"Quite frankly China has tested the limits of both the US and UN for years, and neither the Clinton nor Bush administrations were willing or capable of doing anything."
What exactly do you propose the U.S. do? The Chinese are holding such huge U.S dollar reserves they could ruin the U.S. economy just by dumping them, though they would probably cause a global economic collapse and suffer as much as everyone else if they did.
The U.S. has transfered so much capital and IP to China, and we are so dependent on the steady stream of container shipping from China you pretty much have to look the other way at anything short of open warfare.
Besides which China is a Republican businessman's fantasy come true. It has a vast pool of dirt cheap labor, no labor unions, almost no business regulation, no environmental controls, and workers either keep their mouths shut or they are harshly dealt with by the state. They have one party authoritarian rule and as long as that one party is pro business, which they have been for the last couple decades, they are a Republican's wet dream. Why do you think so many big western corporations are rushing to China lock, stock and barrel. Liberal democracies sucks for business, you have to pay people more than a subsistence wage, you can't kill 4000 a year in coal mines like you can in China, you can't lock workers up if they bitch....
The new Fascist China is pure heaven for Republicans, so their is almost nothing China is going to do they are going to have a problem with including this. Most western businessman and politicians are way more fixated on kissing Chinese ass these days than they are starting some kind of confrontation with them.
Besides which when it comes to network security if you are stupid enough to put anything important on the Internet, and you can't keep it secure you kind of deserve what you get, doesn't really matter where the attack comes from.
"As such they are entitled to a monthly dividend of our productivity, enough to survive decently.."
LoL, I think you just proved there are no leftist libertarians. Dude that is pure socialism and there isn't anything Libertarian about it. Its basically welfare except everyone can qualify. You will end up with vast numbers of people who just don't want to work collecting it, and a dwindling number of people wondering why they are working so hard to support all those freeloaders. Welcome to France....
Libertarians are the exact opposite of that. They want to make their own way in the world, and if they work hard they reap the benefits, if they don't they starve. A Libertarian is never looking for a free ride.
I have a few relatives on Medicare. They go to the doctor CONSTANTLY and demand every expensive test in the books because they want to find out "what's wrong" with themselves. The tests always come back there isn't anything wrong with them other than they are old and aren't twenty years old any more.
If you listen to a scanner with ambulance and fire on it you would be dumbfounded at the rate some seniors call for ambulance and paramedic service and go to the emergency room for simple medical problems that should have been taken care of with a visit to a doctor's office. It doesn't cost them much to abuse the system thanks to Medicare so they do.
Its just simple human nature that if you make something free a lot of people are going to squander it.
In the U.S. it a major industry getting yourself declared disabled and going on Social Security disability when you are perfectly able. Again I know someone who had a lump and a friend who was a doctor, claimed it was terminal cancer and got on disability. The lump turned out to be benign, and the person just kept collected disability until 65.
"Secondarily, you assume that you can identify the bright kids and the dumb ones."
So why wouldn't being faced with landing in a vocational school, versus a prep school, motivate you just as well to do what it takes to prove your ability?
Gotta love people who say I'm a genius, but I don't have to do anything to prove it, take my word on, trust me. I'm going to fail every course but please give me that college degree and a high paying job, because I'm really smart, really, trust me. You should probably consider starting your own business, and hopefully starvation will be a sufficient motivator for you to succeed.
"Vocational skills aren't the answer either, since all you'll be doing is teaching some subset of skills and technology used at that point in time."
This is another silly argument. You are saying because some vocational skill might not last forever you should teach no vocational skill at all. I hate to break it to you but a liberal arts education isn't going to serve most kids not going to college well either. Training in carpentry, plumbing, electrical systems, welding, operating machine tools, driving trucks and machinery will and probably for a long time. Math, science and English would almost certainly have to be part of that curriculum too. But it would be practical and grounded in the real world. Trying to teach Shakespeare to a future carpenter usually doesn't work. Trying to teach calculus to someone who is going to be a welder or a truck driver also doesn't work well.
"Your suggestions would simply result in more stratification, and a class structure even worse than we have now. (Yeah, I've since read a history book or two...)"
So instead you want to flatten gifted kids in to a lowest common denominator "No child left behind" public education system so they will be years behind where they should be when the finally escape it. Equality sounds nice but that is an invitation for complete failure in a globalized world where India is pushing it most gifted kids very hard to achieve as much as they can as early as they can. Again I'm advocating people are elevated based on their ability and their willingness to work hard. Not on the fact they won the sperm lottery and were born to an affluent family. Rich, dumb lazy kids deserve to fail just as much as poor, dumb, lazy kids.
"I don't think that would work. You learn a lot more in school than just what is taught in class, notably, how to make friends, get on with others, work in teams (which inherently means learning how to fit into a power structure, by the way)... and so on."
I guess you totally glossed over the part in my post where I said there is value to keeping these kids in a loose knit school so they have access to sports, music etc. so they get the socializing angle. You certainly don't wanted gifted kids turning in to hermits..but that socializing aspect of public schools is frequently brutally counterproductive to gifted kids. Academically gifted kids...nerds...are the ones most likely to be brutalized in public schools. A lot of kids resent kids who do better acadamicly, coupled with the fact a lot of gifted kids aren't the most socially astute. U.S. schools seem to place a LOT more value, to the point of glorification, on jocks who excel at sports, than academic achievers. Be real... most public schools treated academic achievers horribly.
"I find your ideas about separation of kids into regular school and trade schools based on "natural intelligence" problematic."
I would totally agree that the "state" partitioning kids is bad and I wouldn't say its exactly based on "natural intelligence. Gifted is a complex mix of natural ability and willingness to work hard. Someone with natural ability but unwilling to work doesn't really belong in a prep school either. Someone with limited natural ability but willingness to work hard could easily make it in a prep school.
The choice should be left to the student and their family with councilors perhaps pointing out to low achieving kids that their chances of success in a prep school track, are not great, but if they want to work really hard... Councilors should also discourage a gifted kid taking a vo-tech track as a waste of a life but if the kid hates education.... Kids should be able to switch between the two if they change their mind perhaps with the realization it may mean an extra year or two of classes unless they are fast learners.
The biggest benefit of splitting schools is you escape the current lowest common denominator system where gifted kids are punished by kids who hate school and hate people who do well at school.
A problem we have with universal publication education is I think most students have stopped valuing education precisely because its compulsory. Maybe if a good education was a little harder to get people would return to valuing it more.
"People heavily involved in technology are younger with less experience: exactly the type of people who would find appeal in an economic/political movement characterized by simple messages"
Most of your post is just silly. I drank Republican, Democrat and Socialist kool-aid at various times when I was young and naive. It was only as I got older and have seen the practical consequences of both the political systems I'd lived in and the ones in other parts of the world that I've embraced a more Libertarian view on the world. Mind you I'm not talking about the over the top Libertarianism of its fanatics to which I could see your post applying.
My brand of Libertarianism arises from the simple fact politicians and their benefactors are self serving. The laws they pass are almost never for the common good. They are designed to pick winners and losers using money they tax out of my pocket, and the winners are always their friends, and the losers their enemies. When Democrats are in they tax the rich and hand out money to the poor, who happen to vote for them. Republicans are in they cut taxes...on the rich...give their business friends big subsidies and screw over working people every chance they get. Neither party does a good job for the middle class. Real socialism sounds nice on paper, but it fails when it hits the flaws in human nature. People who just want to work hard and get ahead are completely screwed under Socialism. It is a system for party members and bureaucrats on one hand and freeloaders on the other. Some good things happen under Socialism but in my book it is a huge net loss of a system.
At least in my case Libertarianism isn't due to inexperience, its due to experience and interaction with all the misguided things politicians have done over my lifetime. Its left me at a place I mostly want my government to be a tiny fraction of its current size and to tax me at a small fraction of its current rates. I would be a lot happier saving for my own retirement instead of government doing it for me, and if you don't save for it you suffer. That's life.
I am completely OK with paying modest taxes to pay for a defensive military, but the U.S. military is anything but that. It is a completely excessive offensive force which is constantly meddling outside the U.S. when it shouldn't. I'm fine with paying taxes for fire and police service. Police are useful when they stop people from hurting each other. They are completely out of bounds when they enforce laws regulating personal behavior that hurts no one else. Government serves a useful purpose when it builds roads, and I am glad to pay a use tax on gasoline or diesel for that. I am fine with things like antitrust, FDA and consumer safety agencies as long as they don't go overboard punishing business, or end up in the pockets of business like they are today. The fact is greedy people trying to make money are predators, they will hurt other people and it is an appropriate role for government to stop people from hurting each other. If I'm not hurting anyone else though....leave me alone.
Universal health care would be nice but you give people something for free and they abuse it, then it costs everyone a fortune, and it sucks the life out of an economy. It would be good to have universal catastrophic health insurance and a medical system that encourages people to get basic preventive care but that is hard to do in practice.
This leaves about 90% of the government we have today that I think is completely inappropriate and counterproductive. You could wipe most of it off the books and the world would just be a better place.
There are a lot better ways to educate gifted and self motivated students than shoving them in regimented classrooms, especially now that we have these new fangled computers and networks. You could almost certainly build a better system for gifted kids if you took something like the MIT on line courseware and developed it. For example add elementary and secondary school level equivalents. Back those courses with on line tutors like the tutors in India a lot of kids are using today to help them through parts they don't understand, and then figure out a system for verifying self taught students are learning the material which is probably the hardest part. You almost certainly want to allow the most gifted kids to be self paced. Keeping a loose knit school for sports, music and other activities is valuable, it just shouldn't a regimented warehouse for kids, and schools really shouldn't be allowed to abuse gifted kids who don't fit in to school cliques.
The classroom system is an anachronism and really unnecessary in the computer and network age for a lot of kids.
The regimented classrooms might be a necessary evil for the not so gifted and the people who wont do anything productive unless someone is watching them every minute. Its a pretty dubious endeavor trying to teach history, social studies, geography and even math and science to these people.in the first place though. They would probably be a lot happier and better served by a vocational or technical school where they are learning survival skills, a trade and maybe apprenticeships where they can earn a little money and see what life will be like in the working world if they aren't willing to work for a rewarding and well paying career.
The recent "No Child Left Behind" boondoggle in particular, is probably a prescription for devastation of American competitiveness. You are expending massive effort and resources on making the least gifted students barely literate, and judging schools on the performance of their worst students and not their best ones. You are abandoning all the most gifted students. You would think the morons that instituted No Child Left Behind would have studied what makes India such an educational powerhouse. India excels because they seek out the gifted students and do everything possible to give them the best eduction possible(though its excessively regimented). American politicians by contrast, being the morons they are, opted for a system that is fixated on the worst students and abandons the gifted ones. I think the ulterior motive of the Republicans involved was to just destroy the public education system entirely with the illusion that private schools would fix everything. The problem there being private schools tend to best serve the wealthy and not necessarily the gifted.
If you want the best education system both for students and society, you want to ensure the most gifted students get the best education possible, regardless of their families wealth, and you want to ensure the poorest students get basic job skills so they can survive and even prosper. A wicked edge to this is that rich kids that are dumb and lazy, like oh I don't know...George W. Bush...don't get a prep school and ivy league education, and a free pass in life, just because their family is rich and powerful.
That works as long as you are always right. The one advantage to team work is individuals aren't infallible and don't have infinite knowledge. The one big advantage to a good team is someone else might know a better way to do something, or see the flaws in your approach and help you correct them before you do something stupid.
You are however correct that one good individual is better than a bad team, if the rest of the team is clueless and just there to take up space and consume oxygen. They are bad when they are just there to form a consensus which, rather than being the best solution, is one of the poorer ones, it just happens to be the one everyone will agree to just to put an end to a pointless discussion and escape.
If you've every worked on a good team you will appreciate that they are priceless, unfortunately they are also somewhat rare, and being stuck on bad teams is a soul sucking nightmare.
"actually vote Republican because they think it is closer to this libertarian ideal that they have in their mind."
Why would they think that, especially lately? The libertarian wing of the Republican party, the true conservative wing, has been decimated. The only reason there are any left is because the Democrats are worse and they don't want to land in third party obscurity. The Republican party today is almost entirely rabidly pro big business and "Christian" party. They only reason they are they "Christian" party is around 1980 they realized they needed some votes to win and push their pro business agenda, big business didn't have enough votes and fundamentalist Christians are, by definition, gullible. If you fall in to those two categories its the party for you, otherwise voting for them is stupidity. Of course voting Democrat is stupid too for different reasons.
McCarthy, Nixon, Reagan and two Bush's have destroyed any pretense the Republican's had of being for small government and keeping government out of people's lives. The only small government they want is to eliminate social programs for the poor and middle class and eliminating all business regulation. You can see what you get when you have no business regulation, you get China, flooding markets with unsafe products, and killing 4000 coal miners a year. The U.S. was the same, or actually worse, around 1900. All the business regulation came in to being because people got tired of being killed by greedy businessmen just out to make a buck.
The Republicans rant about free enterprise but turn around and give huge subsidies to their corporate benefactors at every turn. That isn't free enterprise.... its borderline Fascism when government and big business fuse. The Chinese have turned completely Fascist in the last 20 years and big business Republicans love every bit of it, and are in fact green with envy of China. They are dreaming of returning America to a place like that, where unions are outlawed(they are in China), there is practically no regulation of business, and workers are working for subsistence wages, living in dormitories, and are either completely obedient or swiftly and harshly dealt with. Since big business Republicans couldn't return America to that, they are gutting America's economy to move their profit centers to China instead. (It doesn't help Americans are increasingly ignorant and lazy, prosperity corrupts...).
The Republicans are 100% for a police state and a huge military industrial complex. They think those two things are great for business though in reality they probably aren't, and those two things are the antithesis of Libertarianism. They like law and order because they want obedient workers and even better they want laws everyone will break. People who are guilty of something are easy to control and prone to obey. They want a huge military because its profitable for their corporate benefactors and it theoretically is a necessary tool for imposing America's will around the globe and to control the world economy, especially its oil, which is also good for business if wars didn't wreck economies.
I'm OK with war on drugs the Republicans love so much...if you have a war on alcohol and tobacco at the same time..but when you don't its hypocrisy of the highest order since those two drugs do more damage than all the illegal drugs combined. Prescription drugs are now just as bad with Oxycontin being practically legal heroine. Its only legal because a big pro Republican drug company is making a boat load of money on it.
If you want to transform the American political system overnight, pass a law that makes it mandatory for every state to have a primary for independents, where independents get to put a slate of candidates on the general election ballot, and let all the 3rd party candidates run there if they want so they have a shot at some critical mass. Our two party system is so corrupt because the two parties know they get to pick all the candidates in the primaries, so they have a s
...you work for Real don't you rishimathew. It looks like all three of your Slashdot submissions are about Real. Nice free advertising for them, good work/. editors.
The real problem here is the two parties have completely disenfranchised independent voters in a lot of states. Most states don't allow independents to vote in the primaries, though some do. As a result independents have no say who makes it to the election where they do get to vote. Independents do have a lot of clout since they swing while the partisan voters don't, but they usually only have two bad options in thegeneral election because of a bad primary system.
Our government would get some better, maybe not a lot, if it was law that independents either get to vote in the primary of the party of their choosing or you have a primary entirely for independents, and let the 3rd party candidates run there too.
As much howling as there is lately about Florida Dems being disenfranchised with their primary canceled, independents are ALWAYS disenfranchised by most states and the 2 parties like it that since he primaries are where our politicians are really chosen.
If people could bail on the two parties and still get to vote in primaries a LOT more people would go independent and the two parties would really get the message that they suck. You might end up with a whole third of the electorate voting in an independent primary for independent candidates who win or lose hased on their ideas and not on their party affiliation and the extent to which they pander to the far left and right in the two parties.
In ATT's defense they did bankroll Bell Labs, which was one of the bigger sources of innovation in this country during its heyday. Not sure exactly how much of a font of innovation it is today when it doesn't have the monopoly to bankroll it.
When companies are facing stiff competition they can react in many different ways. One is they can try to innovate to be better than their competition so they invest in a lot in R&D, but R&D is risky and doesn't always pay off. They can also just slash spending to maximize near term profit and lower costs which can be devastating to R&D and long term innovation.
A monopoly with a gusher of profits to spend and no competitors to worry about can prettily easily sink tons of money in pure R&D even with the prospect that it might not pay off in near term products (i.e. Microsoft Research and Bell Labs). They can also just line the pockets of their executives and share holders and not innovate a bit.
"second every little country has a long history of (sometimes nasty) fights with other little countries"
Heh... The Civil War was, by far, the bloodiest war America has ever fought. Next.....
I'll grant you language and hundreds of years of history are obstacles, but the voracious forces of globalization are probably going to compel Europeans to get closer to each other than many will find comfortable.
Your bullshit call is for the most part the only thing that is bullshit. The grand parent is correct you can travel between any of the original 13 EU members without stopping. Since the Schengen agreement all interior border controls were removed and the only border and customer enforcement is around the edges. If you have an EU passport its relatively easy to move around and work in EU countries.
The grandparent slightly overstates when he said "any country in the EU" since I don't think the newer members have signed on to these open borders yet.
The EU has really become the United States of Europe. Its more like the early United States since the states still retain a lot of power, but assuming it holds together it will probably continue to become more like one nation over time.
You express a nice sentiment but the reality is a felony conviction makes the odds of success the rest of your life very low. People do succeed in spite of it but the odds are you are going to continue to fail.
With the ubiquity of back round checks these days if you have a felony conviction your odds of getting a good job again are extremely low. I think its an unwritten law that when you get nailed once, even if its for a victimless crime like drug posession, and you get a felony conviction, society has pretty much written you off. Getting a GED, or getting "rehabilitated" in prison isn't going to change that which may be a reason most prisons don't even try. There is a good chance you are going to come out of prison, be unemployable and broke, or have to take the worst of the worst jobs where you will barely scrape by. So should you be surprised that people return to selling drugs, robbery, etc. to survive? You don't need to pass a background check to return to crime.
The prevailing solution today is to pass 3 strikes laws, something like 20+ states have them. You nail someone once, then you just have to nail them twice more even for trivial crimes and then you lock the person up for life. This is the most basic indicator America doesn't want to rehabilitate. They want to lock people up who broke the rules and throw away the key.
The cost to society to imprison vast numbers of people for life is staggering and growing, but as someone else pointed out prisons are a huge private enterprise now so it is a very profitable. It does add a steep toll to your tax burden though, and it is a great way to divert money from roads and education to warehousing people on an industrial scale. The U.S. has one the highest per capita prison populations in the world.
I rather suspect that the vengeful Nancy Grace mind set of America thinks prison rape is what the people who get convicted of felonies deserve as part of their punishmemt.
"Please tell me how an executive order can overturn the bill of fucking rights?"
The same way Bush used his executive powers to lock up Jose Padilla, an American Citizen, indefinitely, without access to lawyer, in a military brig where he was, at a minimum, subjected to psychological torture. The Bush administration completely stripped a citizen of his basic rights with the stroke of a pen. The case has been grinding through the courts for years ever since, and the courts have finally years later said it was wrong, but there was no punishment for the Bush administration for their wrongdoing so they can just do it again and again. If they lose in court there is no consequence for them. If they win in court they set a precedent that expands their power forever. The deck is completely stacked in their favor to take your rights away.
Unfortunately executive orders, and signing statements, are a favorite tool of this administration, to seize powers they probably don't have. It takes almost no effort for them to issue them, but someone has to have to balls and the resources to launch a law suit against the federal government with its vast power and resources, to overturn it. It then takes years for the case to get to a final decision in the Supreme Court. Since Bush has appointed two justices to the Supreme Court the odds of him winning there are substantially improved. Even if they lose and the court finds they massively abused their power there is no consequence for the people in the Bush administration who did it.
The Bush administration has also been very adept at putting clauses in things like the Patriot Act and their executive orders that make it very difficult and dangerous to challenge them in court. The Patriot Act has a gag order against everyone who is forced to divulge information about someone being investigated, like ISP's or librarians, so they are in peril if they even talk to a lawyer if they want to fight it. As I recall the case filed against warrantless spying on Americans was thrown out recently because the plaintiffs weren't the ones being spied or couldn't prove they were spied on at least. As long as the Bush administration keeps secret who is being spied no one can challenge it in court.
I think maybe your attitude is part of the problem we have. You seem to think your rights are set in stone and no one can take them away from you so you don't have to lift a finger to defend them. In fact your rights are under constant assault by people who want to take them away from you, have been pretty for 200 years, they have to be vigorously defended or you can lose them and in fact have. Since 9/11 its been an all out assault and your most basic rights have been severely eroded. Its unfortunately a standard response in the wake of a sneak attack, for politicians to use fear mongering as a tool to grab power for themselves. It happened after Pearl Harbor too when American citizens of Japanese descent had all their property confiscated and entire families were put in concentration camps for the duration of the war.
This is supposed to be a nation based on the rule of law. Seizure of assets of someone engaged in violence might be tolerable if the government proves the case in court and convince a jury to convict the people involved of a crime. It is completely over the top for a Secretary of Treasury to have the power to seize all your assets with a stroke of a pen and without proving a case in court. The Bush administration might not go after an average American with this but its a certainty they will immediately go after any Muslim charity sending money to groups in the Middle East they don't approve of, or any group that is sympathetic to Palestinian or Hezzbollah causes, criticizes Israel, criticizes the U.S. occupation of Iraq, or criticizes the puppet government in Iraq. They could well go after anyone in America who expresses opposition to the war in Iraq. The wording of this order is so broad they could go after the assets of Congressmen who are trying to force the withdrawal of American troops from Iraq since they can say this will lead to violence and the collapse of Iraq.
"I would guess that this would really put some terror into the enemy..".. unless the enemy has some sophisticated communications eavesdropping and decryption gear or jamming gear, like Russia or China maybe.
You have to wonder how good the comm security is on these, or if the "enemy" could potentially hijack them and turn them back on their masters. I imagine it would be really hard but if it were to happen I think the U.S. might lose some of their enthusiasm for UAV's:)
You also wonder what the UAV does if they are successfully jammed for long periods. Would that preclude them from launching weapons without a human signal to do so? Do they have one mode where they launch a missile at pre-programmed target like a cruise missile or do they only launch missiles at operator selected targets so jamming them would incapacitate them?
Do they just return home on their own if they lose their comm link for the duration of the mission?
You also wonder how stealthy they are. If they are flying against someone with a real air defense are they sitting ducks, so they are really only good against insurgents with no air defenses.
"I think a pertinent question here would be what exactly do you yourself do to minimize your impact on the environment to justify your taking such an extreme anti-environmental stance? Anything at all?"
Its not a pertinent question at all... because I'm not ranting about the fact expanding this oil refinery is going to lead to some pollution.
I'm pointing out the fundamental reason we have pollution is we all demand and are willing to pay for life styles that cause pollution. Even worse now we've shared our lifestyle with places like India and China and will now have hundreds of millions more people driving cars and running air conditioners.
The fundamental issue with fossil fuel pollution is we all want to drive cars, and buy goods shipped by ships, trucks and trains. We have pollution because we demand our computers and air conditioning. We want all these things...we insist having all these things...but then we all get on our high horses and bitch about the fact that refineries pollute, or that coal fired power plants are causing global warming. We could switch to nuclear power plants instead but then people will bitch about the risk of a meltdown or the radioactive waste. That TVA power plant of yours is generating nuclear waste that is being stored in someone else's back yard. We could use solar but the current classic home solar installion often means a bunch of nasty batteries. You could do wind but that that ruins vast acreages and is a significant hazard to birds. You could do hydroelectric which seems to be how you soothe your conscious but that leads to serious ecological consequences for rivers and especially migratory aquatic species.
Dude you drive a car, even if you don't drive it much or its gets good MPG. Somewhere the environment is being trashed to drill for oil for you, a tanker is hauling it to you and periodically hitting rocks and spilling millions of gallons of it in to the ocean, pipeline are being built to get it to a refinery for you which scars the land and spring leaks, a refinery is polluting the environment to make it in to gasoline for you, and all you are doing is trying to kid yourself you aren't just as responsible as me or anyone else. If you want to rant about pollution from energy production you need to not drive a gasoline powered car, completely unplug from the grid and not use electricity(i.e. your computer) unless you can produce it yourself in an environmentally friendly way, grow your own food, without chemical fertilizer etc.
" While I don't live in any of the cities you mention, the majority of my electricity comes from hydroelectric and nuclear thanks to TVA."
Which proves absolutely zip. We are all on a giant national electrical grid. It is bought and sold and shuffled around randomly. We are all equally to blame for the fact that there is a new boom in the construction of coal fired power plants. Stop trying to kid yourself that you aren't just as much a part of the problem as everyone else.
"Wrong. Refining capacity has expanded significantly in the U.S. while no new refineries are built precisely because of EPA roadblocks. Far cheaper, faster, and easier to expand than build new. This concentrates throughput and pollution at existing sites."
Could you provides a source to substantiate this. I think you are the one who is wrong. In a couple minutes of googling I find this in the Christian Science Monitor:
"In 1981, the US had 324 refineries with a total capacity of 18.6 million barrels per day, the Department of Energy reports. Today, there are just 132 oil refineries with a capacity of 16.8 million b.p.d., according to Oil and Gas Journal, a trade publication."
While major producers like Exxon have significantly expanded production at existing refineries, or snapped up refineries in mergers, a large number of small refineries have disappeared, and of course many oil companies have consolidated in mergers. Refining has as a result been significantly consolidated. Here is another chart which also shows total refining capacity is down from 1982 to 2002 by 500,000 barrels, and shows the extent of the consolidation. Not sure if this has changed in the last 5 years, but I doubt it has.
Everyone knows U.S. refining capacity is inadequate, the Saudis point this out everytime Americans bitch about gasoline prices and blame crude oil for it. The fact is the refiners are the leading profiteers on gasoline. That's why gasoline prices spike when crude oil prices don't spike, its why gasoline prices always spike just in time for the summer driving season. Oil companies are racking up record profits on crude oil, but they are also making record profits on gasoline because of refining.
I wont argue that environmental regulation is a reason for the shortage in capacity, but I can most definitely assure you that oil companies are overjoyed with the fact there is a shortage in refining capacity and are crying crocodile tears blaming it on the EPA.
It would be great if there was a truly free market in refining with competition and if when there was a shortage of capacity some enterprising capitalist could just build a new refinery, increase supply and reduce costs. In the area I'm in there is really only one refinery serving the entire area and they jack up prices with impunity whenever they feel like it. It simply isn't a free market, and when Reagan deregulated it, we traded a government manipulated market for an industry manipulated market and they are both bad.
I'll probably get filleted for this but I think the slant being put on this by both the submitter and everything I read here is leaving one important point out. The Midwest especially Indiana and Iowa is critically short of refining capacity, and doesn't have the best access to crude oil either. So they are trying solve this problem by getting more refining capacity and tapping in to Canadian crude. The Midwest has recently been through several bouts where refineries have been shut down due to things like floods and breakdowns, and gasoline prices have spiked by as much as fifty cents overnight.
Now granted on a project of this size you would think they probably would invest somewhat more in being environmentally friendly but I wager a lot of people just want to stabilize gasoline prices, the only way to do that is to increase refining capacity, so they said what the hell. Unfortunately the Great Lakes have been a toxic waste dump for over a century so I'm not sure you would in fact notice a little more. Their ecology has already been pretty much destroyed so its kind of crying over spilled milk. All we are taking about here are shades of pollution, since the great lakes are already in bad shape.
I would be a little curious about the people ranting about the preciousness of the environment here. How many gallons of gas do you buy a week? How much electricity do you use powering all your modern conveniences, your AC because you are living in Vegas, Phoenix or Florida which aren't places people should really live in large numbers...or to power your computers...which is probably coming from a coal fired power plant. There is great irony in air conditioning. We massively abuse it so we can live places that aren't cold in the winter because we are pansies. The air conditioning is sucking up huge quantities of electricity which we are burning coal to generate. The coal is releasing CO2 it took millions of years for the Earth to sequester and the climate is warming. Now we need even more AC to stay comfortable. You can see where this viscous circle is taking us.
I know it feels good to rant about "the man" destroying our environment but unless you are living off the grid and running your car on biodiesel or riding a bike to get around, "the man" is you and me and all of us.
On the flip side much of the spiking we see in gasoline prices lately dates back to the Reagan era when refining was deregulated. Refining capacity has not kept pace with demand ever since. It is a fact that most oil companies LIKE the fact there is a shortage of refining capacity so they have been finding excuses for the last 20+ years to avoid expanding refining capacity, blaming it on environmental regulation in particular. The fact gasoline supplies have gotten progressively tighter ever since is making oil refiners rich, and they are either implicitly or explicitly colluding to keep it that way. By expanding their refining capacity BP is actually bucking the trend and jerking around the good ole boys in Texas. The "oil man" is a money loving whore and they are screwing us, but we let them by buying cars with horrible fuel milage, and by solo driving four hours a day to commute to work, etc.
I can see a comic scenario here, maybe BP said hell no to expanding capacity, and blamed it on environmental regulations (though they really just wanted to continue to profit off tight gasoline supplies). Indiana said fine, screw the environmental stuff, build it and just pollute. At this point BP said "D'oh" because their bluff had just been called.
"Either they cease to officially exist, or they can identify themselves through existing, insecure means."
I'm somewhat less concerned about the physical identification process since that is a long running weakness in our ID system until you inflict cradle to grave biometrics on us and I wouldn't touch that hotbutton with a 10 foot pole. If someone has to go in to a social security office or embassy with 2 ID's and be scrutinized by a human being that is better than the current system where one person can harvest a million identities and credit card numbers and use them electronically from some place in Russia with pretty much no check on them.
Having to go in to an office to reset your signature would be a serious impediment to identity thieves. They could be photographed and fingerprinted, for example, and have the info attached to the account so in the event there is a fraud there is evidence of the culprit. It would also be possible to setup automated notification if your signature is changed so you know immediately when it happens. You would forbid changing the notification address and the private key at the same time to insure notification gets to the previous owner of the identity.
The thing that is urgently needed NOW is for a digital signature as a requirement for any online financial transactions. If online theft continues to explode everyone is going to eventually stop trusting online anything especially after their first encounter with identity theft.
I appreciate the potential for government abuse of a "national" ID system like this but the current abuse of our ID's by thieves completely trumps that problem and this is a pretty modest extension of the existing social security number "national" ID system which is completely inadequate in the age of computers and networks.
We already have a national ID system...its just a bad one.... the Social Security number.
The only thing a digital signature system would add to government power is the ability to track each time your signature is accessed to verify your identity, but when it comes to taxes, banking and employment they already are notified most of the time when your social security number is used.
Not sure I would exactly agree with this spin on history. The Magna Carta dates to the early thirteenth century and outlined the concept of Habeus Corpus, which was designed to protect people from the abuse of power by English kings. Many of the rights you cite in our constitution were drawn up with the Magna Carta as the historical basis. Britain did have a representative form of government and a parliament long before America did. The main problem the colonies had with the British government is they didn't have any seats in parliament or power in it, which is usually the case for colonies.
I'm not prone to defend King George or his namesake George W. but the 13 colonies were in fact colonies of England and under the legal jurisdiction of King George. I really doubt he was as good at "surveillance" as you make him sound, it was more a case that he and his administrative and military apparatus did work to try to enforce order in increasingly rebellious colonies. All imperial power have done that, and do that....including the United States of America throughout its history.
You can certainly understand why many in the colonies wanted to throw off the yoke of English rule, but a fair percentage of it was due to business and the age old root of insurrection, excessive taxation, primarily in the form of tarifs on goods imported in to the colonies...like tea. The Stamp Act and these tarifs interfered with the ability of certain colonists to get rich. Its a neglected historical fact that John Hancock was mostly a salesman and a trader. He made a pretty penny, organizing a boycott of British tea and then smuggling tea in to the colonies, and selling it, without paying the tarifs so he undercut the near monopoly of the British East India Company. The ax he was grinding with the British is he wanted to get rich importing tea instead of the British East India company. British East India held substantial power in London...in modern terms the British East India compnay had good lobbyists, Hancock didn't and they used their lobbyists to gain a huge competitive advantage over their colonial rivals...something very common for modern corporations to use their lobbyists for too. Hancock was charged at least once with smuggling so I'm not sure the ax he was grinding with King George was so much about life, liberty and pursuit of happiness as it was about making money selling tea.
I assure you if our founding fathers were alive to day and defied taxes they would be in the Federal penitentiary, or if they openly advocated insurrection they would be lucky to live to even make it to prison. There is pretty much no government or legal system that condones not paying taxes, treason, revolt and insurrection which is what the founding fathers practiced, though perhaps with good reason and to good effect.
One has to wonder if the founding fathers were time warped from then to now what they would think of the staggering tax burden the government they created inflicts on its own citizens. The tarifs of 1776 pale next to the staggering and intrusive income, sales and property taxes today, though in a curious inversion tarifs are rapidly disappearing in the name of "free trade". Perhaps they would have blessed it because we supposedly have "representation" in the government that taxes us, but I certainly didn't have any real say in all the taxes I pay, if I had I wouldn't have signed up for most of them, nor for most of the things those tax dollars are being squandered on. I really want a government that builds roads(and taxes fuel to pay for that) and provides a bare minimum defense and police force. Not sure schools are even a proper role considering how bad public schools have turned out.
"The fewer people that have access to your private information, the harder it is for people to steal from you."
True. The problem we have with identity theft, at least in the U.S., is the mechanism we use to identify ourselves dates to a 1936, a nine digit number which, when tied to your name opens nearly all doors to identity thieves. The key problem with it is it used to identify you which means you CAN'T keep it secret because you have to use it everytime you need to identify yourselves for employment, banks, credit cards and assorted other purposes. We got away with it back in the age where everything was on paper and moved from point A to point B by hand, and the paper was locked up in buildings, but in the computer and network age it is pure insanity that we still rely on this archaic system for identification. It is an engraved invitation for hackers to get rich, especially when combined with the online use of credit cards and banks. The staggering losses to identify theft are going to just continue to explode and amazingly no one is doing anything about it.
The solution is well known and wouldn't be that hard to implement. The social security administration urgently needs create a public key digital signature repository and allow people to go to a Social Security office, prove their identity and register their digital signature. Then everything which requires electornic identification needs to require a person use their digital signature and private key to prove their identity. If you don't create a digital signature then you continue with the current system and are extremely vulnerable to identity theft. If you have a digital signature then you have some confidence that when you bank, or use your credit card online that there is a system at work that doesn't date back to before the computer age. You could even go in and change your digital signature once in a while, something you can't easily do with your name and social security number.
The really important thing about social networking sites has been totally forgotten. The beauty of social networking sites is that, once you get the ball rolling, and sucker a certain number of people in to one, they drag all their friends in to them whether they want to be in them or not...and then they drag all their friends in because they are there and they don't want to look friendless. They are the definition of viral marketing and are the way to go if you want to get rich like a dot com millionaire in 1999, and you suck at marketing. Of course there is also a first mover advantage because once you have established a big social networking site you have an inherent advantage because people want to join the BIG social networking site, they want to join as few social networking sites as possible and they want to join the one all their friends are already in.
Call me old fashioned but plastering personal information all over the Internet is to me....ill advised. Its an invitation to identity theft, cyberstalking and future employment problems especially if you share a little to much information about yourself and its sucked in to Google for all eternity. Perhaps they are the rage amongst the young because young people haven't acquired enough of a sense of caution to prevent them from doing something that is ultimately a little foolish, like plastering all the details of your life, and your inner most thoughts... with photos... on the Internet.
Slashdot Mirror
"Quite frankly China has tested the limits of both the US and UN for years, and neither the Clinton nor Bush administrations were willing or capable of doing anything."
What exactly do you propose the U.S. do? The Chinese are holding such huge U.S dollar reserves they could ruin the U.S. economy just by dumping them, though they would probably cause a global economic collapse and suffer as much as everyone else if they did.
The U.S. has transfered so much capital and IP to China, and we are so dependent on the steady stream of container shipping from China you pretty much have to look the other way at anything short of open warfare.
Besides which China is a Republican businessman's fantasy come true. It has a vast pool of dirt cheap labor, no labor unions, almost no business regulation, no environmental controls, and workers either keep their mouths shut or they are harshly dealt with by the state. They have one party authoritarian rule and as long as that one party is pro business, which they have been for the last couple decades, they are a Republican's wet dream. Why do you think so many big western corporations are rushing to China lock, stock and barrel. Liberal democracies sucks for business, you have to pay people more than a subsistence wage, you can't kill 4000 a year in coal mines like you can in China, you can't lock workers up if they bitch....
The new Fascist China is pure heaven for Republicans, so their is almost nothing China is going to do they are going to have a problem with including this. Most western businessman and politicians are way more fixated on kissing Chinese ass these days than they are starting some kind of confrontation with them.
Besides which when it comes to network security if you are stupid enough to put anything important on the Internet, and you can't keep it secure you kind of deserve what you get, doesn't really matter where the attack comes from.
"As such they are entitled to a monthly dividend of our productivity, enough to survive decently.."
LoL, I think you just proved there are no leftist libertarians. Dude that is pure socialism and there isn't anything Libertarian about it. Its basically welfare except everyone can qualify. You will end up with vast numbers of people who just don't want to work collecting it, and a dwindling number of people wondering why they are working so hard to support all those freeloaders. Welcome to France....
Libertarians are the exact opposite of that. They want to make their own way in the world, and if they work hard they reap the benefits, if they don't they starve. A Libertarian is never looking for a free ride.
I have a few relatives on Medicare. They go to the doctor CONSTANTLY and demand every expensive test in the books because they want to find out "what's wrong" with themselves. The tests always come back there isn't anything wrong with them other than they are old and aren't twenty years old any more.
If you listen to a scanner with ambulance and fire on it you would be dumbfounded at the rate some seniors call for ambulance and paramedic service and go to the emergency room for simple medical problems that should have been taken care of with a visit to a doctor's office. It doesn't cost them much to abuse the system thanks to Medicare so they do.
Its just simple human nature that if you make something free a lot of people are going to squander it.
In the U.S. it a major industry getting yourself declared disabled and going on Social Security disability when you are perfectly able. Again I know someone who had a lump and a friend who was a doctor, claimed it was terminal cancer and got on disability. The lump turned out to be benign, and the person just kept collected disability until 65.
"Secondarily, you assume that you can identify the bright kids and the dumb ones."
So why wouldn't being faced with landing in a vocational school, versus a prep school, motivate you just as well to do what it takes to prove your ability?
Gotta love people who say I'm a genius, but I don't have to do anything to prove it, take my word on, trust me. I'm going to fail every course but please give me that college degree and a high paying job, because I'm really smart, really, trust me. You should probably consider starting your own business, and hopefully starvation will be a sufficient motivator for you to succeed.
"Vocational skills aren't the answer either, since all you'll be doing is teaching some subset of skills and technology used at that point in time."
This is another silly argument. You are saying because some vocational skill might not last forever you should teach no vocational skill at all. I hate to break it to you but a liberal arts education isn't going to serve most kids not going to college well either. Training in carpentry, plumbing, electrical systems, welding, operating machine tools, driving trucks and machinery will and probably for a long time. Math, science and English would almost certainly have to be part of that curriculum too. But it would be practical and grounded in the real world. Trying to teach Shakespeare to a future carpenter usually doesn't work. Trying to teach calculus to someone who is going to be a welder or a truck driver also doesn't work well.
"Your suggestions would simply result in more stratification, and a class structure even worse than we have now. (Yeah, I've since read a history book or two...)"
So instead you want to flatten gifted kids in to a lowest common denominator "No child left behind" public education system so they will be years behind where they should be when the finally escape it. Equality sounds nice but that is an invitation for complete failure in a globalized world where India is pushing it most gifted kids very hard to achieve as much as they can as early as they can. Again I'm advocating people are elevated based on their ability and their willingness to work hard. Not on the fact they won the sperm lottery and were born to an affluent family. Rich, dumb lazy kids deserve to fail just as much as poor, dumb, lazy kids.
"I don't think that would work. You learn a lot more in school than just what is taught in class, notably, how to make friends, get on with others, work in teams (which inherently means learning how to fit into a power structure, by the way)
I guess you totally glossed over the part in my post where I said there is value to keeping these kids in a loose knit school so they have access to sports, music etc. so they get the socializing angle. You certainly don't wanted gifted kids turning in to hermits..but that socializing aspect of public schools is frequently brutally counterproductive to gifted kids. Academically gifted kids...nerds...are the ones most likely to be brutalized in public schools. A lot of kids resent kids who do better acadamicly, coupled with the fact a lot of gifted kids aren't the most socially astute. U.S. schools seem to place a LOT more value, to the point of glorification, on jocks who excel at sports, than academic achievers. Be real
"I find your ideas about separation of kids into regular school and trade schools based on "natural intelligence" problematic."
I would totally agree that the "state" partitioning kids is bad and I wouldn't say its exactly based on "natural intelligence. Gifted is a complex mix of natural ability and willingness to work hard. Someone with natural ability but unwilling to work doesn't really belong in a prep school either. Someone with limited natural ability but willingness to work hard could easily make it in a prep school.
The choice should be left to the student and their family with councilors perhaps pointing out to low achieving kids that their chances of success in a prep school track, are not great, but if they want to work really hard... Councilors should also discourage a gifted kid taking a vo-tech track as a waste of a life but if the kid hates education.... Kids should be able to switch between the two if they change their mind perhaps with the realization it may mean an extra year or two of classes unless they are fast learners.
The biggest benefit of splitting schools is you escape the current lowest common denominator system where gifted kids are punished by kids who hate school and hate people who do well at school.
A problem we have with universal publication education is I think most students have stopped valuing education precisely because its compulsory. Maybe if a good education was a little harder to get people would return to valuing it more.
"People heavily involved in technology are younger with less experience: exactly the type of people who would find appeal in an economic/political movement characterized by simple messages"
Most of your post is just silly. I drank Republican, Democrat and Socialist kool-aid at various times when I was young and naive. It was only as I got older and have seen the practical consequences of both the political systems I'd lived in and the ones in other parts of the world that I've embraced a more Libertarian view on the world. Mind you I'm not talking about the over the top Libertarianism of its fanatics to which I could see your post applying.
My brand of Libertarianism arises from the simple fact politicians and their benefactors are self serving. The laws they pass are almost never for the common good. They are designed to pick winners and losers using money they tax out of my pocket, and the winners are always their friends, and the losers their enemies. When Democrats are in they tax the rich and hand out money to the poor, who happen to vote for them. Republicans are in they cut taxes...on the rich...give their business friends big subsidies and screw over working people every chance they get. Neither party does a good job for the middle class. Real socialism sounds nice on paper, but it fails when it hits the flaws in human nature. People who just want to work hard and get ahead are completely screwed under Socialism. It is a system for party members and bureaucrats on one hand and freeloaders on the other. Some good things happen under Socialism but in my book it is a huge net loss of a system.
At least in my case Libertarianism isn't due to inexperience, its due to experience and interaction with all the misguided things politicians have done over my lifetime. Its left me at a place I mostly want my government to be a tiny fraction of its current size and to tax me at a small fraction of its current rates. I would be a lot happier saving for my own retirement instead of government doing it for me, and if you don't save for it you suffer. That's life.
I am completely OK with paying modest taxes to pay for a defensive military, but the U.S. military is anything but that. It is a completely excessive offensive force which is constantly meddling outside the U.S. when it shouldn't. I'm fine with paying taxes for fire and police service. Police are useful when they stop people from hurting each other. They are completely out of bounds when they enforce laws regulating personal behavior that hurts no one else. Government serves a useful purpose when it builds roads, and I am glad to pay a use tax on gasoline or diesel for that. I am fine with things like antitrust, FDA and consumer safety agencies as long as they don't go overboard punishing business, or end up in the pockets of business like they are today. The fact is greedy people trying to make money are predators, they will hurt other people and it is an appropriate role for government to stop people from hurting each other. If I'm not hurting anyone else though....leave me alone.
Universal health care would be nice but you give people something for free and they abuse it, then it costs everyone a fortune, and it sucks the life out of an economy. It would be good to have universal catastrophic health insurance and a medical system that encourages people to get basic preventive care but that is hard to do in practice.
This leaves about 90% of the government we have today that I think is completely inappropriate and counterproductive. You could wipe most of it off the books and the world would just be a better place.
There are a lot better ways to educate gifted and self motivated students than shoving them in regimented classrooms, especially now that we have these new fangled computers and networks. You could almost certainly build a better system for gifted kids if you took something like the MIT on line courseware and developed it. For example add elementary and secondary school level equivalents. Back those courses with on line tutors like the tutors in India a lot of kids are using today to help them through parts they don't understand, and then figure out a system for verifying self taught students are learning the material which is probably the hardest part. You almost certainly want to allow the most gifted kids to be self paced. Keeping a loose knit school for sports, music and other activities is valuable, it just shouldn't a regimented warehouse for kids, and schools really shouldn't be allowed to abuse gifted kids who don't fit in to school cliques.
The classroom system is an anachronism and really unnecessary in the computer and network age for a lot of kids.
The regimented classrooms might be a necessary evil for the not so gifted and the people who wont do anything productive unless someone is watching them every minute. Its a pretty dubious endeavor trying to teach history, social studies, geography and even math and science to these people.in the first place though. They would probably be a lot happier and better served by a vocational or technical school where they are learning survival skills, a trade and maybe apprenticeships where they can earn a little money and see what life will be like in the working world if they aren't willing to work for a rewarding and well paying career.
The recent "No Child Left Behind" boondoggle in particular, is probably a prescription for devastation of American competitiveness. You are expending massive effort and resources on making the least gifted students barely literate, and judging schools on the performance of their worst students and not their best ones. You are abandoning all the most gifted students. You would think the morons that instituted No Child Left Behind would have studied what makes India such an educational powerhouse. India excels because they seek out the gifted students and do everything possible to give them the best eduction possible(though its excessively regimented). American politicians by contrast, being the morons they are, opted for a system that is fixated on the worst students and abandons the gifted ones. I think the ulterior motive of the Republicans involved was to just destroy the public education system entirely with the illusion that private schools would fix everything. The problem there being private schools tend to best serve the wealthy and not necessarily the gifted.
If you want the best education system both for students and society, you want to ensure the most gifted students get the best education possible, regardless of their families wealth, and you want to ensure the poorest students get basic job skills so they can survive and even prosper. A wicked edge to this is that rich kids that are dumb and lazy, like oh I don't know...George W. Bush...don't get a prep school and ivy league education, and a free pass in life, just because their family is rich and powerful.
That works as long as you are always right. The one advantage to team work is individuals aren't infallible and don't have infinite knowledge. The one big advantage to a good team is someone else might know a better way to do something, or see the flaws in your approach and help you correct them before you do something stupid.
You are however correct that one good individual is better than a bad team, if the rest of the team is clueless and just there to take up space and consume oxygen. They are bad when they are just there to form a consensus which, rather than being the best solution, is one of the poorer ones, it just happens to be the one everyone will agree to just to put an end to a pointless discussion and escape.
If you've every worked on a good team you will appreciate that they are priceless, unfortunately they are also somewhat rare, and being stuck on bad teams is a soul sucking nightmare.
"actually vote Republican because they think it is closer to this libertarian ideal that they have in their mind."
Why would they think that, especially lately? The libertarian wing of the Republican party, the true conservative wing, has been decimated. The only reason there are any left is because the Democrats are worse and they don't want to land in third party obscurity. The Republican party today is almost entirely rabidly pro big business and "Christian" party. They only reason they are they "Christian" party is around 1980 they realized they needed some votes to win and push their pro business agenda, big business didn't have enough votes and fundamentalist Christians are, by definition, gullible. If you fall in to those two categories its the party for you, otherwise voting for them is stupidity. Of course voting Democrat is stupid too for different reasons.
McCarthy, Nixon, Reagan and two Bush's have destroyed any pretense the Republican's had of being for small government and keeping government out of people's lives. The only small government they want is to eliminate social programs for the poor and middle class and eliminating all business regulation. You can see what you get when you have no business regulation, you get China, flooding markets with unsafe products, and killing 4000 coal miners a year. The U.S. was the same, or actually worse, around 1900. All the business regulation came in to being because people got tired of being killed by greedy businessmen just out to make a buck.
The Republicans rant about free enterprise but turn around and give huge subsidies to their corporate benefactors at every turn. That isn't free enterprise.... its borderline Fascism when government and big business fuse. The Chinese have turned completely Fascist in the last 20 years and big business Republicans love every bit of it, and are in fact green with envy of China. They are dreaming of returning America to a place like that, where unions are outlawed(they are in China), there is practically no regulation of business, and workers are working for subsistence wages, living in dormitories, and are either completely obedient or swiftly and harshly dealt with. Since big business Republicans couldn't return America to that, they are gutting America's economy to move their profit centers to China instead. (It doesn't help Americans are increasingly ignorant and lazy, prosperity corrupts...).
The Republicans are 100% for a police state and a huge military industrial complex. They think those two things are great for business though in reality they probably aren't, and those two things are the antithesis of Libertarianism. They like law and order because they want obedient workers and even better they want laws everyone will break. People who are guilty of something are easy to control and prone to obey. They want a huge military because its profitable for their corporate benefactors and it theoretically is a necessary tool for imposing America's will around the globe and to control the world economy, especially its oil, which is also good for business if wars didn't wreck economies.
I'm OK with war on drugs the Republicans love so much...if you have a war on alcohol and tobacco at the same time..but when you don't its hypocrisy of the highest order since those two drugs do more damage than all the illegal drugs combined. Prescription drugs are now just as bad with Oxycontin being practically legal heroine. Its only legal because a big pro Republican drug company is making a boat load of money on it.
If you want to transform the American political system overnight, pass a law that makes it mandatory for every state to have a primary for independents, where independents get to put a slate of candidates on the general election ballot, and let all the 3rd party candidates run there if they want so they have a shot at some critical mass. Our two party system is so corrupt because the two parties know they get to pick all the candidates in the primaries, so they have a s
The real problem here is the two parties have completely disenfranchised independent voters in a lot of states. Most states don't allow independents to vote in the primaries, though some do. As a result independents have no say who makes it to the election where they do get to vote. Independents do have a lot of clout since they swing while the partisan voters don't, but they usually only have two bad options in thegeneral election because of a bad primary system.
Our government would get some better, maybe not a lot, if it was law that independents either get to vote in the primary of the party of their choosing or you have a primary entirely for independents, and let the 3rd party candidates run there too.
As much howling as there is lately about Florida Dems being disenfranchised with their primary canceled, independents are ALWAYS disenfranchised by most states and the 2 parties like it that since he primaries are where our politicians are really chosen.
If people could bail on the two parties and still get to vote in primaries a LOT more people would go independent and the two parties would really get the message that they suck. You might end up with a whole third of the electorate voting in an independent primary for independent candidates who win or lose hased on their ideas and not on their party affiliation and the extent to which they pander to the far left and right in the two parties.
"is not required to innovate"
In ATT's defense they did bankroll Bell Labs, which was one of the bigger sources of innovation in this country during its heyday. Not sure exactly how much of a font of innovation it is today when it doesn't have the monopoly to bankroll it.
When companies are facing stiff competition they can react in many different ways. One is they can try to innovate to be better than their competition so they invest in a lot in R&D, but R&D is risky and doesn't always pay off. They can also just slash spending to maximize near term profit and lower costs which can be devastating to R&D and long term innovation.
A monopoly with a gusher of profits to spend and no competitors to worry about can prettily easily sink tons of money in pure R&D even with the prospect that it might not pay off in near term products (i.e. Microsoft Research and Bell Labs). They can also just line the pockets of their executives and share holders and not innovate a bit.
"second every little country has a long history of (sometimes nasty) fights with other little countries"
Heh... The Civil War was, by far, the bloodiest war America has ever fought. Next.....
I'll grant you language and hundreds of years of history are obstacles, but the voracious forces of globalization are probably going to compel Europeans to get closer to each other than many will find comfortable.
Your bullshit call is for the most part the only thing that is bullshit. The grand parent is correct you can travel between any of the original 13 EU members without stopping. Since the Schengen agreement all interior border controls were removed and the only border and customer enforcement is around the edges. If you have an EU passport its relatively easy to move around and work in EU countries.
The grandparent slightly overstates when he said "any country in the EU" since I don't think the newer members have signed on to these open borders yet.
The EU has really become the United States of Europe. Its more like the early United States since the states still retain a lot of power, but assuming it holds together it will probably continue to become more like one nation over time.
You express a nice sentiment but the reality is a felony conviction makes the odds of success the rest of your life very low. People do succeed in spite of it but the odds are you are going to continue to fail.
With the ubiquity of back round checks these days if you have a felony conviction your odds of getting a good job again are extremely low. I think its an unwritten law that when you get nailed once, even if its for a victimless crime like drug posession, and you get a felony conviction, society has pretty much written you off. Getting a GED, or getting "rehabilitated" in prison isn't going to change that which may be a reason most prisons don't even try. There is a good chance you are going to come out of prison, be unemployable and broke, or have to take the worst of the worst jobs where you will barely scrape by. So should you be surprised that people return to selling drugs, robbery, etc. to survive? You don't need to pass a background check to return to crime.
The prevailing solution today is to pass 3 strikes laws, something like 20+ states have them. You nail someone once, then you just have to nail them twice more even for trivial crimes and then you lock the person up for life. This is the most basic indicator America doesn't want to rehabilitate. They want to lock people up who broke the rules and throw away the key.
The cost to society to imprison vast numbers of people for life is staggering and growing, but as someone else pointed out prisons are a huge private enterprise now so it is a very profitable. It does add a steep toll to your tax burden though, and it is a great way to divert money from roads and education to warehousing people on an industrial scale. The U.S. has one the highest per capita prison populations in the world.
I rather suspect that the vengeful Nancy Grace mind set of America thinks prison rape is what the people who get convicted of felonies deserve as part of their punishmemt.
"Please tell me how an executive order can overturn the bill of fucking rights?"
The same way Bush used his executive powers to lock up Jose Padilla, an American Citizen, indefinitely, without access to lawyer, in a military brig where he was, at a minimum, subjected to psychological torture. The Bush administration completely stripped a citizen of his basic rights with the stroke of a pen. The case has been grinding through the courts for years ever since, and the courts have finally years later said it was wrong, but there was no punishment for the Bush administration for their wrongdoing so they can just do it again and again. If they lose in court there is no consequence for them. If they win in court they set a precedent that expands their power forever. The deck is completely stacked in their favor to take your rights away.
Unfortunately executive orders, and signing statements, are a favorite tool of this administration, to seize powers they probably don't have. It takes almost no effort for them to issue them, but someone has to have to balls and the resources to launch a law suit against the federal government with its vast power and resources, to overturn it. It then takes years for the case to get to a final decision in the Supreme Court. Since Bush has appointed two justices to the Supreme Court the odds of him winning there are substantially improved. Even if they lose and the court finds they massively abused their power there is no consequence for the people in the Bush administration who did it.
The Bush administration has also been very adept at putting clauses in things like the Patriot Act and their executive orders that make it very difficult and dangerous to challenge them in court. The Patriot Act has a gag order against everyone who is forced to divulge information about someone being investigated, like ISP's or librarians, so they are in peril if they even talk to a lawyer if they want to fight it. As I recall the case filed against warrantless spying on Americans was thrown out recently because the plaintiffs weren't the ones being spied or couldn't prove they were spied on at least. As long as the Bush administration keeps secret who is being spied no one can challenge it in court.
I think maybe your attitude is part of the problem we have. You seem to think your rights are set in stone and no one can take them away from you so you don't have to lift a finger to defend them. In fact your rights are under constant assault by people who want to take them away from you, have been pretty for 200 years, they have to be vigorously defended or you can lose them and in fact have. Since 9/11 its been an all out assault and your most basic rights have been severely eroded. Its unfortunately a standard response in the wake of a sneak attack, for politicians to use fear mongering as a tool to grab power for themselves. It happened after Pearl Harbor too when American citizens of Japanese descent had all their property confiscated and entire families were put in concentration camps for the duration of the war.
This is supposed to be a nation based on the rule of law. Seizure of assets of someone engaged in violence might be tolerable if the government proves the case in court and convince a jury to convict the people involved of a crime. It is completely over the top for a Secretary of Treasury to have the power to seize all your assets with a stroke of a pen and without proving a case in court. The Bush administration might not go after an average American with this but its a certainty they will immediately go after any Muslim charity sending money to groups in the Middle East they don't approve of, or any group that is sympathetic to Palestinian or Hezzbollah causes, criticizes Israel, criticizes the U.S. occupation of Iraq, or criticizes the puppet government in Iraq. They could well go after anyone in America who expresses opposition to the war in Iraq. The wording of this order is so broad they could go after the assets of Congressmen who are trying to force the withdrawal of American troops from Iraq since they can say this will lead to violence and the collapse of Iraq.
"I would guess that this would really put some terror into the enemy.." .. unless the enemy has some sophisticated communications eavesdropping and decryption gear or jamming gear, like Russia or China maybe.
:)
You have to wonder how good the comm security is on these, or if the "enemy" could potentially hijack them and turn them back on their masters. I imagine it would be really hard but if it were to happen I think the U.S. might lose some of their enthusiasm for UAV's
You also wonder what the UAV does if they are successfully jammed for long periods. Would that preclude them from launching weapons without a human signal to do so? Do they have one mode where they launch a missile at pre-programmed target like a cruise missile or do they only launch missiles at operator selected targets so jamming them would incapacitate them?
Do they just return home on their own if they lose their comm link for the duration of the mission?
You also wonder how stealthy they are. If they are flying against someone with a real air defense are they sitting ducks, so they are really only good against insurgents with no air defenses.
"I think a pertinent question here would be what exactly do you yourself do to minimize your impact on the environment to justify your taking such an extreme anti-environmental stance? Anything at all?"
... because I'm not ranting about the fact expanding this oil refinery is going to lead to some pollution.
Its not a pertinent question at all
I'm pointing out the fundamental reason we have pollution is we all demand and are willing to pay for life styles that cause pollution. Even worse now we've shared our lifestyle with places like India and China and will now have hundreds of millions more people driving cars and running air conditioners.
The fundamental issue with fossil fuel pollution is we all want to drive cars, and buy goods shipped by ships, trucks and trains. We have pollution because we demand our computers and air conditioning. We want all these things...we insist having all these things...but then we all get on our high horses and bitch about the fact that refineries pollute, or that coal fired power plants are causing global warming. We could switch to nuclear power plants instead but then people will bitch about the risk of a meltdown or the radioactive waste. That TVA power plant of yours is generating nuclear waste that is being stored in someone else's back yard. We could use solar but the current classic home solar installion often means a bunch of nasty batteries. You could do wind but that that ruins vast acreages and is a significant hazard to birds. You could do hydroelectric which seems to be how you soothe your conscious but that leads to serious ecological consequences for rivers and especially migratory aquatic species.
Dude you drive a car, even if you don't drive it much or its gets good MPG. Somewhere the environment is being trashed to drill for oil for you, a tanker is hauling it to you and periodically hitting rocks and spilling millions of gallons of it in to the ocean, pipeline are being built to get it to a refinery for you which scars the land and spring leaks, a refinery is polluting the environment to make it in to gasoline for you, and all you are doing is trying to kid yourself you aren't just as responsible as me or anyone else. If you want to rant about pollution from energy production you need to not drive a gasoline powered car, completely unplug from the grid and not use electricity(i.e. your computer) unless you can produce it yourself in an environmentally friendly way, grow your own food, without chemical fertilizer etc.
" While I don't live in any of the cities you mention, the majority of my electricity comes from hydroelectric and nuclear thanks to TVA."
Which proves absolutely zip. We are all on a giant national electrical grid. It is bought and sold and shuffled around randomly. We are all equally to blame for the fact that there is a new boom in the construction of coal fired power plants. Stop trying to kid yourself that you aren't just as much a part of the problem as everyone else.
"Wrong. Refining capacity has expanded significantly in the U.S. while no new refineries are built precisely because of EPA roadblocks. Far cheaper, faster, and easier to expand than build new. This concentrates throughput and pollution at existing sites."
Could you provides a source to substantiate this. I think you are the one who is wrong. In a couple minutes of googling I find this in the Christian Science Monitor:
"In 1981, the US had 324 refineries with a total capacity of 18.6 million barrels per day, the Department of Energy reports. Today, there are just 132 oil refineries with a capacity of 16.8 million b.p.d., according to Oil and Gas Journal, a trade publication."
While major producers like Exxon have significantly expanded production at existing refineries, or snapped up refineries in mergers, a large number of small refineries have disappeared, and of course many oil companies have consolidated in mergers. Refining has as a result been significantly consolidated. Here is another chart which also shows total refining capacity is down from 1982 to 2002 by 500,000 barrels, and shows the extent of the consolidation. Not sure if this has changed in the last 5 years, but I doubt it has.
Everyone knows U.S. refining capacity is inadequate, the Saudis point this out everytime Americans bitch about gasoline prices and blame crude oil for it. The fact is the refiners are the leading profiteers on gasoline. That's why gasoline prices spike when crude oil prices don't spike, its why gasoline prices always spike just in time for the summer driving season. Oil companies are racking up record profits on crude oil, but they are also making record profits on gasoline because of refining.
I wont argue that environmental regulation is a reason for the shortage in capacity, but I can most definitely assure you that oil companies are overjoyed with the fact there is a shortage in refining capacity and are crying crocodile tears blaming it on the EPA.
It would be great if there was a truly free market in refining with competition and if when there was a shortage of capacity some enterprising capitalist could just build a new refinery, increase supply and reduce costs. In the area I'm in there is really only one refinery serving the entire area and they jack up prices with impunity whenever they feel like it. It simply isn't a free market, and when Reagan deregulated it, we traded a government manipulated market for an industry manipulated market and they are both bad.
I'll probably get filleted for this but I think the slant being put on this by both the submitter and everything I read here is leaving one important point out. The Midwest especially Indiana and Iowa is critically short of refining capacity, and doesn't have the best access to crude oil either. So they are trying solve this problem by getting more refining capacity and tapping in to Canadian crude. The Midwest has recently been through several bouts where refineries have been shut down due to things like floods and breakdowns, and gasoline prices have spiked by as much as fifty cents overnight.
Now granted on a project of this size you would think they probably would invest somewhat more in being environmentally friendly but I wager a lot of people just want to stabilize gasoline prices, the only way to do that is to increase refining capacity, so they said what the hell. Unfortunately the Great Lakes have been a toxic waste dump for over a century so I'm not sure you would in fact notice a little more. Their ecology has already been pretty much destroyed so its kind of crying over spilled milk. All we are taking about here are shades of pollution, since the great lakes are already in bad shape.
I would be a little curious about the people ranting about the preciousness of the environment here. How many gallons of gas do you buy a week? How much electricity do you use powering all your modern conveniences, your AC because you are living in Vegas, Phoenix or Florida which aren't places people should really live in large numbers...or to power your computers...which is probably coming from a coal fired power plant. There is great irony in air conditioning. We massively abuse it so we can live places that aren't cold in the winter because we are pansies. The air conditioning is sucking up huge quantities of electricity which we are burning coal to generate. The coal is releasing CO2 it took millions of years for the Earth to sequester and the climate is warming. Now we need even more AC to stay comfortable. You can see where this viscous circle is taking us.
I know it feels good to rant about "the man" destroying our environment but unless you are living off the grid and running your car on biodiesel or riding a bike to get around, "the man" is you and me and all of us.
On the flip side much of the spiking we see in gasoline prices lately dates back to the Reagan era when refining was deregulated. Refining capacity has not kept pace with demand ever since. It is a fact that most oil companies LIKE the fact there is a shortage of refining capacity so they have been finding excuses for the last 20+ years to avoid expanding refining capacity, blaming it on environmental regulation in particular. The fact gasoline supplies have gotten progressively tighter ever since is making oil refiners rich, and they are either implicitly or explicitly colluding to keep it that way. By expanding their refining capacity BP is actually bucking the trend and jerking around the good ole boys in Texas. The "oil man" is a money loving whore and they are screwing us, but we let them by buying cars with horrible fuel milage, and by solo driving four hours a day to commute to work, etc.
I can see a comic scenario here, maybe BP said hell no to expanding capacity, and blamed it on environmental regulations (though they really just wanted to continue to profit off tight gasoline supplies). Indiana said fine, screw the environmental stuff, build it and just pollute. At this point BP said "D'oh" because their bluff had just been called.
"Either they cease to officially exist, or they can identify themselves through existing, insecure means."
I'm somewhat less concerned about the physical identification process since that is a long running weakness in our ID system until you inflict cradle to grave biometrics on us and I wouldn't touch that hotbutton with a 10 foot pole. If someone has to go in to a social security office or embassy with 2 ID's and be scrutinized by a human being that is better than the current system where one person can harvest a million identities and credit card numbers and use them electronically from some place in Russia with pretty much no check on them.
Having to go in to an office to reset your signature would be a serious impediment to identity thieves. They could be photographed and fingerprinted, for example, and have the info attached to the account so in the event there is a fraud there is evidence of the culprit. It would also be possible to setup automated notification if your signature is changed so you know immediately when it happens. You would forbid changing the notification address and the private key at the same time to insure notification gets to the previous owner of the identity.
The thing that is urgently needed NOW is for a digital signature as a requirement for any online financial transactions. If online theft continues to explode everyone is going to eventually stop trusting online anything especially after their first encounter with identity theft.
I appreciate the potential for government abuse of a "national" ID system like this but the current abuse of our ID's by thieves completely trumps that problem and this is a pretty modest extension of the existing social security number "national" ID system which is completely inadequate in the age of computers and networks.
We already have a national ID system...its just a bad one.... the Social Security number.
The only thing a digital signature system would add to government power is the ability to track each time your signature is accessed to verify your identity, but when it comes to taxes, banking and employment they already are notified most of the time when your social security number is used.
Not sure I would exactly agree with this spin on history. The Magna Carta dates to the early thirteenth century and outlined the concept of Habeus Corpus, which was designed to protect people from the abuse of power by English kings. Many of the rights you cite in our constitution were drawn up with the Magna Carta as the historical basis. Britain did have a representative form of government and a parliament long before America did. The main problem the colonies had with the British government is they didn't have any seats in parliament or power in it, which is usually the case for colonies.
I'm not prone to defend King George or his namesake George W. but the 13 colonies were in fact colonies of England and under the legal jurisdiction of King George. I really doubt he was as good at "surveillance" as you make him sound, it was more a case that he and his administrative and military apparatus did work to try to enforce order in increasingly rebellious colonies. All imperial power have done that, and do that....including the United States of America throughout its history.
You can certainly understand why many in the colonies wanted to throw off the yoke of English rule, but a fair percentage of it was due to business and the age old root of insurrection, excessive taxation, primarily in the form of tarifs on goods imported in to the colonies...like tea. The Stamp Act and these tarifs interfered with the ability of certain colonists to get rich. Its a neglected historical fact that John Hancock was mostly a salesman and a trader. He made a pretty penny, organizing a boycott of British tea and then smuggling tea in to the colonies, and selling it, without paying the tarifs so he undercut the near monopoly of the British East India Company. The ax he was grinding with the British is he wanted to get rich importing tea instead of the British East India company. British East India held substantial power in London...in modern terms the British East India compnay had good lobbyists, Hancock didn't and they used their lobbyists to gain a huge competitive advantage over their colonial rivals...something very common for modern corporations to use their lobbyists for too. Hancock was charged at least once with smuggling so I'm not sure the ax he was grinding with King George was so much about life, liberty and pursuit of happiness as it was about making money selling tea.
I assure you if our founding fathers were alive to day and defied taxes they would be in the Federal penitentiary, or if they openly advocated insurrection they would be lucky to live to even make it to prison. There is pretty much no government or legal system that condones not paying taxes, treason, revolt and insurrection which is what the founding fathers practiced, though perhaps with good reason and to good effect.
One has to wonder if the founding fathers were time warped from then to now what they would think of the staggering tax burden the government they created inflicts on its own citizens. The tarifs of 1776 pale next to the staggering and intrusive income, sales and property taxes today, though in a curious inversion tarifs are rapidly disappearing in the name of "free trade". Perhaps they would have blessed it because we supposedly have "representation" in the government that taxes us, but I certainly didn't have any real say in all the taxes I pay, if I had I wouldn't have signed up for most of them, nor for most of the things those tax dollars are being squandered on. I really want a government that builds roads(and taxes fuel to pay for that) and provides a bare minimum defense and police force. Not sure schools are even a proper role considering how bad public schools have turned out.
"The fewer people that have access to your private information, the harder it is for people to steal from you."
True. The problem we have with identity theft, at least in the U.S., is the mechanism we use to identify ourselves dates to a 1936, a nine digit number which, when tied to your name opens nearly all doors to identity thieves. The key problem with it is it used to identify you which means you CAN'T keep it secret because you have to use it everytime you need to identify yourselves for employment, banks, credit cards and assorted other purposes. We got away with it back in the age where everything was on paper and moved from point A to point B by hand, and the paper was locked up in buildings, but in the computer and network age it is pure insanity that we still rely on this archaic system for identification. It is an engraved invitation for hackers to get rich, especially when combined with the online use of credit cards and banks. The staggering losses to identify theft are going to just continue to explode and amazingly no one is doing anything about it.
The solution is well known and wouldn't be that hard to implement. The social security administration urgently needs create a public key digital signature repository and allow people to go to a Social Security office, prove their identity and register their digital signature. Then everything which requires electornic identification needs to require a person use their digital signature and private key to prove their identity. If you don't create a digital signature then you continue with the current system and are extremely vulnerable to identity theft. If you have a digital signature then you have some confidence that when you bank, or use your credit card online that there is a system at work that doesn't date back to before the computer age. You could even go in and change your digital signature once in a while, something you can't easily do with your name and social security number.
The really important thing about social networking sites has been totally forgotten. The beauty of social networking sites is that, once you get the ball rolling, and sucker a certain number of people in to one, they drag all their friends in to them whether they want to be in them or not...and then they drag all their friends in because they are there and they don't want to look friendless. They are the definition of viral marketing and are the way to go if you want to get rich like a dot com millionaire in 1999, and you suck at marketing. Of course there is also a first mover advantage because once you have established a big social networking site you have an inherent advantage because people want to join the BIG social networking site, they want to join as few social networking sites as possible and they want to join the one all their friends are already in.
Call me old fashioned but plastering personal information all over the Internet is to me....ill advised. Its an invitation to identity theft, cyberstalking and future employment problems especially if you share a little to much information about yourself and its sucked in to Google for all eternity. Perhaps they are the rage amongst the young because young people haven't acquired enough of a sense of caution to prevent them from doing something that is ultimately a little foolish, like plastering all the details of your life, and your inner most thoughts... with photos... on the Internet.