letting the American education system sink into mediocrity.
It's similar to what's probably going to happen in the US Presidential election this November. I'll be voting for Nader, but it's likely over 50 million people will vote for that lying, elitist murderer known as George W. Bush. (A few million less than that, will probably vote for another elitist piece of shit known as John Kerry.) Chances are, Bush will win, and America will have to survive all the theocratic fascism it can stomach. It's the natural consequence of generations of people making terrible decisions. {shrug} When we collectively make or allow bad decisions to form society's main vectors, we deserve all the bad things that happen after that. {double shrug}
Yes, if the parents read, and in fact keep books in the house, it's obviously the case that the children will be readers themselves. I've noticed a correlation in this regard between dumbass parents and dumbass kids. Of course, a parent who doesn't read and regularly zones in front of the TV isn't likely to understand that they are condemning their kids to the same fate -- a life of lost potential and fatal regret.
American history is deliberately taught in a way that discourages critical thought, heroizes the government, and suppresses historical dissent
The antidote to this is Howard Zinn's "People's History of the United States". Zinn's PHOTUS should be required reading in all American junior high schools. In contrast, I think a teacher would probably be fired (or strung up) for attempting to use it. America's dumbass parents don't want to hear about how American strikers were machine-gunned in the 1930s. Better for them to continue thinking happy thoughts about their beloved Land of the Free. {snort}
You raised many fine points, but I only have the time for one.
Calculus is a more natural way of calculating things in the real world. Don't look at "precalc" as being hard. Instead, if you have an acceptable grasp of algebra and a competent teacher, then a journey into "the calculus" can be a distinct opportunity for you. Do some research into some alternative calculus books, and you can open an important mental door for yourself.
I recall you said 70-hour weeks. That's not "doing fine". That's a new form of "slavery", since they steal your life.
[I] am choosing a change of career
Yeah, like I said, you're hiding in college. No one chooses a "change in career" unless it's under duress or distress of some kind. You sound just like those fucking corporate execs sound when they either resign in disgrace or run away from a sinking-ship of a company, when they say they're leaving to "pursue other interests".
Call me a wanker
I really don't have to, as your reading public can sniff out your bullshit readily enough.
I'm one who's working hard so he doesn't have to work at McDonald's. Ever.
Why, is your last name Bush or Kennedy? Because that's the only way your next profession won't be downsized, rightsized, underbid, offshored, nearshored or outsourced. Hard work doesn't count for anything anymore. You can't possibly compete with a man making at most 1/3rd of your wage.
Adapt or go extinct.
It's more like adapt and society goes extinct, but that's for you to figure out once all the riots and fires hit.
There's no shortage of this type of boyfriend. There are millions of them across America, each wearing a "wife-beater" t-shirt, sporting a goatee and a nearly-bald haircut, clutching the latest brand of 40oz liquor, and emblazoned with every tattoo known to man. But you already knew that; you've been heavily competing for these worthless sacks of shit along with every other Gen-X woman.
The wife-beater type cares intensely about where you are. In his drugs-and-alcohol addled, self-centered universe, you could be cheating on him, and he can't stand that.
You n00b. Tech support has sucked royally for almost a decade. The American consumer not only got used to it, but he is ready for even less quality in his support. The race to the bottom is still going strong, with only minor course corrections as companies race down that hill of quality and cost.
If tech support's ever going to recover, it's going to take at least 4 more years to do it. But this has to coincide with the recovery period after the inevitable Great American Housing Crash... and the longer that takes, the longer product and service quality will take to rise. Quality service for Americans can only come from a quality culture like America... and the cost of living has to crash to reflect the new cheap levels of compensation that are the only thing that companies will offer.
... for what, another 2-4 years in school, landing you perhaps $30K in debt or lost wealth, and all for another 6-8 years of employment (at most) before you need to retrain out of the outsourced / nearshored / offshored field you chose?
Yeah, brilliant fuckin' choice, Ace. Why not be honest with us? People in your position go to school to hide out during bad economic times. That's what you're really doing. And then there's the problem of America's deepening Depression... so you'd have to go to school for a looooong time to weather this one. The housing bubble alone will take 8 more years before sensible pricing will return (if allowed). Are you going for a Triple Doctorate for the 12 more years that will be required for the Depression to run its course?
I've noticed that driving and talking to a passenger, is somewhat the equivalent. I've made some of my worst traffic errors in those situations. Reason? I'm distracted by the passenger. Conversation takes up brainspace and occupies notice.
If you think a nail clipper is a problem onboard an aircraft now, just wait until that era, when pins and pens will have to be confiscated in case they are used as a puncturing weapon.
Slashdot Mirror
Your ire is fueled by disinformation. I repeat:
... and then correct me if I'm wrong. People with massive wealth take advantage of things like foundations to achieve tax avoidance that would appear criminal to us middle-class slobs. We just don't understand the Economy of the Billions.
go read David Cay Johnston's new book "Perfectly Legal"
The Gates family could just have written checks to people they wanted to give money to. But they chose to setup an expensive legal entity to do it. There are reasons for this related to the Economy of the Billions.
And finally, if they are going to give away billions, then why not spend millions to arrange a financial entity that saves them 100s of millions? But that's just tax avoidance, and I refuse to give them credit for altruism for that.
This is an almost pointless discussion, however. The rich are evolving larger schemes in larger numbers, in order to avoid paying taxes that you can't afford to avoid. It's part of the natural order during the fall of an Empire. I'm merely awaiting the time when the unwashed masses realize they own nothing while the very few elite own everything, and then some violent redistribution will take place. {shrug}
All good info, but -- and please correct me if I'm wrong -- people with enough money (to afford the setup and maintenance fees) like to use things like "foundations" to handle all their subsequent finances in order to avoid taxation. The donations are the price to be paid to have such a significant tax shelter (i.e. they have to give some money away in order for the foundation to justify existing as a charity).
With a foundation, Bill and Melinda can take in income or capital gains, and pay essentially no tax on them -- making a mockery of the tax system imposed on the middle class. Those two people may have charitable urges like most folks do, and a foundation certainly would be helpful if only for a logo and a "non-personal" checking account, but the untold hundreds of millions in tax breaks are the real reasons that they paid some accounting firm to setup their foundation.
If you're curious about how extreme tax breaks are getting, go read David Cay Johnston's new book "Perfectly Legal".
They aren't losing, but no matter.
... and it didn't, since it LOST THE FUCKING WAR and ran from the country with its tail between its legs, chased by men with assault rifles (and probably no small number of pistols, wouldn't you know?). And the same is shaping up in Iraq: American forces have devolved to certain population zones, leaving the vastness of the country to remaining "insurgents" (actually, "freedom fighters for their own fucking country against a foreign invader") if they so choose to possess it.
You know, I'm thinking of taking some vacation and touring sunny Iraq this autumn. I hear that Americans can travel freely across the country, which is only to be expected, since Bush & Company declared MISSION ACCOMPLISHED! {howls of laughter} Shit {wiping tears from eyes}, the American military doesn't even have a safe zone in fucking DOWNTOWN BAGHDAD, for crying out loud!
The point originally stated is still valid.
No, the original point was that the hand weapon is no match for a government assault. If that really was true, then America would have handily won Vietnam at least
Somebody forgot to tell you that America lost the Vietnam war. That, I could chalk up to simple reclusion on your part. But this insistence that the motivated guerilla has no chance against a "war machine" is simply false from many historical examples. Go read up your silly little ass about the Warsaw Ghetto. The German Army was invincible, right? It rolled over Europe, right? No one could stand against them, right? {more gales of laughter}
There is no way a pistol is going to take back the country from armored humvees, balckhawk helicopters and laser guided munitions. It simply will not happen.
... yet they are still losing.
... Vietnam ... Somalia ... and it is now being proven again in Iraq. And people like you still believe the Mythology of the War Machine. :^P
Other munitions aside, it must be shocking the fuck out of you when another day goes by and Iraq still isn't "taken" by the American military from Iraqi "insurgents". The American military is heavily superior in armaments
A motivated guerilla with hand weapons -- pistol, rifle, grenade, bazooka -- is a very dangerous weapon himself. This is still being proven across the world. It was proven in the Warsaw Ghetto
(Anecdote: My co-worker son is in the US Marines, and was just deployed in a Blackhawk group that serves a "hot-standby response". This means the guys sit in Blackhawks, for 6 to 8 hours at a crack, with the engines ready to fire up and the electronics already hot, so they can take off as soon as they are given a scramble order, along with the coordinates of the strike. All this, and the United States is STILL LOSING. Think about it.)
Or maybe the aliens that run our world on their supercomputer have not yet coded the rest of the universe.
... ungg ... urrh ... $%($#(%()[NO CARRIER]
Are you implying that the force is a glitch in the Matrix? That's it, I've had enough, I'm going to self substantiate RIGHT NOW and learn to like nutrient goop
We are NOT moving towards a "cashless society". This is one of the pervasive myths promoted by too many yuppies living in an unsustainable bubble of credit-energy-time in many urban areas. Too many of them have become subordinate to an urban megasociety where financial transactions have become narrow and streamlined, which is just another way of saying "controlled".
... yet the trade prospers nonetheless.
Hey, Mr. Yuppie of the Year 2020, how about lending me ten bucks? Oh, that's right, we went "cashless" so we can't do that anymore. {BZZT!} You were wrong. People will not accept such a future.
Cashless transactions are being ADDED to our retinue of payments; they're not REPLACING them. People always want to move wealth in uncontrolled (and in fact untracked) ways. The only way to obey that desire with digicash is to open up such security holes that counterfeiting will destroy the system in months. The current credit system's restraints is a model of that. In other words, a digicash monopoly will never happen.
You have no idea how much of the American economy is black or grey, and hence is quite circumspect with digicash methods. A truely cashless society will destroy the drug trade; since drugs are highly desirable items, it only logically follows that digicash cannot prevail. After all, drugs are also quite illegal and subject to a lot of law enforcement action
Furthermore, attempts to force a digicash monopoly will create a huge black market. Barter alone, right now, is strong enough to form the skeleton of that market.
Cash is still king and will remain so, despite how many millions of yuppies find it handy to get a cup of coffee at Starbucks with their plastic.
That's exactly the trap that companies fall into when they outsource. Some salesweenie who had golfed and drank with them, manages to get the stupid bastard executives to sign on the bottom line. Boom! Then the company starts paying through the nose for every exception that those goddamn drunks didn't think of when they were staggering around the golf course and bars. They end up nickel-and-dimed. My employing bank outsourced me to some scumbag "IT solutions" company, and decided to do the same thing ... signing a FIVE YEAR contract, right off. What idiot signs on for such a long term for doing such a thing the first time? Now I laugh everytime some memo comes out of the bank *and* the solutions company, about either controlling events like server failures and missing metrics. Stupid bitches. It's even happening so early that I am salivating over the idea that the exec bozos who arranged all this aren't going to justify their bonuses. There aren't going to be any bonuses; the expenses just during the 1st 6 months are going to blow those away. Har har!
Spoken like a true tech elitist. "My skills are are real skills, but yours are crap." The sure fix to snobbery like yours is to hand you these "0-skill" jobs and let YOU handle them. Make sure you scan those network cables after you pull them, chump.
In fact, we may as well hand these tasks to you to do, since Sanjay Agrupta in Dehli can apparently do your oh-so-skilled job for at most 1/3rd your pay. Think of it as cross-training for the day when you won't be able to program anymore at any price.
It's alarming that you can walk down the street with such a perverse input filter. Do you even see this truck coming?
... effectively put into a prison.
... or they would be physically burned down by natural parental activist if the nation-state tries to bring violence into the obedience equation. But this essentially never happens. Why? Parents on average don't care enough about their own fucking kids to ensure they are properly treated by our educational systems.
... but which school? His overworked mother did manage to file most of the proper forms with the old public grade school, but since they are incomplete, no one investigating can be sure what Mikey's status is. (Still not understanding me yet?) How about then Mikey is shuffled to a public charter school. Like too many such schools, administration is even worse than the actual public mainstream school. So, Mikey pulls a con on his charter-school administrator and tells him that his mother has now chosen home schooling, complete with a 1-page form that Mikey learned to forge off the Internet.
[increased options only create more cracks between them for more people to fall into] You are saying that, if we allow parents to choose which school their kids attend, it is less likely that kids will get a good education?
If parental choice was the overriding factor in the schooling of children, we'd have few problems. But such choice is one of the least significant terms in this equation. Many of our school problems revolve around parents not getting involved and making the choices that any sensible person would make. For instance, no school that brings in cops to point guns at or strip-search children should have most of its student body continuing to attend after a couple of days after said incident. What parent lets their kids be so abused? Answer: Many do, since they just don't care. Either that, or they are far too dumb to understand their kids have been institutionalized
If parents executed their informed choices (remember, being informed is one of those choices) then most schools with signficant problems would simply shut down due to a lack of interest
Now, using this information as a background, let's return to our previous statements. Since parents and educational systems on average just don't care about the children, then more options (especially of such disconnection from each other) will produce all kinds of options for kids to excuse themselves from the entire educational apparatus. If you need concrete examples to make this perfectly obvious, let's look at little Michael "Mikey" Williams, male, age 11, inner-city Black. Before, the educational system was just his public grade school. If he missed class, the enforcement apparatus was simple: teachers would note his absences, report these to administrators, and eventually a truant officer would act against Mr. and Ms. Williams. What happens after the Age of Options? Well, little Mikey still skips school
The whole point of my argument is that this type of competition can and will produce huge gaps that people will simply fall through and escape the educational apparatus almost entirely. At least these gaps will provide for more events of unexcused absence. Remember, this kind of competition is not occuring in an environment of attraction force for the people directly involved (children). Instead, children are generally repulsed from the educational system and in general must be forced into it. Once you split these forces, you are trying to make something happen on the points of a pitchfork than with a broadsword. There are simply more opportunities to escape.
I'm still mystified why this kind of thing isn't glaringly obvious to the experienced person. I figured it out in 2 seconds.
Vouchers would extend this freedom of school choice to even the poorest folks. If you are a true progressive, you should want this.
Oh, y
People who propose Darwinian solutions such as this one, believe themselves to be out of harm's way.
As I like to tell people: What, is the upper class going to take away my home, give me a shit car to drive, and threaten me with constant unemployement? {snort} It's already happened, Ace. I'm already part of the at-risk population. I expect to fight and die in America's coming civil war. I advocate Darwinian Solutions since we need to clear the air about many things. We need to get America's great fascist undercurrent out into the open where the real violence can take place. We need to show that America is no longer a nation or a culture and that it needs to Balkanize, where the smaller sovereign states have a chance to regain the form of Democratic Republics once again.
The modern school system is just another resultant symptom of a very sick society. It needs to burn out or fade away like all the rest of the bullshit. We need to burn this place down to the foundations and start over in the ruins. I don't expect to survive; rifle bullets don't discriminate. But after all the death, the next generations will know justice and prosperity.
You are so uneducated about the US military command and control that I hardly know where to begin with your asinine postings that attempt to excuse GWB's criminal failure to defend the US.
Each President is a Commander in Chief (CINC) of all the US military forces, from the first second after he takes his oath of office. This isn't something with any uncertainty attached to it. This is a well-defined role that has surrounded by redundant and reliable communications links for decades. Ever heard of the "football"? It's the comm package that must always be nearby the President in case has to issue launch or cancel orders for nuclear military forces. It was at Bush's inauguration, and it has never been very far from him since.
Just by being an educated US citizen, GWB knew that the WTC was attacked by Islamic extremists in 1993. He knew also that Bin Laden was on active assault status for years, at least taking credit for attacks in 1998. GWB must have been briefed before and after the inauguration about further details on all such threats. GWB also was well briefed on the possible use of jetliners to effectively "bomb" targets in the US. Just on these irrefutable facts alone, GWB cannot be excused for his lack of urgency on the morning of 911. Planes were not scrambled into affected airspaces for a long time.
A President has the authority and the means to order any military action by using the always accompanying command and control links. These were with Bush on the morning of 911. You show outrageous ignorance or shameful complacency when you say "it was only seven minutes", but 7 minutes is a long time in military command. Bush could have had planes scambled on his own authority over Washington DC, NYC and Boston within 3 minutes, probably, since hundreds of planes are always waiting on the flightlines at bases around the US for just this purpose. After all, he knew everything I said above. He knew it was possible an attack was taking place. And as CINC, it was his duty to understand and respond as quickly as possible. A "possible" attack must be treated like a "real" attack. But he didn't respond. He dawdled. He effectively sat on his hands. He failed to do his duty. Whether or not it was by incompetence or deceit, his lack of action was criminal.
These are the facts. The US Congress should have immediately impeached him on those facts alone. But, the American people isn't willing to deal with these issues. People want to pretend something entirely farcical is actually true. But don't try to pass off your ignorance or complacency as factual reality. On Slashdot, this is not the utterly controlled enviroment of Fox News -- we can call your bullshit with facts.
Abandoned [...]? What the hell are you talking about here?
If you'd bother to think about it, there will always be those who fall through the cracks of rule systems. If you are old enough to know, experience tells you that increased options only create more cracks between them for more people to fall into (potentially). To identify one prevailing line of thought, the public school system will care less about fallen person A since "the voucher system will catch them". They will hardly followup to see if that was true. The voucher system will look at fallen person A similarly; "the public school system will catch them". The point of my exposition here is that NO SYSTEM will end up catching these people. In effect, increased options (public mainstream, public charter, private, voucher, etc.) will primarily allow the more skilled students to perform better, while letting the poorer students more excuses to perform poorly. Ah, well.
[Then bad things will happen, including various deaths.] Are you on drugs, or just trolling?
No, there's at least a 3rd answer, that being I thought things through of social consequence and made my conclusions. Tossing people out of civilized systems increases their risks of death. Those abandoned by such systems turn themselves to things like gangs, drugs, and all the trappings of "nigger culture". Need I propose to you that such things increase the risk of death?
[I'll be voting for Nader] Yeah, well, good luck with that.
Good luck to us all, I think. Unlike millions of other voters, I'm voting for a good choice, not one who is "the lesser of two evils". Lesser evil is still pretty damned evil, and as I said before, we are now paying for our generations of making such bad choices.
[America will have to survive all the theocratic fascism it can stomach.] W has not been perfect, but you are on drugs again here.
GWB is a theocratic fascist, unless you think that Nixon was a pretty good President. Any President who wipes his ass with the US Constitution is not just "not perfect", but exactly destructive to the US nation. It's a pretty sad day for a Democratic Republic to have people classified as being "on drugs" for being concerned about things like the writ of habeas corpus.
Of course, there's little that GWB has done, atrocity-wise, that hasn't received the blessings of many Americans and the majority of the US Congress. Kerry and his ilk may be flapping their lips about how GWB "lied" to them, but they are educated men (arguably, more than myself) who should well have known they were being defrauded. I knew it, easily; therefore, they should have. The weapons inspectors were reporting from Iraq all the things that the war hawks and chicken hawks didn't want to hear (namely, that they had no justification for invading Iraq). So the time-honored technique of the Big Lie was used, and here we are now with shooting wars overseas and a cultural war going on at home.
Yeah, GWB was a great choice in 2000 {sarcasm}. Nader would have been a much better choice than either of the two boobs who were running in the major parties. But most of America doesn't want sensibility. They want an Empire. Too bad that Empires always die in paroxysms of violence, followed by intense Human suffering in a pervasive cultural mediocrity.
Can't anyone ever say "a Dem would have been better" instead of things like "W kills babies for breakfast"?
Since a President primarily has impact upon foreign relations and domestic economy, Clinton scored some serious negative marks for starting off the new American Depression (which GWB inherited and then expanded). Corporations were cooking their books (i.e. fraud) routinely by the mid 1990s, and Clinton's SEC blessed it all. The Democrats have given the American people lousy executive choices for a long time. Gore was a lousy choice, and Kerry is even worse. The Anybody But Bush (ABB) philosophy
I hope that (like me) you're saving your money. By the time you reach your early 50s, you'll effectively be unemployable, as employers look at you and laugh (bad health/insurance risk; too untrainable/independent; general nonconformist). And if you're in your 30s now, there won't be a Social Security system worth mentioning by the time you need it in your mid 60s, hence you have to save even more money to cope. And there's the significant risk of a serious manual-labor (primarily, spinal) injury in your 50s since that's all the work people will condescend to let you do. You have to realistically plan for all of this NOW.
I'm 37, and I've already had so-called friends tell me things like "don't blame us because you didn't get a degree". (I've "downsized" my friends over this kind of thing. Really, it was horrible to find my own "friends" practicing class warfare against me.) It's going to get a lot more vicious for people like us before it can ever get better. We can only depend on ourselves. Save your wealth, control your expenses, and plan for an era of enforced poverty. With good judgment, you can avoid being thrown out like garbage and make a relatively good life for yourself.
You've missed a particularly critical element in the school-failure equation: administrators. I say get rid of those parasites and dump their workloads onto the teachers a la committee structures. The teachers will get full-year employment, at substantial increases in pay for taking over added work. (Example: Dump a $90K administrator, and give his work to a 3 teacher committee for $15K each. Savings: $45K.) Furthermore, they'll probably get rid of all the layers of nonsense that administrators add upon teachers just to justify their existence. Teachers should run their schools. Period.
Their argument? "Well, he came to school, so you can't fail him."
Judge: Bailiff, after hearing the plaintiff's argument, please go over there and kick him right in the ass.
{boot!}
{ouch!}
Judge: Next case!
It won't be as bad as you imply, but there will be enough students "abandoned" by the system for the rest of us to notice. Then bad things will happen, including various deaths. It's the price to pay for letting the American education system sink into mediocrity.
It's similar to what's probably going to happen in the US Presidential election this November. I'll be voting for Nader, but it's likely over 50 million people will vote for that lying, elitist murderer known as George W. Bush. (A few million less than that, will probably vote for another elitist piece of shit known as John Kerry.) Chances are, Bush will win, and America will have to survive all the theocratic fascism it can stomach. It's the natural consequence of generations of people making terrible decisions. {shrug} When we collectively make or allow bad decisions to form society's main vectors, we deserve all the bad things that happen after that. {double shrug}
Yes, if the parents read, and in fact keep books in the house, it's obviously the case that the children will be readers themselves. I've noticed a correlation in this regard between dumbass parents and dumbass kids. Of course, a parent who doesn't read and regularly zones in front of the TV isn't likely to understand that they are condemning their kids to the same fate -- a life of lost potential and fatal regret.
American history is deliberately taught in a way that discourages critical thought, heroizes the government, and suppresses historical dissent
The antidote to this is Howard Zinn's "People's History of the United States". Zinn's PHOTUS should be required reading in all American junior high schools. In contrast, I think a teacher would probably be fired (or strung up) for attempting to use it. America's dumbass parents don't want to hear about how American strikers were machine-gunned in the 1930s. Better for them to continue thinking happy thoughts about their beloved Land of the Free. {snort}
You raised many fine points, but I only have the time for one.
Calculus is a more natural way of calculating things in the real world. Don't look at "precalc" as being hard. Instead, if you have an acceptable grasp of algebra and a competent teacher, then a journey into "the calculus" can be a distinct opportunity for you. Do some research into some alternative calculus books, and you can open an important mental door for yourself.
Actually, I was doing fine as it was
I recall you said 70-hour weeks. That's not "doing fine". That's a new form of "slavery", since they steal your life.
[I] am choosing a change of career
Yeah, like I said, you're hiding in college. No one chooses a "change in career" unless it's under duress or distress of some kind. You sound just like those fucking corporate execs sound when they either resign in disgrace or run away from a sinking-ship of a company, when they say they're leaving to "pursue other interests".
Call me a wanker
I really don't have to, as your reading public can sniff out your bullshit readily enough.
I'm one who's working hard so he doesn't have to work at McDonald's. Ever.
Why, is your last name Bush or Kennedy? Because that's the only way your next profession won't be downsized, rightsized, underbid, offshored, nearshored or outsourced. Hard work doesn't count for anything anymore. You can't possibly compete with a man making at most 1/3rd of your wage.
Adapt or go extinct.
It's more like adapt and society goes extinct, but that's for you to figure out once all the riots and fires hit.
There's no shortage of this type of boyfriend. There are millions of them across America, each wearing a "wife-beater" t-shirt, sporting a goatee and a nearly-bald haircut, clutching the latest brand of 40oz liquor, and emblazoned with every tattoo known to man. But you already knew that; you've been heavily competing for these worthless sacks of shit along with every other Gen-X woman.
The wife-beater type cares intensely about where you are. In his drugs-and-alcohol addled, self-centered universe, you could be cheating on him, and he can't stand that.
You n00b. Tech support has sucked royally for almost a decade. The American consumer not only got used to it, but he is ready for even less quality in his support. The race to the bottom is still going strong, with only minor course corrections as companies race down that hill of quality and cost.
... and the longer that takes, the longer product and service quality will take to rise. Quality service for Americans can only come from a quality culture like America ... and the cost of living has to crash to reflect the new cheap levels of compensation that are the only thing that companies will offer.
If tech support's ever going to recover, it's going to take at least 4 more years to do it. But this has to coincide with the recovery period after the inevitable Great American Housing Crash
I'm back in school and quit my bitching
... for what, another 2-4 years in school, landing you perhaps $30K in debt or lost wealth, and all for another 6-8 years of employment (at most) before you need to retrain out of the outsourced / nearshored / offshored field you chose?
... so you'd have to go to school for a looooong time to weather this one. The housing bubble alone will take 8 more years before sensible pricing will return (if allowed). Are you going for a Triple Doctorate for the 12 more years that will be required for the Depression to run its course?
Yeah, brilliant fuckin' choice, Ace. Why not be honest with us? People in your position go to school to hide out during bad economic times. That's what you're really doing. And then there's the problem of America's deepening Depression
What a fucking wanker you are.
I've noticed that driving and talking to a passenger, is somewhat the equivalent. I've made some of my worst traffic errors in those situations. Reason? I'm distracted by the passenger. Conversation takes up brainspace and occupies notice.
If you think a nail clipper is a problem onboard an aircraft now, just wait until that era, when pins and pens will have to be confiscated in case they are used as a puncturing weapon.