No. A politician SHOULD change his mind based on changing conditions or if he realizes he was wrong. Lord knows its one of Bush's biggest flaws that he can never admit he was wrong apparently even to himself.
That's not what Kerry does though. He changes his position to pander what he thinks the audience he is after at the moment wants to hear. He seems to be oblivious to the fact, that in the electronic age, people are going to notice that he is taking both sides of key issues depending on the audience. I think the Republicans have a film with cuts where he contradicts himself over and over and its going to drive home this fact.
During the primary Kerry was a firebrand liberal in order to beat Dean at his game, and now since the Dem vote is locked up he's morphed in to Mr. Middle of the road centrist to sucker the independents.
I may be naive but I think sometime before an election a candidate should establish his positions, tell everyone what they are, and let the cards fall where they will. He comes across like he is playing all of his supporters as chumps and thats why so many people really dislike him.
I pretty much gagged when he opened his convention speech with the salute and "Reporting for Duty". Maybe the still photos worked but to me he couldn't have done anything more to come across as a complete phony.
I guess I'm not following your point. I guess you are saying all of Israel's killing is justified, they only kill terrorists, never civilians, and its just the Palestinian's who are the indiscriminate killers? Anyone who says Isreal kills civilians is a Palastinian propagandist?
You are saying bombing an apartment building was justified because someone you don't like was in it. I don't remember exactly who the target was in the incident I'm thinking of. If it was such a noble act I doubt the U.S. would have condemned it as much as they did or not would 20 or so Israeli Air Force pilots would have forfeited their careers over it. There are so many civilians killed by both sides I lose track.
To make of for my bad memory here. is an article on another bombing that just happened, 17 dead, 15 civilians, 11 children. Is Haaretz Palastinian propaganda? Perhaps the children were body gaurds or relatives of some terrorist so maybe its OK they were killed too.
You see I don't think you should, with good conscience, try to pretend one side is always the right one in this particular situation. Its reached the point both sides are very wrong and they should both be very ashamed.
"At least 209 Greens in 27 states hold elected office as of July 2004."
Uh, those are city council, a few mayors, school boards etc, mostly in very liberal cities, mostly in California. I think I saw one state legislator in the whole list. Give me a ring when they have a contingent at a state house large enough to influence legistlation or elect some one to governor or the House of Representatives.
Here is a write up by one of their own on their recent presidential nominating fiasco to balance the rosy picture from their web site. I can dig up some more on what a mess they are on the national level. I'll give you they have some successful local efforts in very left enclaves scattered around the country but that isn't going to take them anywhere on a national stage.
In my heart I really wish they could compete on the national stage but its really just not very realistic unless they find some extremely charismatic and powerful candidate that will attract attention at a state or national level and overcome the fact that the media is going to ignore anyone other than Jesse, Ralph or Ross.
"Oh, and the reason we have to go with Israel is because they don't strap bombs on kids and have them walk into pizza parlors full of other kids and blow themselves up."
Not sure I follow your point. They don't need to strap bombs on kids, instead they can just drop them from an F-16 or shoot a missile from an Apache. Remember the 500 pound Israel dropped on a crowded apartment building in Gaza, as a ham handed way to assassinate one guy. It ended up killing, inevitably, all the innocent women and children in the building. A number of loyal Israel pilots sacrificed their careers, and lives, to protest that incident, along with targeting of cars with missiles on crowded streets because it shows Israel is no better or different in the indiscriminate killing department.
The world needs to realize that both sides in that conflict have issues. As long as the world divides up in two camps and chooses to pretend one side is always a saint and the other is the devil, and vice versa, its going to insure perpetual blood shed and a breeding ground for extremism on all sides.
This is a key reason why the U.S. can't win the "War on Terror" on its current path, because it can't fathom it has to fix the root causes of the animosity of the Arab world towards the U.S. and Isreal. Doing that would deprive the extremists of much of the support they are now getting from more moderate Arabs.
Corrections he says he is anti-offshoring at the moment because he considers it to be a good way to win votes. Its anybody's guess if he would be anti-offshoring if he got elected or would really do anything about it other add a couple of new incomprehensible changes to the tax code that may or may not discourage it.
If you recall Kerry voted for the war in Iraq and for the Patriot Act. During the primary when Dean was killing him on these two planks he magically became a crusader against the war and the Patriot Act. As soon as he locked up the Democratic nomination he rapidly backpedaled on both issues to court indepentent voters who aren't as hard over on these two planks. Haven't heard him say anything on the Patriot act lately and his position on Iraq is nothing but muddled. He seems to be both for and against it.
I don't have any use for the Bush machine but they are hitting the nail on the head calling him a flip flopper. The quandry for independent voters, do you vote for the incumbent who is obviously bad and dangerous, or a challeneger who might turn out OK or could just as easily turn out worse, you simply can't predict what position he will have five minutes after you elect him.
Well actually it is. The two major parties have created countless hurdles in most states that are designed to prevent a third party or independent from ever gaining traction. Iowa officially disbanded the Green Party because they couldn't muster 2 percent of the vote in the 2002 governor's race at which point the party ceased to exist, it was disallowed a primary this year and candidates have to petition to get on the ballot. Of course since its disbanded its even harder to garner the 2% this year to regain party status.
It takes enormous effort just to get on the ballots in most states if you aren't in the two major parties, and of course a 3rd party presidential candidate has a very slim chance of participating in televised debates.
If there was ever a cause for an addition to the Bill of Rights it should be an amendment to allow unfettered formation of political parties and to forbid the parties in power from suppressing formation of opposition parties. It is something you expect from a totalitarian state, not the worlds "Greatest Democracy".
Another problem is both the Reform and Green parties have deteriorated in to a complete shambles on their own, they simply lack a coherent organization and appear to have fallen in to chaos which is killing them without all the barriers the Dems and Republicans are throwing in front of them.
And finally most people who would opt for Nader or other third parties are so keen to see George W. go down they will vote for Kerry, even though he is a truly pathetic candidate. Fact is in the current system voting 3rd party really is throwing away your vote and the two major parties don't really care if you do it. They'd like your vote but as long as you don't for the other major candidate its the same as if you don't vote at all.
The two copyright issues cited here really aren't the most serious things in the world. Like it or not Meet the Press is copyrighted and NBC can do with it what they will. It is a little lame holding back something unflattering to the President but there is a wealth of other video and transcripts available that will do that.
There are other things about both candidates that I'm amazed the press doesn't cover though.
President Bush's cocaine use and the fact that he apparently refused his national guard flight physical when they instituted drug testing, and that he was apparently convicted in Texas for something, probably Cocaine possession, should disqualify him as President but the press almost never touches this, possibly because the Bush family did such a great job of disposing of all the proof. Its a near certainty Bush political operatives were given unsupervised access to George W.'s Guard records and amazingly the Army recently admitted some of his records, probably the embarrassing ones have in fact been destroyed.
Kerry has his skeletons too that the press never touches. His Vietnam record and the ease with which he racked up medals cetainly does deserve scrutiny. For some reason the press lets everyone think Kerry is a Kennedyesque Irish Catholic when his paternal grand parents were actually Austro/Hungarian and Jewish. His name would be John Kohn if they hadn't changed their name to Kerry when the immigrated to the U.S. in 1902. When you are electing a President these little things are good to know, since they may color his decision making on Isreal in particular, but for some reason today's Press only fillets candidates like Dean they want to drive out of contention because they aren't pro establishment enough. Dean was toast the day he had the audacity to suggest the U.S. treat Israel and the Palastinians equally. You want to get elected in the U.S. you always side with Israel all the way or you are going down.
I think I'd disagree with you though I guess its all how you define "any significant way". The Pentagon budget declined from $319.7 billion in 1991 to a low of $266 billion in 1996 and thats not factoring in inflation. It dropped briefly in 1965 and when Vietnam was winding down but otherwise its been up every year since 1962.
The obviously disturbing trend is the fact that its exploded from $295 billion in 2000 to $410 billion now and thats NOT including expenditures in Afghanistan and Iraq. The Bush administration has been running those exepenses on a separate budget in an effort to conceal the true size of the DOD budget and to avoid sticker shock if Americans saw the real figure which must be approaching $500 billion now, $300 billion to $500 billion in 4 years is a massive escalation especially facing a rag tag band of Muslim insurgents with no weapons other than those they improvise.
Its also useful to reflect on the massive inflation during the Reagan years. Bush and Reagan, what a pair of book ends.
"Speaking as an employer, I'm very happy with this trend."
I think I should put this another way. The fact that you are happy as an employer means its an employer's market. Thats just another way say that CS sucks as a career.
You presumably have more and better candidates to choose from and you can play them less. Whats not to like from an employers point of view.
Protected from whom? Hate to break it to you but that old American saw doesn't cut anymore.
NATO is an empty shell with no real adversary any more and there is a deep schism between Old Europe and the New America.
The U.S. lacks the capacity to protect anyone from Islamic extremists for the most part.
Russia and China are economic partners more than military threat at the moment. I guess there is North Korea but about the only one the U.S. really protects from them is South Korea. If a war starts there Seoul is going to be a major casualty whatever. The U.S. is apparently going to draw down the ground force and most South Koreans want the U.S. military to leave.
There are other assorted third rate dictators scattered around but the EU could deal with them if they had to.
To be honest, in the new world order, where the U.S. has given itself the prerogative to launch preemptive warfare against any enemy, real or imagined, most countries have this gnawing question in the back of their minds. Who will protect them from the U.S. if:
A. The U.S. decides to use its military supremacy to intimidate them politically or to extract economic advantage B. The U.S. decide to outright invade them under false pretenses as was the case in Iraq.
"Speaking as an employer, I'm very happy with this trend."
As an employer I'm glad for you. Of course it doesn't change the fact that it is an increasingly poor career to embark on as an employee unless you live in India, China etc. But most fields are bad in the U.S. now thanks to out sourceing outside of maybe healthcare, trial lawyer, MBA, politician or journalist. Its even worse if you've committed a big chunk of your life developing skills and experience in a profession that is now over the hill if you live in the U.S., the land where the only things we make any more are drugs and weapons.
You may well find the quality of the graduates in the U.S. craters again when no one with talent will opt for it because the job market is so bad thanks to out sourceing and a continuing surplus of programmers that will crater salaries. It is, in a lot of ways a field that has peaked and is declining.
A. You have to work really hard to find work that isn't just tedious. B. You are fighing Microsoft's monopoly at one end(unless you work for them and I wager that isn't quite the sweet deal it used to be with them out sourceing too and looking to cut costs). In reality proprietary software companies tend to be sucky places to work except when the salary and options make up for it. C. You are fighting open source at the other end and its pretty hard to compete against an army of people, many of whom are working for free.
The burning question is why are you hiring American CS grads anyway. Indian grads are probably better on average, they work harder for a small fraction of what you will have to pay someone in the U.S. Its nice and all to have people sitting in your U.S. office doing the work but the economics and necessity simply aren't there any more for most programming work.
The U.S. appears headed to a situation where its engineer pool will be working largely in defense and intelligence where non U.S. citizens are excluded by law. Its kind of fitting since the U.S. has had Seymour Melmans's "permanent war economy" since they end of World War II, and the Pentagon's budget is in reality the world's largest planned economy, a concept that should cause Republican's brains to explode since they worship free markets, in theory, but also worship the Pentagon whose huge economy is the antithesis of free market.
The 90's were only a brief respite from gross overspending on the military, and isn't it amazing that the U.S. economy boomed, employment soared and we had budget surpluses and that never happens any more. Sure there was a bubble but there was also a major downturn in wasting the economy on the military.
Now the permanent war economy is back with a vengeance and it sucks. The bad thing about working on weapons is:
A. They contribute very little real economic value unless you sell them to other countries, they prevent an attack or you use them to loot and pillage other countries. Otherwise they are economic black hole and most other countries aren't squandering their treasure on at the same rate the U.S. is giving them a real economic edge.
B. They weapons are ultimately designed to kill people and destroy countries so its not the most spiritually satisfying work.
"The argument against using foreign labor to produce goods cheaper is very similar to the (stupid) argument that free software is bad for the economy because it hurts the profits some proprietary software companies."
How stupid it is depends on where you're standing. If you are a shareholder in a company using cheap foreign labor, selling cheap foreign goods or you are buying cheap goods in Walmart then foreign labor is wonderful. If you work for a living and you live in the U.S. today foreign labor means there is a high probability you are going to be pushed in to poverty unless you:
A. Go in to business for yourself and succeed, which is pretty hard especially without capital
B. Have a skill or ability that is immune to out sourceing. There are ever fewer of those skills. Might I suggest C{E,F,I,T}O, health care, trial lawyer, politician or journalist.
Trade barriers existed for a simple reason some countries have higher standards of living than others, lower standards for working conditions, artificially valued currencies, willingness to dump goods to take over markets etc. If you erase all the trade barriers most workers are going to be pushed down to a uniform wage of around $0.35/hr. You can live on that in China but not the U.S.
"Actually the better solution is getting rid of income and payroll taxes completely and replacing them with a national sales tax."
A sales tax would be wonderful, I'd actually almost go for it, but for the one fact it is the most regressive of taxes. Low income people spend all their income buying things so all their income is taxed. The wealthy don't spend most of their income, and they accumulate ever more by investing what they have. Switching to a national sales tax would dramatically accelerate the percentage of the nations wealth accumulating in the hands of that lucky top 1%, and its already accumulating there fast enough. That is the key thing Republicans refuse to acknowledge about taxes. Everthing they yearn for, elimination of inheritence, dividend and capital gains taxes, leads directly to massive and rapid accumulation of wealth in the hands of an ever smaller, ever luckier few. The more the wealth concentrates in their hands the less there is for everyone else. It is really easy to make money if you already have it. America has had periods like this, the gilded age being one of the worst. They lead to social upheaval when working people get sick of the rich getting ever richer doing nothing, while most people can't stay above water working all day every day. It lead to Progressives like Teddy Roosevelt who gave us progressive taxes to try to reign it in, a system Bush is rapdily dismantling insuring a new gilded age.
A far better tax is a pure income tax, no deductions, no loopholes with the wealthy paying a higher percentage because they can afford it. The current system would work if you got rid of all the loopholes designed to engineer behavior or give outs to the people who are willing to play the system or cheat. You could do away with corporate taxes as long as you compel them to pay out most of their profits as dividends instead of hordeing like Microsoft did.
"..a lot more now than it was 10 years ago."
Uh, why is that. Al Qaeda has no major weapons. America's gold plated weapons systems are nearly useless against them. You don't need an F-22 to shoot down a hijacked airliner. You don't need a B-2 to bomb caves and mud huts in Afghanistan. There are NO targets in Iraq and Afghanistan now where you aren't more likely to kill civilians than you are insurgents especially with massive fire power from high tech weapons.
The only thing the military needs at the moment is:
A. boots on the ground, especially special forces.
B. Intelligence that works (i.e. not multibillion dollar spy satellites, not intelligence that is a complete lie because it was cooked to suit the needs of politicians like Wolfowitz, not massive PR events over a laptop with 3 year old data th
"Yeah, how dare they put national security above political expediency?"
I didn't say tap it, I just said stop filling it during a time when oil is very expensive and supplies are tight. There is a lot of oil in the reserve already, it would be nice to stop filling it until Yukos and various other problems are sorted out.
"I see you and Michael Moore share the same definition of "fact"."
Uh what are Republicans for then. They are overwhelmingly the party of rich white men and corporations. Those people care about profits and wealth accumulation to the exclusion of just about everything else. They do sucker a lot of less affluent whites into support them but its using sucker social issues like religion, militarism, abortion etc. They have to because there aren't enough rich white men to win an election.
"Yes please, save me from the tyranny of Walmart's low prices. I also understand there's this product called "Linux", created largely with foreign labor, that's cutting into the profits of real American companies like Microsoft and SCO."
The point you are trying to make here is completely lost on me other than I assume you are trying to slam Linux and troll using Microsoft and SCO. Didn't work. Your statement is just bait still dangling on a forlorn hook.
"Corporations don't pay taxes"
Well then why do the Republicans keep howling about the corporate tax burden? You glossed over the basic problem, why should a corporation be able to make money, not pay taxes on it and then dole it out share holders as dividends who also don't have to pay taxes on it. They didn't do any real work for it, they just had money and they made more money and they don't get taxed. Sweet job if you can get it. Meanwhile someone scraping by working for a living can't escape payroll taxes or income taxes and they end up increasingly carry the tax burden.
"But isn't it funny how the left howls..."
You seem to be operating under the delusion that I'm left or Democrat because I'm not a Republican. Believe it or not there are more than two sides in the world. I'm half arch conservative and half populist. I like my government as small as possible which means I'm not really left or democrat, but if you are going to tax I want you to tax the people that can pay first which makes me populist.
Social security was simply a dumb idea in its inception. When it was passed most people didn't live to retirement age. Now everyone lives 20-30 years past it and its eventually going to be untenable, now its just a huge burden on the young. Since the early eighties when the taxes were jack up its been mostly a regressive tax on the young and both parties are to blame for looting. I really just want the money I put in back, with minimal interest, instead of gambling I make it to some ridiculously high retirement age or that there is even any program left when I'm that old.
"Sort of true, except that the Iraq war wasn't intended to show a profit. If we wanted their oil, all we had to do was buy it (like France); that's far cheaper than paying to blow stuff up and paying again to rebuild it."
Excepting of course it was embargoed and only being sold through the corrupt UN oil for food program. The invasion did manage to put it back on the open market at least during the periods their pipelines aren't burning.
Its pretty native to paint it as either we did to take their oil or thats not why we did it. It is telling the Bremer spent a couple percent of the U.S. funds for rebuilding and he spent every bit of Iraq currents and near future oil revenue and most of it on U.S. companies like Halliburton.
The U.S. is in Iraq because the U.S. wanted a permanent military force in the heart of the oil rich Middle East. They had it in Saudi Arabia but the Saudi's put to many constraints on the U.S. military based there. In Iraq the U.S. has a compliant puppet government and can use Iraq as the base for future intimidation or invasion to insure control of oil
I can believe "do no evil" of Larry and Sergey, they are smart geeks who will make some well deserved wealthy without doing evil and still have some of their ideals in tact.
But, since it became clear Google was the last big pot of gold from the dot com boom I'm pretty confident Google has filled up with plenty of other people, mostly business people, who will do any evil, in a heart beat, to maximize the money they make out of the IPO. Maybe Larry and Sergey can fend them off or dilute them, but I imagine it depends on what percentage of shares they still hold and how much power they've given up in the march to Wall Street.
As soon as Google is on Wall Street and on the "make the quarterly numbers" tread mill I assure you they will probably also do just about any evil necessary, just look at Red Hat and VA.
"I really think a lot more is attributed to presidents than is actually the case"
Not sure I entirely agree. If there is gridlock with different parties holding the White House and at least one house in Congress then yes, the President's influence is greatly undermined.
When a party controls the White House and both houses of Congress the President has a great deal of control of many things that influence the economy, the only brakes being the fillibuster in the Senate and the courts. Dick Cheney has been sitting in the capitol writing key pieces of legislation like Medicare reform in secret Republican only conferences.
For better or worse depending on how it ends up Bush/Cheney deserve a great deal of credit for how things go in the near term. The main thing they lack total control over is oil prices, but its telling that during a time when oil is tight they are continuing to fill the strategic reserve, making it tighter, which tends to suggest they are, for whatever reason, OK with sky high oil prices. It certainly benefits their many allies in the oil business and increases pressure to open drilling in ANWAR. With prices as high as they are you would think they would at least stop filling the reserve until after the election.
A key reason jobs do better under Democrats is a simple fact. Republicans care first and foremost about profits and wealth accumulation for the wealthiest few percent in the nation and the large corporations in their industrial base finance, energy, defense, pharma, health care. They don't care about job creation other than to give it lip service to get elected. High unemployment is good from their perspective because it keeps wages down and profit margins up. They want corporations to do plenty of business and grow but with the fewest, most underpaid workers possible. Free trade, container shipping, cheap telecommunications was a god send to the Republicans because now corporations can tap cheap, disciplined, labor in China and India, and can grow without the annoyance of high costs and increasingly poor labor quality in the U.S. ever again.
Some things Presidents control when they control Congress too:
- Tax policy, which is currently massively rewarding the wealthy and is not really creating jobs in the U.S. The corporate share of the tax burden is down to %9, an historic low. Its a myth U.S. corporations face a huge tax burden. They would were it not for huge loopholes that let most large companies pay no taxes. To compound this, wealthy share holders no longer pay taxes on dividends. The argument was corporations pay taxes on the profits so it was double taxation to tax dividens. Well since corporations don't pay their share of the tax burden this was a lie but dividend taxes were rescinded anyway. Dividends are now a huge untaxed windfall profit for the wealthy which is why Microsoft is paying out $36 billion in dividends. Meanwhile payroll taxes, which hit the low and middle income people, are still at record highs and the social security surplus from those taxes is being redirected in to general spending, in a way to help fund tax cuts for the wealthy. For all practical purposes the U.S. is moving to a regressive taxation system where the lower and middle class are shouldering the burden while the wealthy are accumulating wealth at historically high rates.
- They control the size of the Federal Budget and deficit. Their massive deficit spending was a gigantic short term stimulus to the economy and almost single handedly spurred the recent 4-5% growth. A half trillion deficit corresponds pretty closely to this growth rate in an $11 trillion economy. It is however extraordinarily unsound long term policy and just about everyone is saying it including the World Bank and IMF which are U.S. lap dogs. It is not free market economics the Republican's claim to be such big fans of when most of the economic growth is do to Federal spending with borrowed money.
- The extent of military spending is out of control
Guess it depends on whether you are writing code or doing mister answer man. If you are the team architect or an admin then yes you need lots of interaction but I've never really found it necessary to be out in the open to be accessible. Accessibility is more an attitude than a physical state. An obvious problem is most of the people around you may not want to hear a steady stream of Q&A, if it doesn't relate to what they are working on, just so you can feel appreciated. A tech discussion is way better in an office with a white board with the interested people in the room.
I don't recall any cube farm recently where most people weren't jacked in to music most of the time in a vain attempt to filter out the NOISE.
Exactly right. Free meals, free beer, cheap soft drinks are nice and all but they can be synonymous to peanuts the exec's throw to their chimps to reward them for doing good tricks. Free meals are cool but they are there first and foremost to nudge you in to putting in more uncompensated overtime.
Over the years I've set my priorities from hard experience:
A. Make sure the company's executive team isn't looting the company through stock options, signing bonuses for their own, interest free loans that turn in to gifts etc. If they are giving them to themselves make sure they are giving them to performers in the engineering offices, too. The more they loot the less there will be for incentives for worker bees and to fund adequate staffing.
B. If the company goes through a hard patch make sure the execs are sacrificing MORE than the working people, because they are making a lot more. If you go in to one of those "sacrifice" meetings and you have guts ask the head cheese to tell you what sacrifices he and his bosses are making. If he can't answer, gets pissed off or you get laid off for it you don't want to be there anyway.
C. Opt for a company that will give you a walled office over a cube nearly every time. It indicates they really do value you and they want you to be productive. If they are shoving you in cubes they probably view you at the same level as cattle to be milked, especially if they are all in plush offices. It pretty much sicks if the execs are in cubes too because execs shouldn't me sitting in the middle of a cube farm talking about confidential things.
D. Make sure the executives have the vision and ability to create a successful product and are building a team to produce one. 80+ hour weeks kind of suck but they suck a lot more if the product ends up being a disaster, since disasters usually mean layoffs versus the payoff that follow success, plus it just feels good to be proud of something you put so much effort in. If the product is successful make sure there is a payoff for the worker bees and not just the execs or you should either:
A. Aspire to be an exec and learn to do all the underhanded things necessary to become one, golf skills are a must.
Think about this -- if the Cornell UAV team hadn't accomplished something unprecedented, would it have been "news for nerds"?
I'm a little confused. What did they do that was "unprecedented" other than put XP and.NET in a UAV. UAV's have been done since the V1 which is about 65 years now, and there have been lots of people doing low budget versions in recent years. It is a lot of work and a great university engineering project, like the DARPA grand challenge, and a good read for the Slashdot crown, but "unprecedented" and "news" is a bit of a stretch especially when you can crutch off GPS and modern computers and instrumentation.
"SS has always been a "pay as you go" program where current employees pay to support current retirees."
Then the government should adjust the rates each year so that it is pay as you go and they aren't raking in huge surpluses in the form of regressive payroll taxes that are impacting those who can least afford it the most. The government massively increased Social Security taxes to insure its long term solvency but instead of doing that they are using the huge surpluses to subsidize tax cuts for the wealthy and massive spending increases for the DOD, etc. When the baby boomers hit retirement and as life expectancy continues to grow, instead of having a pool of billions of dollars from all those surpluses to keep it solvent, the government will "reform" social security which translates in to:
- Hiking payroll taxes again - Cutting benefits again
Your point that the government couldn't invest the money is also bogus. They can put it in money markets or make more money available for home mortgages. Or they can do what the Republicans want and privatize it so all of its going to go in to the stock market anyway.
I am with the Republican's in spirit but not with their underhanded plan which is to force all the social security money in to the pockets of their stock broker/banker friends who can accidentally lose all in to their pockets in stock market manipulations.
I really want all the payroll taxes I've paid back in my bank account for me to invest or waste as I see fit rather than it going in to a giant slush fund for politicians to squander.
The burning question is how can SUN open source Solaris without further undercutting SCO's case or joining the ranks of the sued. I'm pretty sure Solaris must have encumbrances from SCO/ATT Unix. Did they get SCO to renounce all rights with the $10 million dollar payoff. Regardless if SUN open sources things like ELF I can't see how this wouldn't knock another leg out from under the teetering chair that is the only thing left keeping SCO from finishing the job of hanging themselves.
You miss the key point that governments do, in fact, have a tendency to abuse their power and its become increasingly difficult for ordinary citizens to do anything to stop it. Most of what the parent said were legitimate concerns and not something that deserved a "wacko" rating.
On the tax front the most obvious example of government abusing its power is payroll taxes. In America working people are obligated to pay relatively steep social security taxes out of our wages. This would be all well and good if we had assurance our money was going in to a "lock box" that would be there for retirement with some reasonable interest. Unfortunately it doesn't. The rather hefty social security surplus is instead being spent to defray a rather huge budget deficit, much of it created by recent hefty tax cuts for the wealthy and increasingly out of control spending. Social security has become a regressive tax, it impacts the least affluent the hardest and is being used to help reduce the tax burden on the wealthy. There is great potential the system will be bankrupt by the time many of us reach retirement unless they jack up the social security taxes again like they did in the early 80's which is where the current surplus comes from. It is a simple example of government abusing ordinary people and they are largely powerless to stop it since the Democrats and Republican's have both abused it in different ways.
Another example of government abusing the will of the people is when political appointees take action that is contrary to the best interests of the people and are only occasionally reigned in by Congress. The actions of the FCC and Michael Powell to allow further concentration of power in the hand of a few huge media monopolies is a great example. It is very detrimental to the people in that they lose diversity in opinion and information but ordinary people are increasingly powerless to stop it. It is very beneficial to Viacom, Disney, Clear Channel and Rupert Murdoch, who have the wealth and lobbying power to get their way while ordinary people don't, except through increasingly meaningless elections.
Now lets move to black boxes in cars. I certainly have no problem if the ONLY thing they are used for is to collect data for an accident investigation. Unfortunately it is a slippery slope, and watch that first step. Step #2 and #3 are the killers. They put in a GPS system to improve the quality of the data and #3 they put in a satellite up and down link like OnStar to provide better "service". At that point, not only don't you own the roads, you don't own your car. Someone can remotely lock and unlock your car, kill the engine or track your every movement.
As long as you assume your government is benevolent, and they or you never do anything wrong, maybe you don't care. But many people in the world live in places where the government isn't benevolent, increasingly the U.S. among them. Having gone this far down the slippery slope what is to say the government wont start using this technology to track political dissidents and opponents. For example Tom Delay abused the current Homeland security system to try to track down Texas legislators who fled Texas to try to stop an essentially illegal gerrymandering of Texas congressional districts by the Republicans to insure their control of the House. With black boxes in every car Delay could have had an instant locating service so the Texas rangers could have had an extra edge in tracking them down and rounding them up to force them to vote.
Another example, perhaps these could be used by a party in power to track the movements of their opposition in a fishing expedition to catch them in compromising situations, at a hotel with a mistress for example.
Or perhaps the government could start tracking the cars of of known protest leaders so they would have advanced warning of meetings to organize protests or people on the way to protests so the government could take preemptive action, arrest them for speeding, or put up ro
"A victory doesn't count until you have a 19 year old with a rifle standing on that bit of ground."
A victory doesn't count until you win the hearts and minds, one way or another, of the people who live on the ground where the 19 year old is standing. As long as there are people with weapons, and the will to resist, who see the 19 year old as a target you haven't really won anything.
"For, although one may be very strong in armed forces, yet in entering a province one has always need of the goodwill of the natives"
Machiavelli, "The Prince"
Not sure the doctrine that you have victory when you have a guy with a rifle standing on captured ground has worked since World War I and it didn't really work then either.
Don't think you can say much better or anything difference about CSC or the rest of the small cadre of IT companies who specialize in winning government contracts around the globe. They've had their share of multibillion dollar fiascos too.
The problem with these companies is they specialize in winning big contracts. They put their best people on the proposals. They don't specialize in delivering great systems. Their best people probably move to the next RFP and they mostly fill the contracts with warm bodies.
They can get away with it because its pretty rare for them to actually be punished for poor performance. If they get blacklisted by the agency that awarded the contract the agency ends up just replacing EDS with CSC or vice versa and the results don't get any better. I'd be interested if someone could cite a huge government IT contract that actually worked well. At some point governments need to figure out this methodology doesn't work and try something new.
Not sure I agree with your point. If IT proposes this change and their lawyers see the possibility of a protracted legal fight with SCO, I imagine their reaction would be less than positive unless they are getting paid extra for all the hours they will spend on the case. Maybe you can argue over the whether the off the cuff term "deer in the headlights" is right, but its a simple fact everything SCO has been doing is designed to make companies who want to use Linux feel like a "deer in the headlights" and send SCO large checks to get them to shut off the lights and put on the brakes. You can be sure Gates and Balmer want SCO to produce this effect, and I wouldn't be surprised if Scooter McNealy likes the effect too.
I would doubt that Lockheed's lawyers are as worried about the legal ramifications of Linux as they might have been a few months ago. SCO's case is looking weaker with every new twist.
This kind of sounds like this is an evaluation stage and it may or may nor happen. It will be more likely to happen when they put an official press release out which doesn't appear to be the case yet.
They may well be using the threat of this switch to wring concessions out of SUN or Microsoft and if they get them they may well back out. Linux has become a pretty effective tool for blackmailing proprietary vendors if nothing else.
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I think his grandfather was Austrian and his grandmather Hungarian. I was just being terse. Chill.
No. A politician SHOULD change his mind based on changing conditions or if he realizes he was wrong. Lord knows its one of Bush's biggest flaws that he can never admit he was wrong apparently even to himself.
That's not what Kerry does though. He changes his position to pander what he thinks the audience he is after at the moment wants to hear. He seems to be oblivious to the fact, that in the electronic age, people are going to notice that he is taking both sides of key issues depending on the audience. I think the Republicans have a film with cuts where he contradicts himself over and over and its going to drive home this fact.
During the primary Kerry was a firebrand liberal in order to beat Dean at his game, and now since the Dem vote is locked up he's morphed in to Mr. Middle of the road centrist to sucker the independents.
I may be naive but I think sometime before an election a candidate should establish his positions, tell everyone what they are, and let the cards fall where they will. He comes across like he is playing all of his supporters as chumps and thats why so many people really dislike him.
I pretty much gagged when he opened his convention speech with the salute and "Reporting for Duty". Maybe the still photos worked but to me he couldn't have done anything more to come across as a complete phony.
I guess I'm not following your point. I guess you are saying all of Israel's killing is justified, they only kill terrorists, never civilians, and its just the Palestinian's who are the indiscriminate killers? Anyone who says Isreal kills civilians is a Palastinian propagandist?
You are saying bombing an apartment building was justified because someone you don't like was in it. I don't remember exactly who the target was in the incident I'm thinking of. If it was such a noble act I doubt the U.S. would have condemned it as much as they did or not would 20 or so Israeli Air Force pilots would have forfeited their careers over it. There are so many civilians killed by both sides I lose track.
To make of for my bad memory here. is an article on another bombing that just happened, 17 dead, 15 civilians, 11 children. Is Haaretz Palastinian propaganda? Perhaps the children were body gaurds or relatives of some terrorist so maybe its OK they were killed too.
You see I don't think you should, with good conscience, try to pretend one side is always the right one in this particular situation. Its reached the point both sides are very wrong and they should both be very ashamed.
"At least 209 Greens in 27 states hold elected office as of July 2004."
Uh, those are city council, a few mayors, school boards etc, mostly in very liberal cities, mostly in California. I think I saw one state legislator in the whole list. Give me a ring when they have a contingent at a state house large enough to influence legistlation or elect some one to governor or the House of Representatives.
Here is a write up by one of their own on their recent presidential nominating fiasco to balance the rosy picture from their web site. I can dig up some more on what a mess they are on the national level. I'll give you they have some successful local efforts in very left enclaves scattered around the country but that isn't going to take them anywhere on a national stage.
In my heart I really wish they could compete on the national stage but its really just not very realistic unless they find some extremely charismatic and powerful candidate that will attract attention at a state or national level and overcome the fact that the media is going to ignore anyone other than Jesse, Ralph or Ross.
"Oh, and the reason we have to go with Israel is because they don't strap bombs on kids and have them walk into pizza parlors full of other kids and blow themselves up."
Not sure I follow your point. They don't need to strap bombs on kids, instead they can just drop them from an F-16 or shoot a missile from an Apache. Remember the 500 pound Israel dropped on a crowded apartment building in Gaza, as a ham handed way to assassinate one guy. It ended up killing, inevitably, all the innocent women and children in the building. A number of loyal Israel pilots sacrificed their careers, and lives, to protest that incident, along with targeting of cars with missiles on crowded streets because it shows Israel is no better or different in the indiscriminate killing department.
The world needs to realize that both sides in that conflict have issues. As long as the world divides up in two camps and chooses to pretend one side is always a saint and the other is the devil, and vice versa, its going to insure perpetual blood shed and a breeding ground for extremism on all sides.
This is a key reason why the U.S. can't win the "War on Terror" on its current path, because it can't fathom it has to fix the root causes of the animosity of the Arab world towards the U.S. and Isreal. Doing that would deprive the extremists of much of the support they are now getting from more moderate Arabs.
"John Kerry is anti-offshoring"
Corrections he says he is anti-offshoring at the moment because he considers it to be a good way to win votes. Its anybody's guess if he would be anti-offshoring if he got elected or would really do anything about it other add a couple of new incomprehensible changes to the tax code that may or may not discourage it.
If you recall Kerry voted for the war in Iraq and for the Patriot Act. During the primary when Dean was killing him on these two planks he magically became a crusader against the war and the Patriot Act. As soon as he locked up the Democratic nomination he rapidly backpedaled on both issues to court indepentent voters who aren't as hard over on these two planks. Haven't heard him say anything on the Patriot act lately and his position on Iraq is nothing but muddled. He seems to be both for and against it.
I don't have any use for the Bush machine but they are hitting the nail on the head calling him a flip flopper. The quandry for independent voters, do you vote for the incumbent who is obviously bad and dangerous, or a challeneger who might turn out OK or could just as easily turn out worse, you simply can't predict what position he will have five minutes after you elect him.
"It's not that hard"
Well actually it is. The two major parties have created countless hurdles in most states that are designed to prevent a third party or independent from ever gaining traction. Iowa officially disbanded the Green Party because they couldn't muster 2 percent of the vote in the 2002 governor's race at which point the party ceased to exist, it was disallowed a primary this year and candidates have to petition to get on the ballot. Of course since its disbanded its even harder to garner the 2% this year to regain party status.
It takes enormous effort just to get on the ballots in most states if you aren't in the two major parties, and of course a 3rd party presidential candidate has a very slim chance of participating in televised debates.
If there was ever a cause for an addition to the Bill of Rights it should be an amendment to allow unfettered formation of political parties and to forbid the parties in power from suppressing formation of opposition parties. It is something you expect from a totalitarian state, not the worlds "Greatest Democracy".
Another problem is both the Reform and Green parties have deteriorated in to a complete shambles on their own, they simply lack a coherent organization and appear to have fallen in to chaos which is killing them without all the barriers the Dems and Republicans are throwing in front of them.
And finally most people who would opt for Nader or other third parties are so keen to see George W. go down they will vote for Kerry, even though he is a truly pathetic candidate. Fact is in the current system voting 3rd party really is throwing away your vote and the two major parties don't really care if you do it. They'd like your vote but as long as you don't for the other major candidate its the same as if you don't vote at all.
The two copyright issues cited here really aren't the most serious things in the world. Like it or not Meet the Press is copyrighted and NBC can do with it what they will. It is a little lame holding back something unflattering to the President but there is a wealth of other video and transcripts available that will do that.
There are other things about both candidates that I'm amazed the press doesn't cover though.
President Bush's cocaine use and the fact that he apparently refused his national guard flight physical when they instituted drug testing, and that he was apparently convicted in Texas for something, probably Cocaine possession, should disqualify him as President but the press almost never touches this, possibly because the Bush family did such a great job of disposing of all the proof. Its a near certainty Bush political operatives were given unsupervised access to George W.'s Guard records and amazingly the Army recently admitted some of his records, probably the embarrassing ones have in fact been destroyed.
Kerry has his skeletons too that the press never touches. His Vietnam record and the ease with which he racked up medals cetainly does deserve scrutiny. For some reason the press lets everyone think Kerry is a Kennedyesque Irish Catholic when his paternal grand parents were actually Austro/Hungarian and Jewish. His name would be John Kohn if they hadn't changed their name to Kerry when the immigrated to the U.S. in 1902. When you are electing a President these little things are good to know, since they may color his decision making on Isreal in particular, but for some reason today's Press only fillets candidates like Dean they want to drive out of contention because they aren't pro establishment enough. Dean was toast the day he had the audacity to suggest the U.S. treat Israel and the Palastinians equally. You want to get elected in the U.S. you always side with Israel all the way or you are going down.
I think I'd disagree with you though I guess its all how you define "any significant way". The Pentagon budget declined from $319.7 billion in 1991 to a low of $266 billion in 1996 and thats not factoring in inflation. It dropped briefly in 1965 and when Vietnam was winding down but otherwise its been up every year since 1962.
From the CBO
The obviously disturbing trend is the fact that its exploded from $295 billion in 2000 to $410 billion now and thats NOT including expenditures in Afghanistan and Iraq. The Bush administration has been running those exepenses on a separate budget in an effort to conceal the true size of the DOD budget and to avoid sticker shock if Americans saw the real figure which must be approaching $500 billion now, $300 billion to $500 billion in 4 years is a massive escalation especially facing a rag tag band of Muslim insurgents with no weapons other than those they improvise.
Its also useful to reflect on the massive inflation during the Reagan years. Bush and Reagan, what a pair of book ends.
1975 87.6 Billion dollars
1976 89.9
1977 97.5
1978 104.6
1979 116.8
1980 134.6
1981 158.0
1982 185.9
1983 209.9
1984 228.0
1985 253.1
1986 273.8
1987 282.5
1988 290.9
1989 304.0
1990 300.1
1991 319.7
1992 302.6
1993 292.4
1994 282.3
1995 273.6
1996 266.0
1997 271.7
1998 270.2
1999 275.5
2000 295.0
2001 306.1
2002 348.9
2003 404.9
"Speaking as an employer, I'm very happy with this trend."
I think I should put this another way. The fact that you are happy as an employer means its an employer's market. Thats just another way say that CS sucks as a career.
You presumably have more and better candidates to choose from and you can play them less. Whats not to like from an employers point of view.
"That's because they're protected by the US ;-)"
Protected from whom? Hate to break it to you but that old American saw doesn't cut anymore.
NATO is an empty shell with no real adversary any more and there is a deep schism between Old Europe and the New America.
The U.S. lacks the capacity to protect anyone from Islamic extremists for the most part.
Russia and China are economic partners more than military threat at the moment. I guess there is North Korea but about the only one the U.S. really protects from them is South Korea. If a war starts there Seoul is going to be a major casualty whatever. The U.S. is apparently going to draw down the ground force and most South Koreans want the U.S. military to leave.
There are other assorted third rate dictators scattered around but the EU could deal with them if they had to.
To be honest, in the new world order, where the U.S. has given itself the prerogative to launch preemptive warfare against any enemy, real or imagined, most countries have this gnawing question in the back of their minds. Who will protect them from the U.S. if:
A. The U.S. decides to use its military supremacy to intimidate them politically or to extract economic advantage
B. The U.S. decide to outright invade them under false pretenses as was the case in Iraq.
"Speaking as an employer, I'm very happy with this trend."
As an employer I'm glad for you. Of course it doesn't change the fact that it is an increasingly poor career to embark on as an employee unless you live in India, China etc. But most fields are bad in the U.S. now thanks to out sourceing outside of maybe healthcare, trial lawyer, MBA, politician or journalist. Its even worse if you've committed a big chunk of your life developing skills and experience in a profession that is now over the hill if you live in the U.S., the land where the only things we make any more are drugs and weapons.
You may well find the quality of the graduates in the U.S. craters again when no one with talent will opt for it because the job market is so bad thanks to out sourceing and a continuing surplus of programmers that will crater salaries. It is, in a lot of ways a field that has peaked and is declining.
A. You have to work really hard to find work that isn't just tedious.
B. You are fighing Microsoft's monopoly at one end(unless you work for them and I wager that isn't quite the sweet deal it used to be with them out sourceing too and looking to cut costs). In reality proprietary software companies tend to be sucky places to work except when the salary and options make up for it.
C. You are fighting open source at the other end and its pretty hard to compete against an army of people, many of whom are working for free.
The burning question is why are you hiring American CS grads anyway. Indian grads are probably better on average, they work harder for a small fraction of what you will have to pay someone in the U.S. Its nice and all to have people sitting in your U.S. office doing the work but the economics and necessity simply aren't there any more for most programming work.
The U.S. appears headed to a situation where its engineer pool will be working largely in defense and intelligence where non U.S. citizens are excluded by law. Its kind of fitting since the U.S. has had Seymour Melmans's "permanent war economy" since they end of World War II, and the Pentagon's budget is in reality the world's largest planned economy, a concept that should cause Republican's brains to explode since they worship free markets, in theory, but also worship the Pentagon whose huge economy is the antithesis of free market.
The 90's were only a brief respite from gross overspending on the military, and isn't it amazing that the U.S. economy boomed, employment soared and we had budget surpluses and that never happens any more. Sure there was a bubble but there was also a major downturn in wasting the economy on the military.
Now the permanent war economy is back with a vengeance and it sucks. The bad thing about working on weapons is:
A. They contribute very little real economic value unless you sell them to other countries, they prevent an attack or you use them to loot and pillage other countries. Otherwise they are economic black hole and most other countries aren't squandering their treasure on at the same rate the U.S. is giving them a real economic edge.
B. They weapons are ultimately designed to kill people and destroy countries so its not the most spiritually satisfying work.
"The argument against using foreign labor to produce goods cheaper is very similar to the (stupid) argument that free software is bad for the economy because it hurts the profits some proprietary software companies."
How stupid it is depends on where you're standing. If you are a shareholder in a company using cheap foreign labor, selling cheap foreign goods or you are buying cheap goods in Walmart then foreign labor is wonderful. If you work for a living and you live in the U.S. today foreign labor means there is a high probability you are going to be pushed in to poverty unless you:
A. Go in to business for yourself and succeed, which is pretty hard especially without capital
B. Have a skill or ability that is immune to out sourceing. There are ever fewer of those skills. Might I suggest C{E,F,I,T}O, health care, trial lawyer, politician or journalist.
Trade barriers existed for a simple reason some countries have higher standards of living than others, lower standards for working conditions, artificially valued currencies, willingness to dump goods to take over markets etc. If you erase all the trade barriers most workers are going to be pushed down to a uniform wage of around $0.35/hr. You can live on that in China but not the U.S.
"Actually the better solution is getting rid of income and payroll taxes completely and replacing them with a national sales tax."
A sales tax would be wonderful, I'd actually almost go for it, but for the one fact it is the most regressive of taxes. Low income people spend all their income buying things so all their income is taxed. The wealthy don't spend most of their income, and they accumulate ever more by investing what they have. Switching to a national sales tax would dramatically accelerate the percentage of the nations wealth accumulating in the hands of that lucky top 1%, and its already accumulating there fast enough. That is the key thing Republicans refuse to acknowledge about taxes. Everthing they yearn for, elimination of inheritence, dividend and capital gains taxes, leads directly to massive and rapid accumulation of wealth in the hands of an ever smaller, ever luckier few. The more the wealth concentrates in their hands the less there is for everyone else. It is really easy to make money if you already have it. America has had periods like this, the gilded age being one of the worst. They lead to social upheaval when working people get sick of the rich getting ever richer doing nothing, while most people can't stay above water working all day every day. It lead to Progressives like Teddy Roosevelt who gave us progressive taxes to try to reign it in, a system Bush is rapdily dismantling insuring a new gilded age.
A far better tax is a pure income tax, no deductions, no loopholes with the wealthy paying a higher percentage because they can afford it. The current system would work if you got rid of all the loopholes designed to engineer behavior or give outs to the people who are willing to play the system or cheat. You could do away with corporate taxes as long as you compel them to pay out most of their profits as dividends instead of hordeing like Microsoft did.
"..a lot more now than it was 10 years ago."
Uh, why is that. Al Qaeda has no major weapons. America's gold plated weapons systems are nearly useless against them. You don't need an F-22 to shoot down a hijacked airliner. You don't need a B-2 to bomb caves and mud huts in Afghanistan. There are NO targets in Iraq and Afghanistan now where you aren't more likely to kill civilians than you are insurgents especially with massive fire power from high tech weapons.
The only thing the military needs at the moment is:
A. boots on the ground, especially special forces.
B. Intelligence that works (i.e. not multibillion dollar spy satellites, not intelligence that is a complete lie because it was cooked to suit the needs of politicians like Wolfowitz, not massive PR events over a laptop with 3 year old data th
"Yeah, how dare they put national security above political expediency?"
I didn't say tap it, I just said stop filling it during a time when oil is very expensive and supplies are tight. There is a lot of oil in the reserve already, it would be nice to stop filling it until Yukos and various other problems are sorted out.
"I see you and Michael Moore share the same definition of "fact"."
Uh what are Republicans for then. They are overwhelmingly the party of rich white men and corporations. Those people care about profits and wealth accumulation to the exclusion of just about everything else. They do sucker a lot of less affluent whites into support them but its using sucker social issues like religion, militarism, abortion etc. They have to because there aren't enough rich white men to win an election.
"Yes please, save me from the tyranny of Walmart's low prices. I also understand there's this product called "Linux", created largely with foreign labor, that's cutting into the profits of real American companies like Microsoft and SCO."
The point you are trying to make here is completely lost on me other than I assume you are trying to slam Linux and troll using Microsoft and SCO. Didn't work. Your statement is just bait still dangling on a forlorn hook.
"Corporations don't pay taxes"
Well then why do the Republicans keep howling about the corporate tax burden? You glossed over the basic problem, why should a corporation be able to make money, not pay taxes on it and then dole it out share holders as dividends who also don't have to pay taxes on it. They didn't do any real work for it, they just had money and they made more money and they don't get taxed. Sweet job if you can get it. Meanwhile someone scraping by working for a living can't escape payroll taxes or income taxes and they end up increasingly carry the tax burden.
"But isn't it funny how the left howls..."
You seem to be operating under the delusion that I'm left or Democrat because I'm not a Republican. Believe it or not there are more than two sides in the world. I'm half arch conservative and half populist. I like my government as small as possible which means I'm not really left or democrat, but if you are going to tax I want you to tax the people that can pay first which makes me populist.
Social security was simply a dumb idea in its inception. When it was passed most people didn't live to retirement age. Now everyone lives 20-30 years past it and its eventually going to be untenable, now its just a huge burden on the young. Since the early eighties when the taxes were jack up its been mostly a regressive tax on the young and both parties are to blame for looting. I really just want the money I put in back, with minimal interest, instead of gambling I make it to some ridiculously high retirement age or that there is even any program left when I'm that old.
"Sort of true, except that the Iraq war wasn't intended to show a profit. If we wanted their oil, all we had to do was buy it (like France); that's far cheaper than paying to blow stuff up and paying again to rebuild it."
Excepting of course it was embargoed and only being sold through the corrupt UN oil for food program. The invasion did manage to put it back on the open market at least during the periods their pipelines aren't burning.
Its pretty native to paint it as either we did to take their oil or thats not why we did it. It is telling the Bremer spent a couple percent of the U.S. funds for rebuilding and he spent every bit of Iraq currents and near future oil revenue and most of it on U.S. companies like Halliburton.
The U.S. is in Iraq because the U.S. wanted a permanent military force in the heart of the oil rich Middle East. They had it in Saudi Arabia but the Saudi's put to many constraints on the U.S. military based there. In Iraq the U.S. has a compliant puppet government and can use Iraq as the base for future intimidation or invasion to insure control of oil
I can believe "do no evil" of Larry and Sergey, they are smart geeks who will make some well deserved wealthy without doing evil and still have some of their ideals in tact.
But, since it became clear Google was the last big pot of gold from the dot com boom I'm pretty confident Google has filled up with plenty of other people, mostly business people, who will do any evil, in a heart beat, to maximize the money they make out of the IPO. Maybe Larry and Sergey can fend them off or dilute them, but I imagine it depends on what percentage of shares they still hold and how much power they've given up in the march to Wall Street.
As soon as Google is on Wall Street and on the "make the quarterly numbers" tread mill I assure you they will probably also do just about any evil necessary, just look at Red Hat and VA.
"I really think a lot more is attributed to presidents than is actually the case"
Not sure I entirely agree. If there is gridlock with different parties holding the White House and at least one house in Congress then yes, the President's influence is greatly undermined.
When a party controls the White House and both houses of Congress the President has a great deal of control of many things that influence the economy, the only brakes being the fillibuster in the Senate and the courts. Dick Cheney has been sitting in the capitol writing key pieces of legislation like Medicare reform in secret Republican only conferences.
For better or worse depending on how it ends up Bush/Cheney deserve a great deal of credit for how things go in the near term. The main thing they lack total control over is oil prices, but its telling that during a time when oil is tight they are continuing to fill the strategic reserve, making it tighter, which tends to suggest they are, for whatever reason, OK with sky high oil prices. It certainly benefits their many allies in the oil business and increases pressure to open drilling in ANWAR. With prices as high as they are you would think they would at least stop filling the reserve until after the election.
A key reason jobs do better under Democrats is a simple fact. Republicans care first and foremost about profits and wealth accumulation for the wealthiest few percent in the nation and the large corporations in their industrial base finance, energy, defense, pharma, health care. They don't care about job creation other than to give it lip service to get elected. High unemployment is good from their perspective because it keeps wages down and profit margins up. They want corporations to do plenty of business and grow but with the fewest, most underpaid workers possible. Free trade, container shipping, cheap telecommunications was a god send to the Republicans because now corporations can tap cheap, disciplined, labor in China and India, and can grow without the annoyance of high costs and increasingly poor labor quality in the U.S. ever again.
Some things Presidents control when they control Congress too:
- Tax policy, which is currently massively rewarding the wealthy and is not really creating jobs in the U.S. The corporate share of the tax burden is down to %9, an historic low. Its a myth U.S. corporations face a huge tax burden. They would were it not for huge loopholes that let most large companies pay no taxes. To compound this, wealthy share holders no longer pay taxes on dividends. The argument was corporations pay taxes on the profits so it was double taxation to tax dividens. Well since corporations don't pay their share of the tax burden this was a lie but dividend taxes were rescinded anyway. Dividends are now a huge untaxed windfall profit for the wealthy which is why Microsoft is paying out $36 billion in dividends. Meanwhile payroll taxes, which hit the low and middle income people, are still at record highs and the social security surplus from those taxes is being redirected in to general spending, in a way to help fund tax cuts for the wealthy. For all practical purposes the U.S. is moving to a regressive taxation system where the lower and middle class are shouldering the burden while the wealthy are accumulating wealth at historically high rates.
- They control the size of the Federal Budget and deficit. Their massive deficit spending was a gigantic short term stimulus to the economy and almost single handedly spurred the recent 4-5% growth. A half trillion deficit corresponds pretty closely to this growth rate in an $11 trillion economy. It is however extraordinarily unsound long term policy and just about everyone is saying it including the World Bank and IMF which are U.S. lap dogs. It is not free market economics the Republican's claim to be such big fans of when most of the economic growth is do to Federal spending with borrowed money.
- The extent of military spending is out of control
Guess it depends on whether you are writing code or doing mister answer man. If you are the team architect or an admin then yes you need lots of interaction but I've never really found it necessary to be out in the open to be accessible. Accessibility is more an attitude than a physical state. An obvious problem is most of the people around you may not want to hear a steady stream of Q&A, if it doesn't relate to what they are working on, just so you can feel appreciated. A tech discussion is way better in an office with a white board with the interested people in the room.
I don't recall any cube farm recently where most people weren't jacked in to music most of the time in a vain attempt to filter out the NOISE.
Exactly right. Free meals, free beer, cheap soft drinks are nice and all but they can be synonymous to peanuts the exec's throw to their chimps to reward them for doing good tricks. Free meals are cool but they are there first and foremost to nudge you in to putting in more uncompensated overtime.
Over the years I've set my priorities from hard experience:
A. Make sure the company's executive team isn't looting the company through stock options, signing bonuses for their own, interest free loans that turn in to gifts etc. If they are giving them to themselves make sure they are giving them to performers in the engineering offices, too. The more they loot the less there will be for incentives for worker bees and to fund adequate staffing.
B. If the company goes through a hard patch make sure the execs are sacrificing MORE than the working people, because they are making a lot more. If you go in to one of those "sacrifice" meetings and you have guts ask the head cheese to tell you what sacrifices he and his bosses are making. If he can't answer, gets pissed off or you get laid off for it you don't want to be there anyway.
C. Opt for a company that will give you a walled office over a cube nearly every time. It indicates they really do value you and they want you to be productive. If they are shoving you in cubes they probably view you at the same level as cattle to be milked, especially if they are all in plush offices. It pretty much sicks if the execs are in cubes too because execs shouldn't me sitting in the middle of a cube farm talking about confidential things.
D. Make sure the executives have the vision and ability to create a successful product and are building a team to produce one. 80+ hour weeks kind of suck but they suck a lot more if the product ends up being a disaster, since disasters usually mean layoffs versus the payoff that follow success, plus it just feels good to be proud of something you put so much effort in. If the product is successful make sure there is a payoff for the worker bees and not just the execs or you should either:
A. Aspire to be an exec and learn to do all the underhanded things necessary to become one, golf skills are a must.
B. Move on
Think about this -- if the Cornell UAV team hadn't accomplished something unprecedented, would it have been "news for nerds"?
.NET in a UAV. UAV's have been done since the V1 which is about 65 years now, and there have been lots of people doing low budget versions in recent years. It is a lot of work and a great university engineering project, like the DARPA grand challenge, and a good read for the Slashdot crown, but "unprecedented" and "news" is a bit of a stretch especially when you can crutch off GPS and modern computers and instrumentation.
I'm a little confused. What did they do that was "unprecedented" other than put XP and
My God, Twirlip of the Mists must be a gold mine. Who knew?
"SS has always been a "pay as you go" program where current employees pay to support current retirees."
Then the government should adjust the rates each year so that it is pay as you go and they aren't raking in huge surpluses in the form of regressive payroll taxes that are impacting those who can least afford it the most. The government massively increased Social Security taxes to insure its long term solvency but instead of doing that they are using the huge surpluses to subsidize tax cuts for the wealthy and massive spending increases for the DOD, etc. When the baby boomers hit retirement and as life expectancy continues to grow, instead of having a pool of billions of dollars from all those surpluses to keep it solvent, the government will "reform" social security which translates in to:
- Hiking payroll taxes again
- Cutting benefits again
Your point that the government couldn't invest the money is also bogus. They can put it in money markets or make more money available for home mortgages. Or they can do what the Republicans want and privatize it so all of its going to go in to the stock market anyway.
I am with the Republican's in spirit but not with their underhanded plan which is to force all the social security money in to the pockets of their stock broker/banker friends who can accidentally lose all in to their pockets in stock market manipulations.
I really want all the payroll taxes I've paid back in my bank account for me to invest or waste as I see fit rather than it going in to a giant slush fund for politicians to squander.
The burning question is how can SUN open source Solaris without further undercutting SCO's case or joining the ranks of the sued. I'm pretty sure Solaris must have encumbrances from SCO/ATT Unix. Did they get SCO to renounce all rights with the $10 million dollar payoff. Regardless if SUN open sources things like ELF I can't see how this wouldn't knock another leg out from under the teetering chair that is the only thing left keeping SCO from finishing the job of hanging themselves.
You miss the key point that governments do, in fact, have a tendency to abuse their power and its become increasingly difficult for ordinary citizens to do anything to stop it. Most of what the parent said were legitimate concerns and not something that deserved a "wacko" rating.
On the tax front the most obvious example of government abusing its power is payroll taxes. In America working people are obligated to pay relatively steep social security taxes out of our wages. This would be all well and good if we had assurance our money was going in to a "lock box" that would be there for retirement with some reasonable interest. Unfortunately it doesn't. The rather hefty social security surplus is instead being spent to defray a rather huge budget deficit, much of it created by recent hefty tax cuts for the wealthy and increasingly out of control spending. Social security has become a regressive tax, it impacts the least affluent the hardest and is being used to help reduce the tax burden on the wealthy. There is great potential the system will be bankrupt by the time many of us reach retirement unless they jack up the social security taxes again like they did in the early 80's which is where the current surplus comes from. It is a simple example of government abusing ordinary people and they are largely powerless to stop it since the Democrats and Republican's have both abused it in different ways.
Another example of government abusing the will of the people is when political appointees take action that is contrary to the best interests of the people and are only occasionally reigned in by Congress. The actions of the FCC and Michael Powell to allow further concentration of power in the hand of a few huge media monopolies is a great example. It is very detrimental to the people in that they lose diversity in opinion and information but ordinary people are increasingly powerless to stop it. It is very beneficial to Viacom, Disney, Clear Channel and Rupert Murdoch, who have the wealth and lobbying power to get their way while ordinary people don't, except through increasingly meaningless elections.
Now lets move to black boxes in cars. I certainly have no problem if the ONLY thing they are used for is to collect data for an accident investigation. Unfortunately it is a slippery slope, and watch that first step. Step #2 and #3 are the killers. They put in a GPS system to improve the quality of the data and #3 they put in a satellite up and down link like OnStar to provide better "service". At that point, not only don't you own the roads, you don't own your car. Someone can remotely lock and unlock your car, kill the engine or track your every movement.
As long as you assume your government is benevolent, and they or you never do anything wrong, maybe you don't care. But many people in the world live in places where the government isn't benevolent, increasingly the U.S. among them. Having gone this far down the slippery slope what is to say the government wont start using this technology to track political dissidents and opponents. For example Tom Delay abused the current Homeland security system to try to track down Texas legislators who fled Texas to try to stop an essentially illegal gerrymandering of Texas congressional districts by the Republicans to insure their control of the House. With black boxes in every car Delay could have had an instant locating service so the Texas rangers could have had an extra edge in tracking them down and rounding them up to force them to vote.
Another example, perhaps these could be used by a party in power to track the movements of their opposition in a fishing expedition to catch them in compromising situations, at a hotel with a mistress for example.
Or perhaps the government could start tracking the cars of of known protest leaders so they would have advanced warning of meetings to organize protests or people on the way to protests so the government could take preemptive action, arrest them for speeding, or put up ro
"A victory doesn't count until you have a 19 year old with a rifle standing on that bit of ground."
A victory doesn't count until you win the hearts and minds, one way or another, of the people who live on the ground where the 19 year old is standing. As long as there are people with weapons, and the will to resist, who see the 19 year old as a target you haven't really won anything.
"For, although one may be very strong in armed
forces, yet in entering a province one has always need of the goodwill of the natives"
Machiavelli, "The Prince"
Not sure the doctrine that you have victory when you have a guy with a rifle standing on captured ground has worked since World War I and it didn't really work then either.
Don't think you can say much better or anything difference about CSC or the rest of the small cadre of IT companies who specialize in winning government contracts around the globe. They've had their share of multibillion dollar fiascos too.
The problem with these companies is they specialize in winning big contracts. They put their best people on the proposals. They don't specialize in delivering great systems. Their best people probably move to the next RFP and they mostly fill the contracts with warm bodies.
They can get away with it because its pretty rare for them to actually be punished for poor performance. If they get blacklisted by the agency that awarded the contract the agency ends up just replacing EDS with CSC or vice versa and the results don't get any better. I'd be interested if someone could cite a huge government IT contract that actually worked well. At some point governments need to figure out this methodology doesn't work and try something new.
Not sure I agree with your point. If IT proposes this change and their lawyers see the possibility of a protracted legal fight with SCO, I imagine their reaction would be less than positive unless they are getting paid extra for all the hours they will spend on the case. Maybe you can argue over the whether the off the cuff term "deer in the headlights" is right, but its a simple fact everything SCO has been doing is designed to make companies who want to use Linux feel like a "deer in the headlights" and send SCO large checks to get them to shut off the lights and put on the brakes. You can be sure Gates and Balmer want SCO to produce this effect, and I wouldn't be surprised if Scooter McNealy likes the effect too.
I would doubt that Lockheed's lawyers are as worried about the legal ramifications of Linux as they might have been a few months ago. SCO's case is looking weaker with every new twist.
This kind of sounds like this is an evaluation stage and it may or may nor happen. It will be more likely to happen when they put an official press release out which doesn't appear to be the case yet.
They may well be using the threat of this switch to wring concessions out of SUN or Microsoft and if they get them they may well back out. Linux has become a pretty effective tool for blackmailing proprietary vendors if nothing else.