Too much Freedom itself isn't the problem, it's a sort of truism though meant to reflect what can be a serious problem.
Your freedom to swing your fist ends at my face, so to speak. But without govenrment or an apparatus to "defend" freedoms there's absolutely nothing stopping you from doing it anyway. Therefore if the other person decides their fist should be lodged firmly in my gut we can say the other person has "too much freedom" because they are so free from the practical consequences (punishment) for their actions that they now use their freedom to act to remove my freedom to act.
The answer isn't to make people "un free" the answer is to make people more accountable for their actions and the consequences thereof. Make power accountable and things fall nicely into place. Put a cop between me and Fisty McSwinger and I we both might be better off. The Cop prevents him from hitting me and as a result we both go off and do our own thing peacably.
In an interconnected, interdependent world those with power over others should by definition be less free than those without. Their power should be held accountable to the people. Our entire system of government is based on this idea. What the founders just never imagined was how private business could slowly evolve into today's government-challenging international behemoths. Nobody imagined a private chartered corporation could render entire swathes of nation states impotent to its whims and all done through the seductive powers of commerce.
The real issue isn't so much "too much freedom" or "too little freedom" it's "too little accountability to the people in institutions of power" and that includes governments as much as big businesses. Which, when you think about it, companies like G.E., Apple, etc. are like their own little private nations for the money they make and the influence they wield in national governments. Call me crazy, but I don't think a market system that has excelled at anything other than being able to continuously produce novel luxury goods and entertainment should be able to hold sway over the policies of national governments ostensibly formed to help support all of their citizens and not just the exclusive aims of their richest 1% or 0.1%.
Also, that 1-2% is still thousands of lives or more saved each year. It's a small percentage but it's of a number so large that it's still significant.
1: The point is irrelevant, yes ONCE UPON A TIME anyone could drive a big truck. Once UPON A TIME I could also buy slaves and nobody would think twice about it. Similarly once upon a time automatic weapons were legal...do we see where this is going? Just because things were once done that way does not mean that the old way PRODUCED QUANTIFIABLY BETTER RESULTS than the new way.
2: By arbitrarily removing grenade launchers, explosives, missiles, and rockets you already start to discredit your argument. Why are they exempt but not other firearms? Sounds like special pleading to me.;)
3: I'm not qualified to determine how much firearms training makes someone competent, I have no experience in that field.
4: Your own training does? Well bravo, but training is not a legal requirement. I'm of the opinion guns should be like cars in that we require a serious level of instruction before we just give someone the ability to use them just to be safe.
5: You've also gotten your burden of proof ass backwards. You were the one who made the original claim that any civilian should be able to own and operate any armament used by police departments. I am challenging you by arguing that A) PDs use many weapons that the average person simply has no practical need for (when a less powerful tool will do the same job just as well) and B) that barring cases of necessity I see no reason why citizens should be given unfettered access to firearms and C) You already had to knock out entire classes of special equipment and armarments used by the modern day police, who are largely a paramilitary force now. This already underscores that no, there is no de-facto presumption of tolerance or acceptability any more with owning a type of firearm. We do not let people fire automatic weapons, purchase C4, and all kinds of other tools precisely for the same reasons I have outlined. I see no reason why this should not further extend down into the range of semi-automatic firearms as well.
If a gun has serious legitimate use as a tool for self-defense or hunting then fine. But otherwise I think the modern day presumption should be that something is disallowed unless it's built specifically for one of those legitimate uses. This is to distinguish between existing firearms like the AR-15 which while they CAN be used for legitimate purposes do not inherently posses any specific features which actually make it a critical tool in self-defense, preventing home invasions nor hunting. Existing rifles will function for hunting, pistols always win for self-defense on the person and a shotgun is worth its weight in gold for home defense.
The AR-15 in specific being legal does not dramatically improve anyone's ability to stay alive and the Assault Weapons Ban's statistics from the FBI's crime report do show an appreciable drop in gun homicides during the ban. it's only 1-2% but that was for a largely "toothless" ban that just banned the production of new guns and I don't even think prevented sales of existing stock at the time of passage. Given that, it seems senseless to argue people should be able to own such a thing, the ban saved lives, reinstating it doesn't significantly impair anyone's ability to obtain a gun sufficient for hunting or self defense, so why not?
What makes "Drone use" bad is when drones are capable of firing on targets. The distancing of the operator from the situation removes the human factor and enables one to open fire on people in ways they never would if they were there in person. Since they don't see the gory carnage themselves, just an arial view of little white dots.
That's the problem, armed drones could very well lead to even more excessive force problems if they're employed by our current PDs.
That's ridiculous! Are you saying I, with my C-class Driver's license should be allowed to drive a Big-rig professionally because both I and Commercial Drivers have "The same" (as in issued by the same government agency for comparably similar purposes) driver's licenses (despite Class C and Class A having vastly different requirements and different training programs) and thus are both equally qualified to drive all street-legal vehicles?
What are you smoking dude? I want some!;p Something tells me that despite your parsing of semantics regarding the word "Civilian" that the LAPD still are trained in ways that still make their capacity with firearms functionally distinct from your average gun owner. At least as much as a Class A from Class C driver's license. They have strict professional needs for weapons (due to their line of work) the average person does not. The average person is not expected to diffuse violent conflicts of all sizes nor manage large unruly crowds (Without unnecessarily injuring them), etc...
That's cute but your analogy misses several important points.
1: That H1B worker will with near absolute certainty return to India. Only now they have an impressive resume thanks to their time here. 2: That one worker will potentially be used to depress wages for hundreds of other workers depending on where they are hired and for what position. 3: You haven't tried to factor the opposite, to see whether or not someone American could've filled that job and what that would've done for the economy instead.
The point is the benefits you figure are there, are largely not, and the costs you don't even bother to state. Let alone figuring out at all whether the latter scenario would've resulted in a net economic gain had an H1B worker not been hired.
There's nothing wrong with skilled competition. However when it becomes a problem is when someone exploits a system designed to let them pluck workers from India who are used to working for 1/2 to 1/4 what will even pay your rent in say, Silicon Valley, O.C. or L.A. and then using that worker as an excuse to raise everyone else's job requirements and/or cut their wages.
That employee deliberately works for less than they are truly worth because they come from a culture that teaches them to undervalue their work. This isn't exactly fair to everyone else when that worker AND their colleagues could be making much more money together. But the process of how they're hired doesn't exactly clue them in on that and it allows employers to cynically play employees against each other in a race to the bottom.
The problem isn't that we're hiring skilled immigrants to do high-tech work, it's that we largely only have these tech job openings because managers refuse to pay workers what they're worth (to the point we've had 30+ years of wage stagnation for all but the top 1% who has seen a 247% increase in their yearly earnings economy wide) due to a toxic corporate culture that regards non-executives as disposable and regards anyone not engaged in relentless wealth acquisition as a "lazy bum who deserves to work like a slave their whole lives." The problem is that employers are abusing the immigration system to depress wages and turn one of the last high-wage professional careers in America into yet another low-wage call-center style job by pitting American workers against a steady supply of foreign graduates who due to politics at home can expect to be poor their entire lives and don't know how to assert their real value with American employers.
It's cynical and simply attempting to make the system more likely to land us permanent residents misses the entire point. The H1-B system exists ONLY TO DRIVE TECH WAGES DOWN. The majority of workers who come in on H1Bs don't even want to stay and are only here to pump up their resumes before going back to their own countries. I'm ALL FOR allowing people to immigrate for humanitarian reasons but especially if we're serious about making immigration a "human priority" then we CANNOT and SHOULD NEVER ALLOW BIG BUSINESS TO CORRUPT THAT. Which is exactly what the H1B program does, it places the needs of employers above the needs of the country and it does so thoughtlessly and needlessly. We have plenty of people here, as Krugman said: It's not that we have a skills shortage. It's that we have a lack of PhDs willing to work for minimum wage.
Ethically speaking we need to keep those jobs vacant until we can grow the talent here. The U.S. has not created any non-executive high-wage job sectors in ages. Fields related to programming and other information technologies are pretty well the last "relatively open" high-paying career track you can get on in America. During the economic recovery 93% of all new income generated went to the top 1%. Businesses and investors are doing better than ever and posting record profits, productivity overall has hit new heights.
Given our history, it's only fair to tell Big Business in this instance to get bent and wait for a while. Well, if we actually care at all about making a better economy and job market for Americans versus simply making it easier for investors to award themselves another round of dividends by letting them slash wages.
Sad as that may be, are you saying there are actually better options that might work? If not I'd rather we just go with Google. The problem with Privacy isn't so much about actual privacy. The Problem with Privacy is information asymmetry. When your Boss gets to know about your private life and judge you at work on it, but you don't get to know or judge theirs. That is when lack of privacy becomes dangerous as it enables for cruel and hypocritical behavior by people in power and it enables them to lie to make excuses as to why that sort of situation is necessary or tolerable.
We may have a much better time going from a privacy-focused society to a free-information society. The cost of liberating the data of the "Elites" in our global society seem to be far less than the costs of locking up all that exposed private data already out there.
is further destruction of the middle class. By replacing American tech workers with H1B slaves, they drive down the wages of the Americans who still have jobs.
Once the rich have taken everything away from the middle, they'll have to turn on each other. That will be fun to watch.
LOL, no it won't. Who says you're going to be able to "just watch" or that the Rich are going to just attack each other? Isn't it history itself that teaches us that when the Rich wage war it is the poor who die?
You know this could be addressed in a really funny way that I know the white house would never endorse. Change the petition format into a mini-message board. Submit your question, get 25K votes, White House responds. From there the author can choose to respond or not (to determine if they actually had their question answered) and if they get 25K more votes again in a new window, WH has to respond yet again....ping...pong!;D
> And if the president needs to make economic decisions by conducting unbiased polls of academic economists, he is obviously not up to his job and should resign.
I agreed with you up until that statement. I don't expect the president to be an expert on economy, I expect him to be a good leader. And a good leader asks for advice from the experts.
Agree completely. If you really want to think about what the proper "Role" of a leader is, it's to take the mantle of responsibility for making important decisions. We can't expect our leader to be a philosopher king who knows everything. But we CAN get a good leader with a high intellect and surround them with a lot of experts who can fill in the gaps to help them make good decisions.
But fundamentally we have leaders so we have someone to blame when things go wrong and reward when things go right. If you think about it, in a way leaders are simply glorified scapegoats/figureheads. At least, that's what they SHOULD be. It's when they get too enamored with their own power that things go awry.
Employers have only themselves to blame for the "shortage". They reject perfectly good candidates out of hand, for the craziest subjective non-reasons, then complain there's a shortage. They have weird ideas about the extraneous qualities they think they want. Like, why is age discrimination rampant? They believe young coders are more easily bullied into working longer hours, and will take less pay. If they want to reject a programmer for being too old, they make up some other bullcrap excuse why, or don't even bother with that. They also desire what they call "loyalty" (while showing no loyalty themselves towards their employees), which really means they want the candidate who is not a "flight risk". They want a candidate within a "good" range of debt and desperation-- not so much that he will steal from the company, but not so little that he can afford to walk away. Evaluating that aspect of a person is very difficult, since they're not supposed to do that at all so they can't outright ask for the information they want. However, credit scores certainly help with that.
Employers are terrible at evaluating candidates. Can't tell a good programmer from a smooth talking bullshit artist. Nor, on the more subjective criteria, are they much good at telling the crazies apart from the merely desperate. The best they can do is hit prospects with a test on trivia about a particular language, the sort of stuff you shouldn't memorize but should look up in a reference. Quick, name all the reserved words in C++! If you can't do it, then you must not be an expert C++ programmer. If you try to explain why knowing that is not important, then you get that question "wrong", and are tagged as a BS artist to boot. I've had a so-called technical interview end after just 1 trivia question. They refuse to allow any time for training, demanding that new hires "hit the ground running". Candidates are expected to train themselves at their own expense beforehand.
Krugman said it best, there is NO actual shortage of skilled candidates. What we have are employers who want people to work at graduate level for minimum wage and complaining when they can't find it that they need more H1Bs to drive everyone else's wages down. It's all a major scam.
There's a distinct difference between subsidizing a highly profitable, highly successful industry, like fossil fuels, with massive subsidies; and giving out low cost loans to up-and-coming-companies who are looking to establish a newer, better industry (Green Energy.) That Solyndra failed is absolutely sad, however statistically speaking that's not even a drop in the bucket compared to what Rs ensure we pay out to major established industries every day as some form of consumer protection money.
Gas subsidies are just that, the gas companies threaten to raise prices at the pump unless we keep paying, despite their record breaking profits. Now tell me, HOW are those two in any way comparable in either intent, scope, or purpose?
1. Unintended consequences on the market. Will this slow broadband rollout?
The primary force slowing broadband roll out is that the Telcos/Cable outfits don't see the point in making that investment when there are more lucrative profits to be made elsewhere. At no point does any rational executive say "No! We won't do ANYTHING to make MORE $$$ because it would embolden Big Gub'mint!" They simply aren't rolling out because they see no safe return there, eliminate their more lucrative rent-seeking alternatives like slicing and dicing the Internet with various premium service tiers and you could arguably see MORE and not less broadband roll out.
You have to think about this in terms of what would be the smartest investment for the company. Even if the company would be able to make more money without Net Neutrality they certainly aren't going to stop rolling out broadband lines to areas where they can make a profit. Would they have possibly rolled out even more broadband lines if we let them discriminate? Maybe but only as an afterthought and only at such a low tier of service that it wouldn't even be worth being called broadband.
AT&T tried a similar line when it came time for T-Mobile's merger to be reviewed and it was as much a load of bull then as it is now.
2. Going beyond basic, technical, historical neutrality as it existed before this issue even became popular. The initial pinciples as stated by the FCC were good. But we've seen that already grew quite a bit in their first proposed rules, and as you note had exceptions carved out.
Yes, and? It wasn't ideal but it WAS a first step. The point was it was simply amazing that despite Comcast's lobbying behavior this even happened. They seemed to almost be untouchable and I think we should at least be thankful we got something. Granted, that still doesn't mean we shouldn't push for more, better, but as I've found especially historically: Good policy and good legislation often starts as very mediocre policy and evolves over time as the forces of change slowly build upon it when the forces of social regression allow. Social security looked really different when it first passed, for instance, as did Medicare.
Keep it going, add lawmakers with their own agendas in it (MAFIAA ass-kissers, fairness doctrine promoters), and it has a good potential to get very scary for the open nature of the Internet. The last head of the FCC was worried about it, the current head of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs once proposed an Internet fairness doctrine, full government control of what you read (individual choice on whether to read something is "anti-democratic"). He's since backed off that as impractical -- but that means if it becomes practical he'd love to do it. He's not alone. Waxman's people even met with the FCC over "media diversity," a codeword for fairness doctrine.
I'm not even sure an Internet fairness doctrine works. The fairness doctrine is only applicable to limited mediums. A Radio or TV show only has so much air time and a newspaper only so much page space. The Internet has neither of those and no real way to objectively quantify the size of overall content on a given website. I mean do you do a word count for text content? A minute counter for any video or audio content? Do we just count bytes and leave it at that? It just doesn't seem like it even works. Also, the point of the the fairness doctrine was that because the radio frequency spectrum was licensed by government to private business and was limited that it was in the public interest to ensure fair representation on both sides of any controversial/political issue.
The Internet, by the same token, is functionally infinite in size. Yes there are theoretical limits to the physical media on which it travels and its bytes are stored but we're nowhere near them yet and can certainly add much more capacity in the future. There is no artificial limit to the number of web
Except he's not really in the pocket of the telcos. He takes far more money from Google and others who have an interest in an open Internet.
I think he's doing this on principle. I am for net neutrality, but I am afraid of what our government might do when making laws to supposedly enforce net neutrality -- but will likely be loaded with various partisan interests where only we lose.
I don't care whether his intent is noble or not, we can clearly predict the EFFECTS of this legislation and that is exactly what it would do. So regardless of whether HE thinks he is doing good by us, he is actually not. As they say: The road to hell is paved with Good Intentions.
Secondly, can't you please take the time to actually break your concerns down into some sort of a rational list of potential problems you foresee? All we'd really be doing is enforcing some sort of a common carrier like status the same with phones that prevents network discrimination. It's a relatively simple technical matter and while yes, you're right that corruption might mean we get watered down B.S. like the current regs which let mobile providers off the hook (when arguably THEY need network neutrality the most. I've heard awful rumors about the carriers wanting to use deep packet inspection to charge you extra to access certain internet services like Netflix, Google, etc.) that doesn't change that the partially bad regs we have are still much better for us than no regs.
If you want to say you think the government will mismanage this terribly then it's not enough to just post your suspicion and expect me to just agree with you. You need to make a clear case, backed with facts, as to why in this specific case the government is not equipped to handle this. I would contend that given how we've managed to eventually get the hang of this whole phone system that we can make the Internet work as well and all it would take is an empowered FCC and perhaps a better appointee to lead it. But I'd love to hear some good counter examples as to why this sort of technical project (which is really just about penalizing ISPs that attempt to unfairly throttle their customers' bandwidth or segregate the Internet via paywalls or premium service tiers) is so far and beyond the pale of our government that unchecked corporate power would be better for everyone than something like the less-than-ideal-regulation like what we have now.
Yes! And that's what this is really all about. Issa thought he could get cred for opposing SOPA and now he wants to use that to kill Net Neutrality; Thinking we'd let this fly under the radar. Obviously congress can pass new laws, but in the current climate this is not about congress (whose only success at Internet regulation was to allow the States to collect sales tax on eCommerce.) but rather about restraining the FCC from being mean to big Telcos, HOW DARE THEY RIGHT?!;p
Why do you assume that every action is done of a genuine belief that its going to work? There is often value to a stunt, even if just to make a point. If anything, I think they are the smart ones in this system.
IF they succeed at making that point, then sure. The problem here is that you can "send a message" that you completely did not intend to send with your stunt. The thing that people need to realize is that for better or worse Narratives to some extent are real and dictate what the "message" of an election is to each party. These are not things YOU have control over, they're just how the political apparatus interprets events.
Its like I tell to some Obama supporters who can't stand Obama. They feel like voting for a 3rd party was wasting a vote, as if the consequences of an election end with who gets into office. Imagine the message sent to both parties if Stein, or Johnson handed Obama a loss.
Yes, I can! Republicans would think, as they always do: "The People clearly handed us a Mandate to throw the Kenyan Usurpur Obummer out of office! They also completely support each and every plank of our G.O.P. party platform including no-abortion exceptions for incest and rape victims, mandatory transvaginal ultrasounds, and they like the rest of us consider Homosexuals a virulent disease to be purged from the Face of God's Green Earth." In short, they'd take it as a validation of absolutely everything they ran on and the idea that their win means people support all of who they are and want them to go Hog wild on the lawmaking accordingly.
The Democrats would think, as they did both after Gore and Kerry's Loss: "The People clearly are more Conservative than we thought! Quickly, move the overton window rightward!" Nader being a factor in Gore's loss did not embolden Liberals to be more liberal or Green party minded, it instead caused many avowed Democrats to get a hate-Boehner (I love spelling it that way!;p) for the Green party voters. This is because the perception among Democrats of those who voted Green is that they're More Democrat than Republican and if they can't reliably court their vote while keeping that big tent open (In other words supporting some environmentalist policies and some green party ideas without going whole hog) then they'd rather try to court other more reliable voting blocs.
If you're given a choice between being able to herd sheep and herd cats, you pick the sheep. Acting indignant about it isn't going to change that it's what WILL happen every time. Democrats see what are essentially a bunch of indignant and capricious ideologues that can't be expected to reliably vote as a bloc based on who tries to cater to those issues (and is likely to actually win a national election.) So naturally they chose to build their coalition without them because why bother giving them any red meat policy wise if they can't guarantee doing so buys them votes?
Elections are not about who wins or loses, those are secondary issues. Elections are about what issues politicians feel safe standing on, and what issues they feel they need to fall into line on. These petitions serve a similar purpose...its not about breaking off, its about getting people talking about it, and about making them answer it.
Its definitely a silly tactic, but, I think there is plenty of room for that.
Now on this one I do agree. The most important thing about politics is what issues enter our national dialogue, how they're discussed, etc. The framing/wording here is essential. With that being said however there are arguably other ways to change the national dialogue without running candidates. One of Occupy's great victories was putting Income Inequality into the national dialogue and framing it well from a perspective of the average worker. I just really do believe that protest voting on principle is a bad idea. Unless you have a large coalition of voters and are able to get real airtime a
Regulatory Uncertainty is B.S. and it's just a line the G.O.P. trots out to justify why we should let industrial manufacturers poison us with Mercury. The uncertainty companies have right now is Demand uncertainty. Because of the recession and 30 years of Middle class wage stagnation there are now fewer dollars of disposable income for companies to fight over and that means a shrinking market.
Sitting on those record piles of cash makes sense when you can't even be sure (If you know you have a popular product) that your market demographic can even afford it since they're barely able to pay off their home loan or whatever else. The tax uncertainty is again, a stupid rationalization. The G.O.P. loves to give these entitled plutocratic children the ability to disguise their "Waaaah! I want to live in Civil society without ever having to pay for it! I swear if you don't lower my taxes I'm going to lay off hundreds of workers! You think I'm joking?!" blackmail a legitimate face.
The real problem is we have a liquidity trap. There's plenty of capital but the capital is all on the wrong side of the market, hoarded in corporate coffers and wealthy banks. The government in this case is the only entity that can take that money via taxes and return it to the bottom of the economy through infrastructure investments, jobs programs, and other social services which both puts money back into consumers hands (ending the recession) and also possibly opening up new markets through the investment in infrastructure.
Whenever someone blames "uncertainty" they're just spinning a yarn about why they feel it's a moral abomination that they should have their income taxed to fund civil society.
And this is caused by? Say it with me everyone! A "Collective Action problem." Now, what sort of organization of bureaucratic structure has the sort of knowhow to fix those? It needs to have a central taxing authority to raise lots of money, and the ability to organize that money into a targeted set of services meant to funnel that money to our most disadvantaged through jobs and job-related programs (such as subsidized daycare) that will train them, enable them to take the jobs, pay fair wages, and therefore generally put disposable money into the hands of consumers, returning confidence to the entire market while also helping millions out of poverty?...It starts with a G...;p
Obama's pollicies a continuation of Bush's? Umm...Citation Needed here please? Because from what dimension do you conflate Bush's "Tax cuts cause the Confidence Fairy to come bless the Markets" philosophy with "Government needs to make up for the demand imbalance through infrastructure spending and other direct investments in our future capacity" of Obama?
Next time, try listing examples so you don't sound quite as unhinged. ^_^
You do realize that doing things like this costs money, yes? I hate to break it to you as well but most of the people I see operating out of foreign locales are also terrible coders. Granted, those were mostly freelancers and I've seen more than a few savants. But the numbers indicate quality is its highest in the USA and other first world countries as far as tech workers go.
For a company to outsource most of its development from the USA to a third world area the company would need to be in such dire straights that the lower costs were worth the decrease in software quality and possible customer backlash. In other words they'd need to be dying and just be doing this to try and squeeze a few more years of profits before the entire place goes belly up.
When it comes to software cutting corners during development only hurts you later. It'll either hurt you in QA, hurt you in sales, or hurt your sales on any future products. Because you can either release buggy software and pay to fix it, or say no, piss a lot of people off and shoot any hopes of selling future products in the foot. Actions have consequences after all.:)
Science has already largely shown though that your rate of pay does not really correlate to an increase in productivity. By and large all that paying people more does is make them willing to do something they would never have otherwise wanted to do...like menial labor.
This, so much the above. In a society of robots where we could simply issue one command like rm -Rf sweetCarbonatedBeveridges/drinkList it'd be one thing. But as we live in a human world filled with many unique individuals who have autonomy you can't just do that. You have to honor that and try to persuade them to do what you want. The more heavy-handed you get the more likely you are to get substantial blowback trying to accomplish whatever it is you wanted to do.
Empathy becomes crucial in convincing people who are not rationally motivated to change their minds. Without understanding others this way there's simply no other method to be effective in motivating them, especially when you want to motivate large groups of people. Well, without effectively changing the entire population into non-people.
You can't learn to empathize if you consider kindness a weakness that must be purged from your being. Some people who go through hardships just get more jaded, cynical and angry because they refuse to help or be helped by others. The idea you can break someone by throwing them into a bad situation is a little silly, it depends on the person, and there are enough people out there who would rather die than give up what they consider to be their pride.
The Tea Party proved there are more than enough people out their steaming mad enough to cut their nose off to spite their face *coughchristineodonnelcough.* A different approach for them is perhaps required.
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Too much Freedom itself isn't the problem, it's a sort of truism though meant to reflect what can be a serious problem.
Your freedom to swing your fist ends at my face, so to speak. But without govenrment or an apparatus to "defend" freedoms there's absolutely nothing stopping you from doing it anyway. Therefore if the other person decides their fist should be lodged firmly in my gut we can say the other person has "too much freedom" because they are so free from the practical consequences (punishment) for their actions that they now use their freedom to act to remove my freedom to act.
The answer isn't to make people "un free" the answer is to make people more accountable for their actions and the consequences thereof. Make power accountable and things fall nicely into place. Put a cop between me and Fisty McSwinger and I we both might be better off. The Cop prevents him from hitting me and as a result we both go off and do our own thing peacably.
In an interconnected, interdependent world those with power over others should by definition be less free than those without. Their power should be held accountable to the people. Our entire system of government is based on this idea. What the founders just never imagined was how private business could slowly evolve into today's government-challenging international behemoths. Nobody imagined a private chartered corporation could render entire swathes of nation states impotent to its whims and all done through the seductive powers of commerce.
The real issue isn't so much "too much freedom" or "too little freedom" it's "too little accountability to the people in institutions of power" and that includes governments as much as big businesses. Which, when you think about it, companies like G.E., Apple, etc. are like their own little private nations for the money they make and the influence they wield in national governments. Call me crazy, but I don't think a market system that has excelled at anything other than being able to continuously produce novel luxury goods and entertainment should be able to hold sway over the policies of national governments ostensibly formed to help support all of their citizens and not just the exclusive aims of their richest 1% or 0.1%.
Also, that 1-2% is still thousands of lives or more saved each year. It's a small percentage but it's of a number so large that it's still significant.
1: The point is irrelevant, yes ONCE UPON A TIME anyone could drive a big truck. Once UPON A TIME I could also buy slaves and nobody would think twice about it. Similarly once upon a time automatic weapons were legal...do we see where this is going? Just because things were once done that way does not mean that the old way PRODUCED QUANTIFIABLY BETTER RESULTS than the new way.
2: By arbitrarily removing grenade launchers, explosives, missiles, and rockets you already start to discredit your argument. Why are they exempt but not other firearms? Sounds like special pleading to me. ;)
3: I'm not qualified to determine how much firearms training makes someone competent, I have no experience in that field.
4: Your own training does? Well bravo, but training is not a legal requirement. I'm of the opinion guns should be like cars in that we require a serious level of instruction before we just give someone the ability to use them just to be safe.
5: You've also gotten your burden of proof ass backwards. You were the one who made the original claim that any civilian should be able to own and operate any armament used by police departments. I am challenging you by arguing that A) PDs use many weapons that the average person simply has no practical need for (when a less powerful tool will do the same job just as well) and B) that barring cases of necessity I see no reason why citizens should be given unfettered access to firearms and C) You already had to knock out entire classes of special equipment and armarments used by the modern day police, who are largely a paramilitary force now. This already underscores that no, there is no de-facto presumption of tolerance or acceptability any more with owning a type of firearm. We do not let people fire automatic weapons, purchase C4, and all kinds of other tools precisely for the same reasons I have outlined. I see no reason why this should not further extend down into the range of semi-automatic firearms as well.
If a gun has serious legitimate use as a tool for self-defense or hunting then fine. But otherwise I think the modern day presumption should be that something is disallowed unless it's built specifically for one of those legitimate uses. This is to distinguish between existing firearms like the AR-15 which while they CAN be used for legitimate purposes do not inherently posses any specific features which actually make it a critical tool in self-defense, preventing home invasions nor hunting. Existing rifles will function for hunting, pistols always win for self-defense on the person and a shotgun is worth its weight in gold for home defense.
The AR-15 in specific being legal does not dramatically improve anyone's ability to stay alive and the Assault Weapons Ban's statistics from the FBI's crime report do show an appreciable drop in gun homicides during the ban. it's only 1-2% but that was for a largely "toothless" ban that just banned the production of new guns and I don't even think prevented sales of existing stock at the time of passage. Given that, it seems senseless to argue people should be able to own such a thing, the ban saved lives, reinstating it doesn't significantly impair anyone's ability to obtain a gun sufficient for hunting or self defense, so why not?
What makes "Drone use" bad is when drones are capable of firing on targets. The distancing of the operator from the situation removes the human factor and enables one to open fire on people in ways they never would if they were there in person. Since they don't see the gory carnage themselves, just an arial view of little white dots.
That's the problem, armed drones could very well lead to even more excessive force problems if they're employed by our current PDs.
That's ridiculous! Are you saying I, with my C-class Driver's license should be allowed to drive a Big-rig professionally because both I and Commercial Drivers have "The same" (as in issued by the same government agency for comparably similar purposes) driver's licenses (despite Class C and Class A having vastly different requirements and different training programs) and thus are both equally qualified to drive all street-legal vehicles?
What are you smoking dude? I want some! ;p
Something tells me that despite your parsing of semantics regarding the word "Civilian" that the LAPD still are trained in ways that still make their capacity with firearms functionally distinct from your average gun owner. At least as much as a Class A from Class C driver's license. They have strict professional needs for weapons (due to their line of work) the average person does not. The average person is not expected to diffuse violent conflicts of all sizes nor manage large unruly crowds (Without unnecessarily injuring them), etc...
That's cute but your analogy misses several important points.
1: That H1B worker will with near absolute certainty return to India. Only now they have an impressive resume thanks to their time here.
2: That one worker will potentially be used to depress wages for hundreds of other workers depending on where they are hired and for what position.
3: You haven't tried to factor the opposite, to see whether or not someone American could've filled that job and what that would've done for the economy instead.
The point is the benefits you figure are there, are largely not, and the costs you don't even bother to state. Let alone figuring out at all whether the latter scenario would've resulted in a net economic gain had an H1B worker not been hired.
There's nothing wrong with skilled competition. However when it becomes a problem is when someone exploits a system designed to let them pluck workers from India who are used to working for 1/2 to 1/4 what will even pay your rent in say, Silicon Valley, O.C. or L.A. and then using that worker as an excuse to raise everyone else's job requirements and/or cut their wages.
That employee deliberately works for less than they are truly worth because they come from a culture that teaches them to undervalue their work. This isn't exactly fair to everyone else when that worker AND their colleagues could be making much more money together. But the process of how they're hired doesn't exactly clue them in on that and it allows employers to cynically play employees against each other in a race to the bottom.
The problem isn't that we're hiring skilled immigrants to do high-tech work, it's that we largely only have these tech job openings because managers refuse to pay workers what they're worth (to the point we've had 30+ years of wage stagnation for all but the top 1% who has seen a 247% increase in their yearly earnings economy wide) due to a toxic corporate culture that regards non-executives as disposable and regards anyone not engaged in relentless wealth acquisition as a "lazy bum who deserves to work like a slave their whole lives." The problem is that employers are abusing the immigration system to depress wages and turn one of the last high-wage professional careers in America into yet another low-wage call-center style job by pitting American workers against a steady supply of foreign graduates who due to politics at home can expect to be poor their entire lives and don't know how to assert their real value with American employers.
It's cynical and simply attempting to make the system more likely to land us permanent residents misses the entire point. The H1-B system exists ONLY TO DRIVE TECH WAGES DOWN. The majority of workers who come in on H1Bs don't even want to stay and are only here to pump up their resumes before going back to their own countries. I'm ALL FOR allowing people to immigrate for humanitarian reasons but especially if we're serious about making immigration a "human priority" then we CANNOT and SHOULD NEVER ALLOW BIG BUSINESS TO CORRUPT THAT. Which is exactly what the H1B program does, it places the needs of employers above the needs of the country and it does so thoughtlessly and needlessly. We have plenty of people here, as Krugman said: It's not that we have a skills shortage. It's that we have a lack of PhDs willing to work for minimum wage.
Ethically speaking we need to keep those jobs vacant until we can grow the talent here. The U.S. has not created any non-executive high-wage job sectors in ages. Fields related to programming and other information technologies are pretty well the last "relatively open" high-paying career track you can get on in America. During the economic recovery 93% of all new income generated went to the top 1%. Businesses and investors are doing better than ever and posting record profits, productivity overall has hit new heights.
Given our history, it's only fair to tell Big Business in this instance to get bent and wait for a while. Well, if we actually care at all about making a better economy and job market for Americans versus simply making it easier for investors to award themselves another round of dividends by letting them slash wages.
Sad as that may be, are you saying there are actually better options that might work? If not I'd rather we just go with Google. The problem with Privacy isn't so much about actual privacy. The Problem with Privacy is information asymmetry. When your Boss gets to know about your private life and judge you at work on it, but you don't get to know or judge theirs. That is when lack of privacy becomes dangerous as it enables for cruel and hypocritical behavior by people in power and it enables them to lie to make excuses as to why that sort of situation is necessary or tolerable.
We may have a much better time going from a privacy-focused society to a free-information society. The cost of liberating the data of the "Elites" in our global society seem to be far less than the costs of locking up all that exposed private data already out there.
is further destruction of the middle class. By replacing American tech workers with H1B slaves, they drive down the wages of the Americans who still have jobs.
Once the rich have taken everything away from the middle, they'll have to turn on each other. That will be fun to watch.
LOL, no it won't. Who says you're going to be able to "just watch" or that the Rich are going to just attack each other? Isn't it history itself that teaches us that when the Rich wage war it is the poor who die?
You know this could be addressed in a really funny way that I know the white house would never endorse. Change the petition format into a mini-message board. Submit your question, get 25K votes, White House responds. From there the author can choose to respond or not (to determine if they actually had their question answered) and if they get 25K more votes again in a new window, WH has to respond yet again....ping...pong! ;D
> And if the president needs to make economic decisions by conducting unbiased polls of academic economists, he is obviously not up to his job and should resign.
I agreed with you up until that statement. I don't expect the president to be an expert on economy, I expect him to be a good leader. And a good leader asks for advice from the experts.
Agree completely. If you really want to think about what the proper "Role" of a leader is, it's to take the mantle of responsibility for making important decisions. We can't expect our leader to be a philosopher king who knows everything. But we CAN get a good leader with a high intellect and surround them with a lot of experts who can fill in the gaps to help them make good decisions.
But fundamentally we have leaders so we have someone to blame when things go wrong and reward when things go right. If you think about it, in a way leaders are simply glorified scapegoats/figureheads. At least, that's what they SHOULD be. It's when they get too enamored with their own power that things go awry.
Employers have only themselves to blame for the "shortage". They reject perfectly good candidates out of hand, for the craziest subjective non-reasons, then complain there's a shortage. They have weird ideas about the extraneous qualities they think they want. Like, why is age discrimination rampant? They believe young coders are more easily bullied into working longer hours, and will take less pay. If they want to reject a programmer for being too old, they make up some other bullcrap excuse why, or don't even bother with that. They also desire what they call "loyalty" (while showing no loyalty themselves towards their employees), which really means they want the candidate who is not a "flight risk". They want a candidate within a "good" range of debt and desperation-- not so much that he will steal from the company, but not so little that he can afford to walk away. Evaluating that aspect of a person is very difficult, since they're not supposed to do that at all so they can't outright ask for the information they want. However, credit scores certainly help with that.
Employers are terrible at evaluating candidates. Can't tell a good programmer from a smooth talking bullshit artist. Nor, on the more subjective criteria, are they much good at telling the crazies apart from the merely desperate. The best they can do is hit prospects with a test on trivia about a particular language, the sort of stuff you shouldn't memorize but should look up in a reference. Quick, name all the reserved words in C++! If you can't do it, then you must not be an expert C++ programmer. If you try to explain why knowing that is not important, then you get that question "wrong", and are tagged as a BS artist to boot. I've had a so-called technical interview end after just 1 trivia question. They refuse to allow any time for training, demanding that new hires "hit the ground running". Candidates are expected to train themselves at their own expense beforehand.
Krugman said it best, there is NO actual shortage of skilled candidates. What we have are employers who want people to work at graduate level for minimum wage and complaining when they can't find it that they need more H1Bs to drive everyone else's wages down. It's all a major scam.
There's a distinct difference between subsidizing a highly profitable, highly successful industry, like fossil fuels, with massive subsidies; and giving out low cost loans to up-and-coming-companies who are looking to establish a newer, better industry (Green Energy.) That Solyndra failed is absolutely sad, however statistically speaking that's not even a drop in the bucket compared to what Rs ensure we pay out to major established industries every day as some form of consumer protection money.
Gas subsidies are just that, the gas companies threaten to raise prices at the pump unless we keep paying, despite their record breaking profits. Now tell me, HOW are those two in any way comparable in either intent, scope, or purpose?
1. Unintended consequences on the market. Will this slow broadband rollout?
The primary force slowing broadband roll out is that the Telcos/Cable outfits don't see the point in making that investment when there are more lucrative profits to be made elsewhere. At no point does any rational executive say "No! We won't do ANYTHING to make MORE $$$ because it would embolden Big Gub'mint!" They simply aren't rolling out because they see no safe return there, eliminate their more lucrative rent-seeking alternatives like slicing and dicing the Internet with various premium service tiers and you could arguably see MORE and not less broadband roll out.
You have to think about this in terms of what would be the smartest investment for the company. Even if the company would be able to make more money without Net Neutrality they certainly aren't going to stop rolling out broadband lines to areas where they can make a profit. Would they have possibly rolled out even more broadband lines if we let them discriminate? Maybe but only as an afterthought and only at such a low tier of service that it wouldn't even be worth being called broadband.
AT&T tried a similar line when it came time for T-Mobile's merger to be reviewed and it was as much a load of bull then as it is now.
2. Going beyond basic, technical, historical neutrality as it existed before this issue even became popular. The initial pinciples as stated by the FCC were good. But we've seen that already grew quite a bit in their first proposed rules, and as you note had exceptions carved out.
Yes, and? It wasn't ideal but it WAS a first step. The point was it was simply amazing that despite Comcast's lobbying behavior this even happened. They seemed to almost be untouchable and I think we should at least be thankful we got something. Granted, that still doesn't mean we shouldn't push for more, better, but as I've found especially historically: Good policy and good legislation often starts as very mediocre policy and evolves over time as the forces of change slowly build upon it when the forces of social regression allow. Social security looked really different when it first passed, for instance, as did Medicare.
Keep it going, add lawmakers with their own agendas in it (MAFIAA ass-kissers, fairness doctrine promoters), and it has a good potential to get very scary for the open nature of the Internet. The last head of the FCC was worried about it, the current head of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs once proposed an Internet fairness doctrine, full government control of what you read (individual choice on whether to read something is "anti-democratic"). He's since backed off that as impractical -- but that means if it becomes practical he'd love to do it. He's not alone. Waxman's people even met with the FCC over "media diversity," a codeword for fairness doctrine.
I'm not even sure an Internet fairness doctrine works. The fairness doctrine is only applicable to limited mediums. A Radio or TV show only has so much air time and a newspaper only so much page space. The Internet has neither of those and no real way to objectively quantify the size of overall content on a given website. I mean do you do a word count for text content? A minute counter for any video or audio content? Do we just count bytes and leave it at that? It just doesn't seem like it even works. Also, the point of the the fairness doctrine was that because the radio frequency spectrum was licensed by government to private business and was limited that it was in the public interest to ensure fair representation on both sides of any controversial/political issue.
The Internet, by the same token, is functionally infinite in size. Yes there are theoretical limits to the physical media on which it travels and its bytes are stored but we're nowhere near them yet and can certainly add much more capacity in the future. There is no artificial limit to the number of web
Except he's not really in the pocket of the telcos. He takes far more money from Google and others who have an interest in an open Internet.
I think he's doing this on principle. I am for net neutrality, but I am afraid of what our government might do when making laws to supposedly enforce net neutrality -- but will likely be loaded with various partisan interests where only we lose.
I don't care whether his intent is noble or not, we can clearly predict the EFFECTS of this legislation and that is exactly what it would do. So regardless of whether HE thinks he is doing good by us, he is actually not. As they say: The road to hell is paved with Good Intentions.
Secondly, can't you please take the time to actually break your concerns down into some sort of a rational list of potential problems you foresee? All we'd really be doing is enforcing some sort of a common carrier like status the same with phones that prevents network discrimination. It's a relatively simple technical matter and while yes, you're right that corruption might mean we get watered down B.S. like the current regs which let mobile providers off the hook (when arguably THEY need network neutrality the most. I've heard awful rumors about the carriers wanting to use deep packet inspection to charge you extra to access certain internet services like Netflix, Google, etc.) that doesn't change that the partially bad regs we have are still much better for us than no regs.
If you want to say you think the government will mismanage this terribly then it's not enough to just post your suspicion and expect me to just agree with you. You need to make a clear case, backed with facts, as to why in this specific case the government is not equipped to handle this. I would contend that given how we've managed to eventually get the hang of this whole phone system that we can make the Internet work as well and all it would take is an empowered FCC and perhaps a better appointee to lead it. But I'd love to hear some good counter examples as to why this sort of technical project (which is really just about penalizing ISPs that attempt to unfairly throttle their customers' bandwidth or segregate the Internet via paywalls or premium service tiers) is so far and beyond the pale of our government that unchecked corporate power would be better for everyone than something like the less-than-ideal-regulation like what we have now.
Yes! And that's what this is really all about. Issa thought he could get cred for opposing SOPA and now he wants to use that to kill Net Neutrality; Thinking we'd let this fly under the radar. Obviously congress can pass new laws, but in the current climate this is not about congress (whose only success at Internet regulation was to allow the States to collect sales tax on eCommerce.) but rather about restraining the FCC from being mean to big Telcos, HOW DARE THEY RIGHT?! ;p
Why do you assume that every action is done of a genuine belief that its going to work? There is often value to a stunt, even if just to make a point. If anything, I think they are the smart ones in this system.
IF they succeed at making that point, then sure. The problem here is that you can "send a message" that you completely did not intend to send with your stunt. The thing that people need to realize is that for better or worse Narratives to some extent are real and dictate what the "message" of an election is to each party. These are not things YOU have control over, they're just how the political apparatus interprets events.
Its like I tell to some Obama supporters who can't stand Obama. They feel like voting for a 3rd party was wasting a vote, as if the consequences of an election end with who gets into office. Imagine the message sent to both parties if Stein, or Johnson handed Obama a loss.
Yes, I can! Republicans would think, as they always do: "The People clearly handed us a Mandate to throw the Kenyan Usurpur Obummer out of office! They also completely support each and every plank of our G.O.P. party platform including no-abortion exceptions for incest and rape victims, mandatory transvaginal ultrasounds, and they like the rest of us consider Homosexuals a virulent disease to be purged from the Face of God's Green Earth." In short, they'd take it as a validation of absolutely everything they ran on and the idea that their win means people support all of who they are and want them to go Hog wild on the lawmaking accordingly.
The Democrats would think, as they did both after Gore and Kerry's Loss: "The People clearly are more Conservative than we thought! Quickly, move the overton window rightward!" Nader being a factor in Gore's loss did not embolden Liberals to be more liberal or Green party minded, it instead caused many avowed Democrats to get a hate-Boehner (I love spelling it that way! ;p) for the Green party voters. This is because the perception among Democrats of those who voted Green is that they're More Democrat than Republican and if they can't reliably court their vote while keeping that big tent open (In other words supporting some environmentalist policies and some green party ideas without going whole hog) then they'd rather try to court other more reliable voting blocs.
If you're given a choice between being able to herd sheep and herd cats, you pick the sheep. Acting indignant about it isn't going to change that it's what WILL happen every time. Democrats see what are essentially a bunch of indignant and capricious ideologues that can't be expected to reliably vote as a bloc based on who tries to cater to those issues (and is likely to actually win a national election.) So naturally they chose to build their coalition without them because why bother giving them any red meat policy wise if they can't guarantee doing so buys them votes?
Elections are not about who wins or loses, those are secondary issues. Elections are about what issues politicians feel safe standing on, and what issues they feel they need to fall into line on. These petitions serve a similar purpose...its not about breaking off, its about getting people talking about it, and about making them answer it.
Its definitely a silly tactic, but, I think there is plenty of room for that.
Now on this one I do agree. The most important thing about politics is what issues enter our national dialogue, how they're discussed, etc. The framing/wording here is essential. With that being said however there are arguably other ways to change the national dialogue without running candidates. One of Occupy's great victories was putting Income Inequality into the national dialogue and framing it well from a perspective of the average worker. I just really do believe that protest voting on principle is a bad idea. Unless you have a large coalition of voters and are able to get real airtime a
Regulatory Uncertainty is B.S. and it's just a line the G.O.P. trots out to justify why we should let industrial manufacturers poison us with Mercury. The uncertainty companies have right now is Demand uncertainty. Because of the recession and 30 years of Middle class wage stagnation there are now fewer dollars of disposable income for companies to fight over and that means a shrinking market.
Sitting on those record piles of cash makes sense when you can't even be sure (If you know you have a popular product) that your market demographic can even afford it since they're barely able to pay off their home loan or whatever else. The tax uncertainty is again, a stupid rationalization. The G.O.P. loves to give these entitled plutocratic children the ability to disguise their "Waaaah! I want to live in Civil society without ever having to pay for it! I swear if you don't lower my taxes I'm going to lay off hundreds of workers! You think I'm joking?!" blackmail a legitimate face.
The real problem is we have a liquidity trap. There's plenty of capital but the capital is all on the wrong side of the market, hoarded in corporate coffers and wealthy banks. The government in this case is the only entity that can take that money via taxes and return it to the bottom of the economy through infrastructure investments, jobs programs, and other social services which both puts money back into consumers hands (ending the recession) and also possibly opening up new markets through the investment in infrastructure.
Whenever someone blames "uncertainty" they're just spinning a yarn about why they feel it's a moral abomination that they should have their income taxed to fund civil society.
And this is caused by? Say it with me everyone! A "Collective Action problem." Now, what sort of organization of bureaucratic structure has the sort of knowhow to fix those? It needs to have a central taxing authority to raise lots of money, and the ability to organize that money into a targeted set of services meant to funnel that money to our most disadvantaged through jobs and job-related programs (such as subsidized daycare) that will train them, enable them to take the jobs, pay fair wages, and therefore generally put disposable money into the hands of consumers, returning confidence to the entire market while also helping millions out of poverty? ...It starts with a G... ;p
Obama's pollicies a continuation of Bush's? Umm...Citation Needed here please? Because from what dimension do you conflate Bush's "Tax cuts cause the Confidence Fairy to come bless the Markets" philosophy with "Government needs to make up for the demand imbalance through infrastructure spending and other direct investments in our future capacity" of Obama?
Next time, try listing examples so you don't sound quite as unhinged. ^_^
You do realize that doing things like this costs money, yes? I hate to break it to you as well but most of the people I see operating out of foreign locales are also terrible coders. Granted, those were mostly freelancers and I've seen more than a few savants. But the numbers indicate quality is its highest in the USA and other first world countries as far as tech workers go.
For a company to outsource most of its development from the USA to a third world area the company would need to be in such dire straights that the lower costs were worth the decrease in software quality and possible customer backlash. In other words they'd need to be dying and just be doing this to try and squeeze a few more years of profits before the entire place goes belly up.
When it comes to software cutting corners during development only hurts you later. It'll either hurt you in QA, hurt you in sales, or hurt your sales on any future products. Because you can either release buggy software and pay to fix it, or say no, piss a lot of people off and shoot any hopes of selling future products in the foot. Actions have consequences after all. :)
Science has already largely shown though that your rate of pay does not really correlate to an increase in productivity. By and large all that paying people more does is make them willing to do something they would never have otherwise wanted to do...like menial labor.
http://www.ted.com/talks/dan_pink_on_motivation.html
If the rate of pay really isn't an effective motivator why do we insist on meritocratic pay? Shouldn't incentives like this actually do something.
This, so much the above. In a society of robots where we could simply issue one command like rm -Rf sweetCarbonatedBeveridges /drinkList it'd be one thing. But as we live in a human world filled with many unique individuals who have autonomy you can't just do that. You have to honor that and try to persuade them to do what you want. The more heavy-handed you get the more likely you are to get substantial blowback trying to accomplish whatever it is you wanted to do.
Empathy becomes crucial in convincing people who are not rationally motivated to change their minds. Without understanding others this way there's simply no other method to be effective in motivating them, especially when you want to motivate large groups of people. Well, without effectively changing the entire population into non-people.
You can't learn to empathize if you consider kindness a weakness that must be purged from your being. Some people who go through hardships just get more jaded, cynical and angry because they refuse to help or be helped by others. The idea you can break someone by throwing them into a bad situation is a little silly, it depends on the person, and there are enough people out there who would rather die than give up what they consider to be their pride.
The Tea Party proved there are more than enough people out their steaming mad enough to cut their nose off to spite their face *coughchristineodonnelcough.* A different approach for them is perhaps required.