If that's your take on the stories and comments I'm surprised. The EU handling of MS and the pirate party are far more libertarian and anti-corporatism than most US news. But well, if that's your take.
You're wrong about the fire departments. Most don't have Fed money. Also libertarians are against the Fed being the nanny of every single decision. Most fire departments are city funded, or township, or county funded. I know in my township we have a millage for fire protection, which is then doled out directly. No Federal involvement whatsoever. I know this is a typical arrangement across the country. When you keep the money close and cut the levels of bureaucracy things perform better. There has been a recent push all around for consolidation of fire departments with more government control. Not surprising most of the volunteers are against this power grab.
The local FD's were given some grant money post 9/11 for some chemical and radiation gear (my area is 50 miles from 2 nuclear plants), but that was a once in a blue moon sort of thing.
I wouldn't say/. is right wing at all (As currently defined). Libertarian on the philosophy charts is dead center which is where most/. stories show. In general/.ers dislike being tracked by corporations and feds, don't care for government mandated monopolies, actually like science (and understand it), have critical thinking skills (Which politicians of all callings dislike), and want an equal playing field for everyone. They're against corporatism, That means/. does correspond to the personal freedoms of the right wing, maybe the classical libertarian sense. But the being able to think for ourselves, are for more science across all things, believe in peer reviewed things like global warming, openly mock creationism, embrace open source free as in beer, would shred patent laws to something more logical, and has probably shared at least one title on a P2P network in their lifetime is definitely not right wing.
Oh and federal level responders aren't all they're cracked up to be. Forget the utter failure in New Orleans, even the recent wildfires in Texas had FEMA turning away help from the local firefighters. Since 71% of all firefighters in this country are volunteers it shows people are willing to put their lives on the line to help their fellow person without the gov't stepping in.
We need some sort of wiki for exposing flaws and hidden information that should be public. It'd be handy to see what secrets governments held. Also banking institutes. And it should be run in such a way that it doesn't make a rock star of the person running it while only actually leaking a few things. Maybe someone should get around to that someday...
Seriously, fuckedcompany had more corporate leaks than wikileaks ever has. Too bad pud sold out (Can't blame him for making money but it's a shame it's gone)
Remember Obama was against the illegal wiretaps as a congressman, but voted for it as a candidate, and has supported it as a President. (If I remember Dodd was the only Dem who voted against as a candidate). The Hope and Change came when O went from the legal scholar candidate advocating change to Bush part 3.
His proposed budget that cuts 1 trillion the first year rolls back funding levels to 2006 - not quite so ancient history. Yes there are a few departments axed, with sub-departments juggled around to others, and letting states manage things directly instead of the fed stepping in, but it's not 1787. He didn't say can the entire EPA, he said reduce it. The libertarian stance is to do no harm to others. If you pollute that harms others and you can be sued. Right now the EPA covers the asses of companies that meet their guidelines.
As an aside, I life in Michigan, across the lake from Chicago. Our air quality doesn't meet EPA requirements. At the lakeshore it doesn't meet air quality as the wind is coming from Chicago (And some from Gary). Right now the EPA is considering imposing extra air quality standards here. Extra expenses on businesses that would make us further anti-competitive to other counties and states. The EPA knows it's not a local issue but is still moving ahead. Yeah, that's the sort of thing that makes gov't agencies too powerful and in need of downsizing.
This time Ron Paul is in it to win it. Last time sure, Ron Paul was standing on his ideals and trying to bring the conversation to things that matter. This time he isn't running for re-election in congress. He's all in.
As to abolishing the Fed, the congressional oversight can't even get a full audit. Not even in private documents not to be shared with the public. Hard to have oversight when you don't even have the facts. He isn't for just killing the Fed, he has stated it should be first be curtailed back, stop lending money left and right secretly, and to shut off their money printing. One day he'd like it gone in an orderly fashion, but different than just axing.
I hate the FCC. They'll now have an extra 4.5 billion to give back to the major telcos, that already owe 300 billion in undelivered broadband. I harped on my local rep about this when he was head of the house subcommittee on telecommunications, but he was in the pocket of Telcos then. Since the telcos lobbied so hard to roll back the telco reform of '96, that ended up killing CLECs and ISPs, we know who will obviously win with a few billion more - the monopolies.
The libertarian answer would be to stop government mandated monopolies like we have. There used to be a few thousand ISPs and the local ones would bend over backwards to help people get online. Plenty of companies would be happy to hook you up, IF there was a fair playing ground. When the Telco reform was rolled back under Bush almost all those ISPs had to close because they couldn't compete against the monopolies again. So what should you do? Vote the bastards out of office who accept lobbying. Yeah that'd be most everyone but sooner or later we'd manage to get some good people in.
From a technical point of view, set up your own last mile. Meraki - now owned by Google - makes easy and good gear. A mile isn't that big of a deal for wireless and is rather cheap. Or your own cable.
Breeder reactors are in other countries, it's the issue of Regulation that is stopping them. Hence regulation is making our waste problem worse.
I live within 50 miles of two reactors on Lake Michigan. I hate that there are casks of spent fuel rods stored along the lakes. But I do trust the engineers so I'd be alright with them handling a better reactor.
It's marked funny but I'll respond since it raises a good point. If the company could just build a breeder reactor to use up most of the fuel we wouldn't have the problem.
Did anyone else lose all respect for wikileaks when they heard that? I like the idea of a watchdog keeping things honest. But when you have data that supposedly showed corruption for a megabank and allowed it to be deleted is simply bullshit. They obviously can't handle the tech side. Or was this all simply a front? Play out a little 'bad press' to keep the really ugly things hidden.... It's hard not to wear a tinfoil hat around this sort of thing.
I'll agree with you on the agribusiness. I live in lower Michigan and the small family farmers who are 3rd, 4th generation are selling because they can't make a go of it. With taxes and international competition a farmer with less than thousands of acres has real trouble. Part of that is unequal regulations - apples shipped in from China or Argentina don't have the same regulations to follow as those grown here, so they cost more, or unequal pay - if you're a farmer who pays an employee by the number of buckets of product they pick, that pay must still come out to minimum wage. That also doesn't work with competing against international companies. Also the credit crunch has been a pain to local farmers. Last season was a bumper crop of apples. Entire orchards went unpicked because the apple processors couldn't get their normal lines of credit to pay farmers for product. Many processors were not set up like Welch or other co-ops to pay after the fact so instead apples just went to waste.
Where I don't agree is thinking Paul's philosophy is moronic. Realistically both sides are just as bad at coming up with any ideas to solving problems and have been for decades. The debt problem isn't new, it's just finally hitting 100% of the GDP. Even the super committee of 12 to fix the budget is simply trimming future expenses so the debt keeps piling on. No one is giving any serious solutions other than Paul. Rolling back most everything to 2006 levels and letting states handle more things in block grant style makes sense. Also even tho he's proposing dropping a few departments some things within those departments will still exist elsewhere. For example, the Nuclear Regulatory Committee would be moved to the Department of Defense, etc. It's not just willy nilly chop things down without thought.
It's not just the regulations, it's the close ties between the banking and gov't. When the Treasury and Fed are both watching out for their personal bank interests of course there are going to be problems.
If I dig through my bookcase long enough I can find prior art. I picked up some novel at the airport once when I needed something to read. It was a supposed thriller, involved a genius who was kicked out of his own company, ended up stealing a voice automated handheld (or wrist held, don't recall exactly) computer that the masses loved and regained his company. It was obvious it was an apple-ish story, and this was nearly a decade ago. I'm guessing someone at apple read it too!
I wouldn't recommend it and I don't even remember the name...
Big companies using their political influence for better tax rates is not only good for their bottom line, it stops new startups from possibly threatening them. You see this with tax breaks also, a small startup will not get the tax exceptions for opening unless they bring in a large chunk of new employees all at once. When you can have a corporate staff of hundreds (Didn't GE have about 1000 tax lawyers?) it does make you far more competitive. Just more hurdles for all entrepreneurs out there.
I'm glad Cain's 9-9-9 plan is at least getting some coverage. I don't believe it's the best solution but a universally applied simple tax code, without being riddled with loopholes, does seem like a great idea. Of course those are the exact reasons why we'll never see one implemented.
Who says he failed? He got his message out, people are talking, and Google may not be able to ignore this. He can claim an oops but know he did it on purpose. Well played
A past FCC person and a telco guy followed the money trail and found agreements were made, taxes and subsidies were given to the tune of a 300 billion telco scandal. Just hold the past agreements accountable. But of course that won't happen. Hell my local congressman was head of the telecommunications subcommittee and always sided with his top donors - big telco, go figure.
Or put the 1996 telco reform back in effect, the one that demanded opening up the government mandated monopoly to competitors. This was stripped of power under Bush Jr when Powel's kis was put in charge of the FCC. Verizon sold their landline operations to Frontier. It's still a mandated monopoly, but Frontier did just put in the first DSLAM in this area. Some minor innovation a decade late. Those changes which initially allowed the local ISPs to open killed them when they were removed. Thousands of local ISPs dead because they couldn't compete against government mandated monopolies.
Alibaba, and a number of other sites like them, are horrible to do business with. Yes, it can be done. However even contacting the 'gold member' sellers that are supposed to have factories and company physically checked by alibaba often leads to failures to get the same offers they list on the site. If you can't find someone that will use an escrow, you ARE going to get ripped off. If you want a standard commodity then that's doable. If you want something tech oriented it can be a nightmare.
I recently was looking for a specific product and tried to find a seller on alibaba, newer-ish tech product. I found a valid looking gold member vendor, thought things were good, wired money... and never heard from the people again. So I wrote that off as me being stupid and not using an escrow. I found a few dozen companies that were all gold member rated (A paid service of Alibaba to verify the seller) and contacted them. My demands were simple, I wanted the listed minimum order and wanted to use the escrow which their listing also said they would do. Then a funny thing happened, I started getting 2 or 3 times as many emails back than I sent. Most from domains that had only been registered in the past few months, but they had my original RFQ information. None of the original companies responded, I can only imagine they're legit "fronts" to get the gold member star and employees either outright divert RFQs to another sister company, or do it without management knowing. I spent hours and could not find a single one that would do an escrow so I knew I'd be screwed. Thinking it was me, I went to a friend who is fluent in chinese and works in the tech industry and is living overseas. His advice was the service attracts those who think profit at all possibilities and has no qualms about outright defrauding the customer. In a nutshell it's an international craigslist with no buyer protection and more than likely you will get screwed.
The one place that may work is the aliexpress. It's a store front with multiple vendors and alibaba itself handles the transactions, and can pay with credit card. That does give you some buyer protection but pricing is nowhere near as attractice as the normal alibaba
How would that be any different than what Google or any other search provider does? They scrape a website and retain all the data and return it in a variety of ways. As long as robots.txt doesn't reject your crawler.
Yeah liberals want to vote for someone that wants to oh.. close Gitmo, Stop no bid contracts in the Government, not allow staff to instantly become lobbyists and vice versa, tax Big oil, negotiate health care on CPAN, stop warrentless wiretaps.. You know like candidate Obama, not like that guy currently in office.
Powel's Kid was running the FCC under Bush Jr. I assume that was part of the package to get Powel in with Bush, or just Powel pulling some strings for nepotism. That wouldn't be all so bad, it was when the kid rolled back all the anti-monopoly changes in the 1996 telco reform act and allowed wired lines their protected monopoly status again. You wonder why it's a duopoly in the states? The FCC under Bush is a major factor in this.
Oh also the lovely Rep Upton (R-MI) who was head of the house subcommittee on telecommunications (My Rep, go figure!) was very pro-big telco and supported these changes back to the old ways. Guess who his largest donors were? But Upton has moved along.. now he's just one of the super 12 fixing the budget. Yeah, that's gonna go over well.
So it's not just the FCC, it's the entire system that's rigged. Corporatism run wild.
Don't worry the telcos were given hundreds of billions and agreed to roll out fiber to the home in many cities and states. I'm sure that'll happen any day now, I mean they promised!
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If that's your take on the stories and comments I'm surprised. The EU handling of MS and the pirate party are far more libertarian and anti-corporatism than most US news. But well, if that's your take.
You're wrong about the fire departments. Most don't have Fed money. Also libertarians are against the Fed being the nanny of every single decision. Most fire departments are city funded, or township, or county funded. I know in my township we have a millage for fire protection, which is then doled out directly. No Federal involvement whatsoever. I know this is a typical arrangement across the country. When you keep the money close and cut the levels of bureaucracy things perform better. There has been a recent push all around for consolidation of fire departments with more government control. Not surprising most of the volunteers are against this power grab.
The local FD's were given some grant money post 9/11 for some chemical and radiation gear (my area is 50 miles from 2 nuclear plants), but that was a once in a blue moon sort of thing.
I wouldn't say /. is right wing at all (As currently defined). Libertarian on the philosophy charts is dead center which is where most /. stories show. In general /.ers dislike being tracked by corporations and feds, don't care for government mandated monopolies, actually like science (and understand it), have critical thinking skills (Which politicians of all callings dislike), and want an equal playing field for everyone. They're against corporatism, That means /. does correspond to the personal freedoms of the right wing, maybe the classical libertarian sense. But the being able to think for ourselves, are for more science across all things, believe in peer reviewed things like global warming, openly mock creationism, embrace open source free as in beer, would shred patent laws to something more logical, and has probably shared at least one title on a P2P network in their lifetime is definitely not right wing.
Oh and federal level responders aren't all they're cracked up to be. Forget the utter failure in New Orleans, even the recent wildfires in Texas had FEMA turning away help from the local firefighters. Since 71% of all firefighters in this country are volunteers it shows people are willing to put their lives on the line to help their fellow person without the gov't stepping in.
We need some sort of wiki for exposing flaws and hidden information that should be public. It'd be handy to see what secrets governments held. Also banking institutes. And it should be run in such a way that it doesn't make a rock star of the person running it while only actually leaking a few things. Maybe someone should get around to that someday...
Seriously, fuckedcompany had more corporate leaks than wikileaks ever has. Too bad pud sold out (Can't blame him for making money but it's a shame it's gone)
Remember Obama was against the illegal wiretaps as a congressman, but voted for it as a candidate, and has supported it as a President. (If I remember Dodd was the only Dem who voted against as a candidate). The Hope and Change came when O went from the legal scholar candidate advocating change to Bush part 3.
His proposed budget that cuts 1 trillion the first year rolls back funding levels to 2006 - not quite so ancient history. Yes there are a few departments axed, with sub-departments juggled around to others, and letting states manage things directly instead of the fed stepping in, but it's not 1787. He didn't say can the entire EPA, he said reduce it. The libertarian stance is to do no harm to others. If you pollute that harms others and you can be sued. Right now the EPA covers the asses of companies that meet their guidelines.
As an aside, I life in Michigan, across the lake from Chicago. Our air quality doesn't meet EPA requirements. At the lakeshore it doesn't meet air quality as the wind is coming from Chicago (And some from Gary). Right now the EPA is considering imposing extra air quality standards here. Extra expenses on businesses that would make us further anti-competitive to other counties and states. The EPA knows it's not a local issue but is still moving ahead. Yeah, that's the sort of thing that makes gov't agencies too powerful and in need of downsizing.
This time Ron Paul is in it to win it. Last time sure, Ron Paul was standing on his ideals and trying to bring the conversation to things that matter. This time he isn't running for re-election in congress. He's all in.
As to abolishing the Fed, the congressional oversight can't even get a full audit. Not even in private documents not to be shared with the public. Hard to have oversight when you don't even have the facts. He isn't for just killing the Fed, he has stated it should be first be curtailed back, stop lending money left and right secretly, and to shut off their money printing. One day he'd like it gone in an orderly fashion, but different than just axing.
I hate the FCC. They'll now have an extra 4.5 billion to give back to the major telcos, that already owe 300 billion in undelivered broadband. I harped on my local rep about this when he was head of the house subcommittee on telecommunications, but he was in the pocket of Telcos then. Since the telcos lobbied so hard to roll back the telco reform of '96, that ended up killing CLECs and ISPs, we know who will obviously win with a few billion more - the monopolies.
The libertarian answer would be to stop government mandated monopolies like we have. There used to be a few thousand ISPs and the local ones would bend over backwards to help people get online. Plenty of companies would be happy to hook you up, IF there was a fair playing ground. When the Telco reform was rolled back under Bush almost all those ISPs had to close because they couldn't compete against the monopolies again. So what should you do? Vote the bastards out of office who accept lobbying. Yeah that'd be most everyone but sooner or later we'd manage to get some good people in.
From a technical point of view, set up your own last mile. Meraki - now owned by Google - makes easy and good gear. A mile isn't that big of a deal for wireless and is rather cheap. Or your own cable.
Breeder reactors are in other countries, it's the issue of Regulation that is stopping them. Hence regulation is making our waste problem worse. I live within 50 miles of two reactors on Lake Michigan. I hate that there are casks of spent fuel rods stored along the lakes. But I do trust the engineers so I'd be alright with them handling a better reactor.
Just to nitpick, Ford didn't take a bailout. GM and Chrysler did.
It's marked funny but I'll respond since it raises a good point. If the company could just build a breeder reactor to use up most of the fuel we wouldn't have the problem.
Did anyone else lose all respect for wikileaks when they heard that? I like the idea of a watchdog keeping things honest. But when you have data that supposedly showed corruption for a megabank and allowed it to be deleted is simply bullshit. They obviously can't handle the tech side. Or was this all simply a front? Play out a little 'bad press' to keep the really ugly things hidden.... It's hard not to wear a tinfoil hat around this sort of thing.
I'll agree with you on the agribusiness. I live in lower Michigan and the small family farmers who are 3rd, 4th generation are selling because they can't make a go of it. With taxes and international competition a farmer with less than thousands of acres has real trouble. Part of that is unequal regulations - apples shipped in from China or Argentina don't have the same regulations to follow as those grown here, so they cost more, or unequal pay - if you're a farmer who pays an employee by the number of buckets of product they pick, that pay must still come out to minimum wage. That also doesn't work with competing against international companies. Also the credit crunch has been a pain to local farmers. Last season was a bumper crop of apples. Entire orchards went unpicked because the apple processors couldn't get their normal lines of credit to pay farmers for product. Many processors were not set up like Welch or other co-ops to pay after the fact so instead apples just went to waste.
Where I don't agree is thinking Paul's philosophy is moronic. Realistically both sides are just as bad at coming up with any ideas to solving problems and have been for decades. The debt problem isn't new, it's just finally hitting 100% of the GDP. Even the super committee of 12 to fix the budget is simply trimming future expenses so the debt keeps piling on. No one is giving any serious solutions other than Paul. Rolling back most everything to 2006 levels and letting states handle more things in block grant style makes sense. Also even tho he's proposing dropping a few departments some things within those departments will still exist elsewhere. For example, the Nuclear Regulatory Committee would be moved to the Department of Defense, etc. It's not just willy nilly chop things down without thought.
It's not just the regulations, it's the close ties between the banking and gov't. When the Treasury and Fed are both watching out for their personal bank interests of course there are going to be problems.
If I dig through my bookcase long enough I can find prior art. I picked up some novel at the airport once when I needed something to read. It was a supposed thriller, involved a genius who was kicked out of his own company, ended up stealing a voice automated handheld (or wrist held, don't recall exactly) computer that the masses loved and regained his company. It was obvious it was an apple-ish story, and this was nearly a decade ago. I'm guessing someone at apple read it too! I wouldn't recommend it and I don't even remember the name...
Big companies using their political influence for better tax rates is not only good for their bottom line, it stops new startups from possibly threatening them. You see this with tax breaks also, a small startup will not get the tax exceptions for opening unless they bring in a large chunk of new employees all at once. When you can have a corporate staff of hundreds (Didn't GE have about 1000 tax lawyers?) it does make you far more competitive. Just more hurdles for all entrepreneurs out there.
I'm glad Cain's 9-9-9 plan is at least getting some coverage. I don't believe it's the best solution but a universally applied simple tax code, without being riddled with loopholes, does seem like a great idea. Of course those are the exact reasons why we'll never see one implemented.
Who says he failed? He got his message out, people are talking, and Google may not be able to ignore this. He can claim an oops but know he did it on purpose. Well played
A past FCC person and a telco guy followed the money trail and found agreements were made, taxes and subsidies were given to the tune of a 300 billion telco scandal. Just hold the past agreements accountable. But of course that won't happen. Hell my local congressman was head of the telecommunications subcommittee and always sided with his top donors - big telco, go figure.
Or put the 1996 telco reform back in effect, the one that demanded opening up the government mandated monopoly to competitors. This was stripped of power under Bush Jr when Powel's kis was put in charge of the FCC. Verizon sold their landline operations to Frontier. It's still a mandated monopoly, but Frontier did just put in the first DSLAM in this area. Some minor innovation a decade late. Those changes which initially allowed the local ISPs to open killed them when they were removed. Thousands of local ISPs dead because they couldn't compete against government mandated monopolies.
Trying to replicate what they did with the Eldridge?
Alibaba, and a number of other sites like them, are horrible to do business with. Yes, it can be done. However even contacting the 'gold member' sellers that are supposed to have factories and company physically checked by alibaba often leads to failures to get the same offers they list on the site. If you can't find someone that will use an escrow, you ARE going to get ripped off. If you want a standard commodity then that's doable. If you want something tech oriented it can be a nightmare.
I recently was looking for a specific product and tried to find a seller on alibaba, newer-ish tech product. I found a valid looking gold member vendor, thought things were good, wired money... and never heard from the people again. So I wrote that off as me being stupid and not using an escrow. I found a few dozen companies that were all gold member rated (A paid service of Alibaba to verify the seller) and contacted them. My demands were simple, I wanted the listed minimum order and wanted to use the escrow which their listing also said they would do. Then a funny thing happened, I started getting 2 or 3 times as many emails back than I sent. Most from domains that had only been registered in the past few months, but they had my original RFQ information. None of the original companies responded, I can only imagine they're legit "fronts" to get the gold member star and employees either outright divert RFQs to another sister company, or do it without management knowing. I spent hours and could not find a single one that would do an escrow so I knew I'd be screwed. Thinking it was me, I went to a friend who is fluent in chinese and works in the tech industry and is living overseas. His advice was the service attracts those who think profit at all possibilities and has no qualms about outright defrauding the customer. In a nutshell it's an international craigslist with no buyer protection and more than likely you will get screwed.
The one place that may work is the aliexpress. It's a store front with multiple vendors and alibaba itself handles the transactions, and can pay with credit card. That does give you some buyer protection but pricing is nowhere near as attractice as the normal alibaba
How would that be any different than what Google or any other search provider does? They scrape a website and retain all the data and return it in a variety of ways. As long as robots.txt doesn't reject your crawler.
Yeah liberals want to vote for someone that wants to oh.. close Gitmo, Stop no bid contracts in the Government, not allow staff to instantly become lobbyists and vice versa, tax Big oil, negotiate health care on CPAN, stop warrentless wiretaps.. You know like candidate Obama, not like that guy currently in office.
Powel's Kid was running the FCC under Bush Jr. I assume that was part of the package to get Powel in with Bush, or just Powel pulling some strings for nepotism. That wouldn't be all so bad, it was when the kid rolled back all the anti-monopoly changes in the 1996 telco reform act and allowed wired lines their protected monopoly status again. You wonder why it's a duopoly in the states? The FCC under Bush is a major factor in this. Oh also the lovely Rep Upton (R-MI) who was head of the house subcommittee on telecommunications (My Rep, go figure!) was very pro-big telco and supported these changes back to the old ways. Guess who his largest donors were? But Upton has moved along.. now he's just one of the super 12 fixing the budget. Yeah, that's gonna go over well. So it's not just the FCC, it's the entire system that's rigged. Corporatism run wild.
I've never played XIV. The dress up game of X2 made me stay away from FF.
It's not in effect yet so not a problem
Don't worry the telcos were given hundreds of billions and agreed to roll out fiber to the home in many cities and states. I'm sure that'll happen any day now, I mean they promised!