Well duh, since I'm working on a sample size of two, Raymond and this JACK developer of course its speculation.
"maybe, just maybe, MS is recruiting for talent"
The problem with your "speculation" is we are talking about Raymond here, at least he is half of the known "talent" pool being discussed here. The obvious problem is its unclear what "talent" Raymond would bring to a company these days. Its not like he is a prolific coder. His only known "talents" lately are:
- publicity hound - author of really embarrassing rants which he unwisely tries to distribute as widely as possible - gun fanatic - worked in partnership with Augustine to cash in on the Linux bubble with VA Linux and then promptly declared selling Linux based hardware was an infeasible business mode, took the money and ran
All in all it would be something of a gift to the open source community if Microsoft did hire Raymond so he could embarrass them with his rants and show up in front of news camera dressed like a seedy Jedi Knight. The most effective strategy I can think of for Raymond to undermine Microsoft is for him to take a job at Microsoft and be himself:) It appears he passed up a golden opportunity to destroy Microsoft when he rejected their advances.
"although being one of the poorer areas of the US"
Assuming New Orleans is rebuilt I think its open to debate if it will still be poor after its done. One possibility is all the low income housing gets bulldozed, which is a key motivator in forced evacuations, and it will replaced by yuppie friendly condos and high rises. Most of the poor have been scattered to the wind already and may stay where they landed, since its hard for poor with no cash reserves.
New Orelans would be an ideal city for yuppies due to its ambiance, food, music, etc. The only obstacle is they needed to get rid of the poor and fix the oppressive crime rate which is something Katrina solved.
On the flip side its open to debate if anyone will want to develop it or move there with the realization that it will always be vulnerable to flooding without massive and more importantly sustained investment in its levees. reclamation of its wetland buffers, and maybe raising some of the low lying areas (and putting green space in the lowest areas).
It would be odd to put it mildly to spend hundreds of billions of dollars rebuilding New Orleans, and spend billions on expensive new levees in perpetuity to recreate and preserve slums. The French quarter, garden district and downtown will come out of the rebuild intact but I doubt any of the crime ridden low income areas will be there in the rebuilt New Orlean, other than maybe some token government planned and subsidized low income housing for the maids and gardeners to live in.
If New Orleans gets rebuilt it will be a "model" city. One has to wonder if, in the process, it will lose all its ambiance and charm.
"Maybe we could all pitch in and hire an out of work TV actor"
I vote for Leo Laporte, the easy going guy from TechTV who fits your description to a tee though I think he might be getting his old job back recently. He would be a million times better as an open source advocate than Raymond, of course tha could be said of anyone.
Raymond can't seem to write more than two consecutive sentences with out tilting in to the worst stereotype of an open source fanatic. He reinforces all the bad part of the bad image open source fanatics have and seems to add nothing positive other than maybe, um, passion. I remember the time he showed up to one of the Microsoft protests dressed as a Jedi Knight, how much of a bad stereotype reinforcement is that.
Of course we would need to figure out how to pay Leo. ESR seems to have done his cashing in on VA Linux stock. Remember VA Linux? As nearly as I can tell they created a semi phony Linux hardware company and IPO'ed right at the heart of the Linux craze. To the positive they gave stock and a lot of cash to worthy open source developers but Augustine and ESR(he was on the board) made a shitload of undeserved money cashing in on Linux, and about a week after the IPO completely abandoned their entire business model and screwed all their employees and investors.
"Please look at the tax code. Those that are considered poor pay very little in taxes (except for FICA)."
Nice to dismiss it like you just did. That is, if I recall 12.5% by the time you count both employee and employer contribution which is a LOT for low and middle income people, and there are still income taxes hammering the middle class in particular thanks to the alternative minimum tax. You have to count the hidden employer contribution because it would be going to salary were it not for that tax.
Payroll taxes used to be worth it when it was a lot lower especially before the rates soared in the 1980's. You used to get more back than you put in. Since the 1980's when the taxes and surpluses soared those payroll taxes have been going to keep a deficit obsessed government afloat(Bush and Reagan in particular) so all those surpluses have been squandered and when Social Security and Medicare hit the red either benefits will be savaged or people will be taxed AGAIN to make up the shortfalls.
You can't dismiss payroll taxes like you just did, they have turned in to highway robbery of working people since the 1980's, they keep going up while taxes on corporations and the wealthy keep going down and it will be a miracle if working people ever get it back like todays seniors do.
"Furthermore, corporation do in fact pay a large amount of taxes. Check the annual statements of any public company to see how much they do pay."
Actually the corprate share of the nation's tax burden has been in steady decline for years. I think it was down to something like 9% though I'd have to go Googling to find the exact number. Any company paying a lot of taxes must have a bad accountant because the number of easily exploited loopholes are huge. If you may recall from the overshoring debate, the tax code actually rewards companies with tax breaks for offshoring jobs.
"Socialist, Fascist, call it what you like."...excepting one allows and promotes private ownership of capital which is a vast difference....excepting Western businessmen are welcomed in to and will pour investment in to a Fascist country and wont touch or be able to touch most Socialist countries with a 10 foot pool.
Other than everything about their economic model, yea they are exactly the same thing.
"No, the ChiCom regime is going to fall in its own way, and this has nothing to do with comparisons to the west. There are similarities to the Soviets of course, since the Red Dynasty tried to follow the Soviet model."
Dude get it through the thick, dwelling in the past, skull it isn't ChiCom any more its ChiFascist, yea they tried to follow the Soviet model from 1950 to 1990 something. They completely abandoned it and adopted Fascism instead. They went from bein boycotted and isolated by the West which led to economic devestation in both places to one now where the West is giving them everything for nothing but short term profits and promises...machine tools, intellectual property, whole factories, jobs, R&D funding etc. If the Soviet Union had all the infusion of capital and IP from the West the Chinese are getting it NEVER would have fallen.
"I guess I have more faith in the Chinese people than you do."
I have some faith there are a lot of brave dissidents who might have had a shot at forcing change....were it not for the supposedly freedom loving west selling them down the river in the name of a beloved buck, just like Yahoo did here.
There is more to a job these days than stock and stock options. Stock options are fading fast for established companies because the accounting rules are changing so most companies are charging them against their bottomline now. They are only really good now people working at startups through IPO. Of course if you purchase stock you want it to go up but there is still...... just a hefty big salary, cash bonuses, benefits especially health insurance which might be pretty attractive to someone living in a basement barely making ends meet doing what they "love". There are also probably some open source developers who have crappy day jobs and would love to get paid full time to develop code, even if it means selling their soul to the devil.
You should also note that Microsoft has been handing out big chunks of cash as dividends to people who actually own their stock. Since the Republicans changed the tax rules for dividends that money is tax free so owning stock and getting dividends is WAY more attractive now than it was. I think it was last December a big dividend payout by Microsoft single handedly lifted national economic data for the quarter because it was billions of dollars pumped in to people's pockets instead of sitting in Microsoft's huge reserves. Of course a huge percentage of it went in to the pockets of Gates, Ballmer, Allen etc tax free. There is something seriously wrong with working people barely making ends meet paying taxes on every penny they make while rich fat cats can now rake in windfall profits from dividends and not pay a dime. The con game used to sell it was the company already paid taxes on that money, so taxing dividends was double taxation. The problem is the tax code is so full of loopholes, shelters and corprate welfare, most big corporations already don't pay anything like the taxes working people do. America is a place rushing to make the rich richer and the poor poor. Over a million new people landed below the poverty line last year.
"1. You shouldn't use your work e-mail address for private stuff. Everything that goes through your employer's server should be considered suspect"
And I forgot to add the problem is more you can't control what someone malicious or clueless who has your work email sends you. You obviously can't insure the corprate man doesn't look at it but leaving it on a mail server and having it backed up ensures its there forever if the corporate man wants to go on a digging expedition.
"1. You shouldn't use your work e-mail address for private stuff. Everything that goes through your employer's server should be considered suspect"
Excepting in the case of law suits what I was saying applies to work email, not personal email, and the FBI investigation could apply to either work or personal.
Of course in the case of the FBI or someone who has a warrant they are going to capture it all at an telecom or ISP office so you are screwed at that point and probably should just stop using email for anything you don't want the whole world to read, or at maybe PGP encrypt though its open to debate if the NSA can't crack that and its a red flag you are hiding something.
I wouldn't be surprised if Microsoft is seeing how many open source people will succumb to high paying jobs with nice stock options, though it was silly to contact Eric because there was 100% probability he would just flame them, use it to pump up his ego and be his usual publicity hound self.
If they identify a lot of open source contributors who are struggling to make ends meet working in the open source world and hire them they both reduce contributions to open source, and they make open source look bad. In particular they are testing to see if people will sell out and sell open source down the river in exchange for piles of cash. Their coffers are deep enough they could hire a lot of struggling open source developers with ease.
They kind of did this to OpenGL a while ago, hiring Kurt Akeley, David Blythe and Michael Cohen in particular. Those people were faced with clinging to the sinking ship that is SGI and OpenGL or sell out to Microsoft and DirectX which totally dominates the desktop and gaming. They both get good researchers and they drain talent away from OpenGL in hopes of pushing it further in to irrelevance.
If you hop in to the wayback machine they did the same thing to Borland, hiring all their top people just to put them out to pasture.
Well the obvious yin and yang here is if you are a corporation that wants to spy on all your employees email, and you want to ensure all your email is around for an attorney to twist and use against you in a lawsuit then yes I think you should leave it all on a corprate server some place and back it up really well.
Me personally I cherish the concept of getting my email off the server at the first opportunity and hope whomever is running the server isn't spying on it or backing it up as it comes in. The ideal is a system focused on IMAP where someone left POP enabled and the admin doesn't entirely grok that fact. I also periodically move my old mail on my machine in to PGP so no a**shole snake of a lawyer or FBI agent can use it against me some day at least without some serious work.
I guess it just depends on whether you want your email to be transient and yours or you want to have it hang around forever to come to haunt you like it did Bill Gates in the DOJ antitrust suit. If I ran a big corporation I think I would make sure all the corprate email got flushed on a regular basis.
Bottomline is I love POP and wish it more instantaneously transfered my mail out of the grip of whomere is running the server.
"Socialism is always more appealing to destitute peasants than to a prosperous middle class."
China isn't Socialist unless you use the broad definition that defines Fascism as Socialism. Chine is a peasant state anymore either. Its a state devoted to rapid economic development devoted to urban Chinese and especially to enriching party members.
Fascism is entirely pallatable to the middle and upper class, as long as they stay in the good graces of the party, which they do by keeping their mouths shut, and are reaping economic benefits.
You seem to be talking about China of 10 or 20 years ago, not the one of today, they are two completely different animals, which is something Westerners completely don't grasp. You need to be equating China to Nazi Germany because the economic and political systems are very similar now. Westerners fell all over themselves to invest in Nazi Germany in the 30's too because it was a booming, capitalism friendly, growing economy, with a ruthlessly oppresive government that kept order and kept profits flowing (until it started ill advised wars).
"No, what will bring them down is the loss of popular support"
Dream on. The Soviet economy was in a shambles economically, China's isn't. The Soviet Union impaled its self on a war in Afghanistan while China is studiously avoiding war and imperial delusions. The Soviet Union relaxed its iron grip allowing its opponents to sense weakness and to seize the opportunity. China isn't going to relax its grip especially after seeing what happened in the Soviet Union.
"The effect of internal communication on this, is that the party will lose the ability lie effectively, which is crucial for maintaining a tyranny."
That is silly, what makes you think the Chinese aren't monitoring and censoring internal communication just as much as external communication. Computerization allows for monitoring and censorship that was impossible a few decades ago.
It boggles the mind that right wingers want to delude themselves that either:
A. China is going to fall like the Soviet Union because its system is inherently "inferior" to the west. If anything Western nations are going to become more repressive and more like China.
B. Its sham free market reforms are going to lead to a sudden rush to Democracy.
I'll eat my keyboard if either happen in the next two decades.
You forgot to list whether you are a fiscal conservative or not. If so how exactly do you con yourself into voting for a party that's squandering and borrowing money at a rate big spending Democrats could only dream about.
You also didn't say if you are a free marketeer. If you are how do you con yourself into voting for a party that is massively intervening in markets with things like their "Energy" bill, Medicare "reform", "farm" bill, and the $200+ billion "transportation" bill that is building a $231 million dollar bridge to an island in Alaska with 50 people on it(this being about equal to how much money they cut out of New Orelans levee maintenance in the last 5 years that might have lead to a $150 billion dollar disaster).
I'm assuming you don't call yourself a true conservative in foreign policy, but if you are how do you con yourself in to voting for a government that is getting its self entangled in misguided foreign adventures like Iraq that have no actual bearing on American national security.
All in all you listed all the thing you are for and against but you didn't actually say what it is about today's Republican party that actually drives you to vote for them. How for example can you be "anti-church" and pro-choice but vote for a party that is now completely dominated by Christian fundamentalists who are pro-life and are going to ban all forms of choice as soon as the Supreme court is stacked. Seems like you are voting against some of your your own self interests. I could see you voting Republican in 1976 but not anytime since 2000.
The thing that I find amazing is that you not only admit it but that you actually seem to be proud of it, voting for Bush I mean not using a Mac.
In case you haven't noticed most people, even right wingers are, to put it mildly, "distancing" themselves from the guy, if not running as far and fast away from him as they can, especially Republican politicians up for election in 2006.
After the expensive disaster that Iraq has turned in to, which no one can deny any more, after Katrina and Michale Brown, and after its become obvious that a completely Republican dominated government is squandering and borrowing money at a rate the Democrats could only dream of, there aren't many real conservatives that want anything to do with the guy any more.
I'm pretty sure the only people that are still admitting they voted for, like and support Bush/Cheney are corporate fat cats making windfall profits from his tax cuts and pork laden bills, Fox news and right wing radio anchors and the Christian fundamentalists who will back him no matter how bad his leadership is as long as he bashes gays, keeps promising to overturn Roe V. Wade, and keeps claiming to be a born again.
" What they fail to realize is that it's internal communcation that will bring them down."
Unless they let peer to peer flourish, like 802.11 meshes, they can monitor and suppress SMS, and faxes, just like anything else. Its trivial to monitor and censor SMS and they no doubt do.
What made you think the party wasn't encouraging or at least allowing the anti Japanese riots.
"The days when they could truck in completely uninformed soldiers from way out in the sticks to put down an uprising in Beijing are coming to an end."
You ignored my point that people with a rising standard of living and affluence are unlikely to risk their new found possessions through insurrection.
Like I said it totally amazes me how Westerners are underestimating the people running China now. They have created a potentially unstoppable system:
- Oppressive and regimented - Very successful economically - Westerners are turning over their wealth to them with complete abandon
The only thing likely to bring them down such a power is war. Franco's Spain survived World War II by maintaining neutrality and lasted until his death decades later.
It boggles the mind how Western politicians and businessman can be so stupid to have anything to do with China at all.... oh I remember now, greed and short term profits while they completely screw themselves in the long run. Communist had empty rhetoric about burying the West, Fascist China is really going to do it.
"That said, so far he has basically flown a rocket plane really high.:"
Rutan and T/Space are hard at work on orbital vehicle on a below the radar NASA contract called CXV.
They have come amazingly far, amazingly fast on $6 million dollars. They have drop tested a 23% scale model of the launch stack and done a parachute test for the capsule. They are taking advantage of a new low cost, ultra reliable Air Force developed launcher and a proven capsule desigh used to recover film from spy satellites. It looks to be a great can do kind of program though it has a long ways to go.
Compare this to CEV, where Boeing and Lockheed are spending $52 million dollars in the same time frame and doing nothing but generating paper and preparing for a design review meeting in 2006 when they MAY settle on a basic concept for a launch vehicle and have so far not gotten past artists conceptions.
"Also, where do you think he got his start in aerospace? NASA!"
Actually he started out working at Edwards Air Force base for the Air Force, maybe you should read his bio. He has worked on NASA projects off and on over the years but you are totally mistaken to paint it like he owes his existence to NASA.
A key point is that the people in the Shuttle program get paid the same whether they fly or not. At this point they have zero incentive to fly. It just unnecessary risk and aggravation.
The people at NASA during Apollo had an incentive to launch, they were trying to accomplish something hard and revolutionary.
The people at NASA today, even if they did launch, are doing nothing worthwhile. The ISS is a waste of time and money and everyone knows it at this point. The fundamental problem here is there is no incentive for anyone in that program to do anything. Life is easier, better and safer if they sit on the ground... and the pay is the same.
Only way you are going to fix this problem is you stop paying contractors and people if they don't fly, but they would really start taking some serious risks which would be both good and bad. If the risks are stupid they just have more accidents so its bad. If the risks are calculated and wise then they might start accomplishing something again instead of being the current towering pile of Jello.
I'm puzzled where Mike Griffin is in this. I suspect he does in fact want the ISS and Shuttle to get killed so he can redirect all the money to something with a point, I'm betting on CXV from T/Space and Burt Rutan. But until it does get killed he is squandering vast sums on nothing worthwhile and he is looking like an incompetent administrator, which I don't think he is.
"The Red Dynasty will fall, and it will fall when it loses the ability to control the flow of information within the country."
That is very unlikely though Westerners keep deluding themselves on that score, especially right wingers. They keep letting China dominate the world economically under the delusion that someday the wheels will fall of which it wont.
The quality of life in China isn't the greatest, especially if you get out in to the rural areas, but it is improving dramatically thanks to the massive influx of Western capital and Western trade deficit dollars. As long the Communist party gives people better housing, better jobs, cars, and appliances the Chinese will be about as docile as Americans are. For successful rebellion you need to have people whose standard of living is plunging and who are starving. China is not that, things are better for them they have been in a really long time. Many expats are going home to try to cash in on the booming economy.
The Chinese also saw how the U.S.S.R. collapsed. As soon as Gorbachev started relaxing the iron grip the situation got out of hand. I am very confident that the Chinese aren't going to relax that iron grip at all. The top party members have multimillion and multibillion dollar fortunes riding on maintaining the status quo now.
About the worst problem the Chinese are openly protesting lately is the devastation their rapid growth is doing to the environment, mostly unbreathable air and rivers that are black sludge.
Well that would include the U.S., U.K and most countries on the planet. The U.S. and U.K. will come demanding the same information in a "terrorism" investigation which is pretty synonymous with what the Chinese would call a dissident they are investigating. The U.S. has now established precedent for arresting people, holding them indefinitely without trial, and without access to lawyer or family. You might notice this is exactly the same the Chinese do and Americans get so indignant over (when the Chinese do it, not the Bush administration).
With the reach of the U.S. military, FBI and intelligence agencies in to something like 120 countries now I'm not really sure there are many countries left where you could keep logs that would be safe from local authorities packing a warrant under pressure from the U.S., U.K. or China. You could maybe argue an offshore oil rig in international waters ala Sea Haven but I think its been made clear in the past that if you hid anything there a country with commandos wanted bad enough that wouldn't be safe either.
I think we really are approaching the point you should realize there really aren't any "freedom-friendly" countries any more, if there ever was even such a thing. The fact is you are "free" to do anything until the government where you live, or some other government with influence on the government where you live, takes exception to what you are doing.
Exactly right. China transitioned from authoritarian Communism to Fascism as soon as it started replacing state ownership of everything with private ownership of capital and corporations, most of which went to loyal and high ranking member of the Communist party. Nazi Germany had the same system, a big oppressive government which constantly intervened in a sham free market economy, where most of the corporations, capital and wealth landed in the hands of ranking party members. The same description could be applied to the U.S. under the increasing dominance of the Republican party though the authoritarian aspect is in its infancy.
None of the politicians or the businessmen in the West will admit this to themselves or to the public. They kid themselves that China is slowly going to transition to democracy just because it is transitioning to sham private ownership of capital. They leave out the fact that private ownership of capital and authoritarian government are quite compatible, and is normally referred to as Fascism. For some reason no one uses that word anymore since it became a dirty word in World War II. There would be an uproar if the CIA fact book someone quoted below referred to China as Communist instead of Fascist so it doesn't, but referring to it as Communist is completely inaccurate and has been for years.
Zhang Ruimin is referred to as the "Jack Welch of China" and is CEO of Haier one of China's larger corporations, manufacturer of appliances and recently made a failed bid for Maytag. He is also a member of the Central committee and was previously a party bureaucrat in charge of state owned factories. Most big Chinese companies are same-same. There is a large number of companies where a top party member or their family are in the top position of the company.
This transition worked great for the elite in the communist party since they've been able to propel themselves to vast wealth simply by using their position in the party. They are also accumulating wealth to an extent which would have resulted in execution under Mao. Its also resulted in Western business transferring vast quantities of IP, market access, capital and jobs in to China that wouldn't have gone there unless they had made the transition to Fascism.
At this point China is the worlds fastest growing market and every Western business with no scruples would sell their mother in to slavery if it meant they got a piece of the action.
I read yesterday in the news on Kai Fu Lee, the Chinese Microsoft VP hired by Google that a key reason he quit was after Bill Gates launched a verbal tirade at him about how the Chinese people and government were f***ing him and Microsoft. Whatever you think about Bill Gates he is a very smart and astute businessman. China is f***ing every company that wants to do business in China and doing it VERY WELL.
The fact is multiplayer online role playing games like Warcraft and Everquest might in fact result in some major breakthroughs in the way children learn and mature. But they are a double edged sword.
They do teach how to communicate and work on a team either in a guild or groups, though its a lesson some children seem to have real problems learning....
They teach kids the value of money, how to make it, how to save it, how to blow it and what the consequences are when you do, how to spend it wisely, how to turn in to ruthless, greedy auction house farmers which will prepare them for later in life as greedy businessmen and EBay farmers.
They teach how to set goals, problem solve, obtain objectives, and how to be patient.
On the down side they do encourage disconnection from reality, totally hammer physical exercise, discourage interaction with others in meat space just because of the extent to which they are a time sink. They also cultivate a time wasting grind mentality. They are ruthless Pavlovian training to the point of addiction, on how to waste vast amounts of time doing things that are tedious to get rewards of dubious value.
I think virtual worlds have great potential to vastly improve and accelerate learning and growth. The problem is dungeon crawl games have kind of hit a wall in terms of creativity. It would also be interesting if they could inject learning real skills that are of value in the real world instead of training people in fantasy trade skills of no actual value, for example require learning math and chemistry instead of tailoring and alchemy. Though as soon as you made a game look like home work people would probably not touch it with a ten foot pole. This while in fact they are basically doing tedious homework style learning in these games already, its just on subjects of no actual value.
Onlnee games also have great potential to totally crater whole nations as vast amounts of time and productivity disappear in to this time sink, though in this regard at least they are better than TV because they are less passive.
" Since you don't know me well enough to read my mind"
Don't need to read your mind, just pointing out you are using the same rhetoric the Bush administration uses, dropping 9/11 at every turn to avoid having to making a coherent argument. I'll take you at your word that is was harmless but I like a lot of people am sick of hearing people drop 9/11 everytime they want to use a sledge hammer to make a point.
"I'm so glad you have specific information about what was censored in that report. Perhaps you can share?"
Obviously not it was CENSORED and to my knowledge it hasn't leaked which is miraculous as leak prone as Washington is. They only thing we know is the Bush administration censored everything in the report relating to Saudi Arabia, some 90-100 pages. The congressmen who wrote the report said that much.
"You know that? How? I've never seen anything along those lines except for pure speculation."
We know with as much certainty as anyone can know about anything the CIA does, that the CIA starting tailing Atta in Germany as far back as 2000, the trusty Wikipedia article. Its well known the CIA tracked him until he entered the U.S. and then dropped surveillance of him because they are precluded from operations in the U.S. Either they didn't flag him to the FBI when he entered or the FBI didn't follow up, I don't remember which.
There is a distinct chance Able Danger learned Atta was an Al Qaeda suspect from someone in the CIA and claimed their data mining project discovered this fact independently to make themselves look good.
Bottomline is you really can't believe anything Able Danger people say, waiting until 4 years later to claim they could have foiled 9/11.
"First of all, the president gets briefed on thousands of those kinds of possibilities"
So what is the point of spending billions on intelligence and intelligence briefings if you don't follow up on any of it unless its a "slam dunk".
"Secondly, the FBI doesn't need direct presidential authority to put potential terrorists under surveillance, and they don't wait for it in other cases."
Well obviously they did need it because they in fact failed to track the known Al Qaeda members when they entered the country, didn't track 9/11 hijackers training in U.S. flight schools to fly but not land airliners, even after one of their agents in Phoenix red flagged them, didn't follow up on Moussaui. My only point is that had the President had directed them to look at the threat that might have set off some light bulb in someones head about the hijackers training in U.S. flight schools they might have foiled the plot.
Though at this point I really can't stand playing the 9/11 blame game anymore. There is a lot more current stuff to blame the Bush administration for which are "slam dunks" in particular the disaster that is Iraq. I quit on the 9/11 blame game, its not even interesting any more.
Excellent job of twisting everything I said... where to begin.
"blame the Bush Administration for the New Orleans levee system,"
About all I said here was the truth, the Bush administration has been more aggressively slashing funding for them than any previous administration. Are they "to blame" for them, never said they were, but they are to blame for cutting both funding and Army personnel who work on them for one simple reason, they moved much of the money and Army Corp people to Iraq. The Bush administration spent $100 million or so on the reclamation of the marshes in Iraq in the last year, and transfered the top Army expert on Louisiana's wetlands there to work on it.
The New Orleans levees are an exercise in pork and corruption, throwing money at them is mostly a waste. Unfortunately they DO have to be maintained otherwise they eventually fail. If you aren't going to maintain them properly then you DO have to move all the people out of the bowl the create otherwise they die..... like they just did, which is what I said. Try to argue the point instead of twist what I said.
"You are not only stereotyping entire states as one party or another "
Uh thats not me doing that, that is Karl Rove in the White House doing that, and in fact all President's do that. All President's focus their pork and attention on swing states first because they want to insure they carry them in the next election, Florida is #1 on the list. Next they focus their attention on states that vote for them. Dead last on their priority list are states that will never vote for them. Simple fact, you can deny all you want but it just shows you have no clue how politics work.
As for Florida getting preferential treatment its obvious they do. The governor is the President's brother for CHRISTS SAKES, its not just preferential treatment, its NEPOTISM. If Christine Blanco and Jeb Bush call the White House at the same time asking for help you want to lay odds on whose call the President takes. Yesterday Bush flew in to Louisiana without bothering to tell Governor Blanco he was coming. She found out from a reporter and had to cancel a trip to visit refugees in Houston. They were also trying to force her to relinquish control of her National Guard which is against the Constitution. Its obvious the Bush administration hates her and its certainly coloring Federal aid to her state. Simple fact dude, why don't you stop ranting and mud slinging at me when all I did was point out the obvious.
I did my time contracting so I'm speaking from experience which is something you obviously didn't know when you started your little tirade. Saw way to many bureaucrats milking Congress for tax dollars to squander and to many contractors milking those bureaucrats for all they were worth.
Fact is classified programs are by design excluded from public scrutiny which makes them ripe for fraud, waste and abuse. Disgusted Congressmen do still expose them though. I've read articles of late that indicate pretty much every current spy satellite contract is suffering massive cost overruns and schedule slips. Some in Congress are so disgusted with this black hole of corruption they are going to start defunding them, especially since long range stealth RPV's can do most of the jobs for far less money and in some ways better, because they are less predictable, more flexible and less vulnerable. RPV programs seem to be one of the few shining lights in a sea of defense contracting failures in recent years.
Take a look at the B-2 and F-22 for case studies in gross excess in defense contracting. The B-2 would be cheaper if it were made of solid gold, At a billion dollars a copy its to expensive to use any place it might actually be at risk, and to few in number to be of any real value in a real war, so when you need a bomber the air force STILL calls the B-52 or F-117 most of the time. The F-22 is 10 years behind schedule, has seen one huge cost overrun and schedule slip after another, and by the time it finally reached production had become so expensive the numbers produced had to be slashed, causing the per unit cost to go even further through the roof just like the B-2.
Lockheed's C-130J was supposed to be a big improvement for aging C-130's in need of retirement, for hurricane watching in particular. Unfortunately they program had massive overruns and the plans are unusable without major modifications. The fancy composite propellers, for example self destruct when flown in rain which is a problem for a Hurricane chaser.
V-22 Osprey again massive schedule slips and overruns.
Maybe you could list some large defense contracts that came in on time and on budget for comparison.
Pretty good post excepting trying to compare the situation in New Orleans to MS, AB or FL is a stretch. The situation in Mississippi was trivial by comparison. They lost 3-4 blocks on the coast but the rest of the state was in tact and no really big cities were hit. Alabama wasn't hit that hard at all. Mississippi's worst economic hit was gambling and its a blessing in disguise that it got wiped. Not sure I would cite as "successful" a state whose main economic agenda appears to be fleecing people in casinos. This isn't producing useful economic activity its just transferring money from those stupid enough to part with it in to state coffers and the pockets of big casino companies. I also can't put Hally Barber and good governance in the same sentence, he is as corrupt as the come and a closet racist in the Trent Lott mold.
Citing Florida as a success in recent years might be due to good governance, or it might be because Jeb can call up his brother and can instantly get anything he wants both in emergency relief and in giant FEMA handouts that insure both Jeb and George get Florida's precious votes. By contrast I don't think George even returns Blanco's calls because she is one of those subhuman Democrats that Bush and Rove just want to see thrown out in the next election. Making her look bad in a disaster was probably a political tactic by Rove that turned horribly wrong.
"massive truckloads of supplies and relief from outside the Hurricane devastation quickly"
The argument that the problem getting relief to New Orleans was due to blocked highways is B.S. A CNN reporter who had never driven to New Orleans drove in, in an SUV towing a boat. He had to stop and ask directions once. Was it straightforward no, but somehow I think a government with helicopters could have scouted some routes. Supplies didn't go in to New Orleans by design, not because of insurmountable barriers. Me personally I'm baffled that the didn't use barges to both get people out and supplies in. The bloody convention center is right next to the Mississippi and I'm pretty sure it remained open to barge traffic with some caution. I assume FEMA is so used to helicopters and trucks they didn't grasp boats work great when next to a giant navigable river.
A few days ago I pointed out here Walmart could have had supplies to all those people in 24 hours to someone whining about how hard it is to get truckloads of supplies together on short notice. I heard today that Walmart did in fact offer to drive their trucks in with food and water and FEMA told them to go to hell.
At this point I dearly wish for a truly independent, no white wash investigation though it probably wont happen, and find out exactly how much incompetence and how much malevolence there was on the part of all government agencies involved in this screwup.
Slashdot Mirror
"your post is pure speculation."
:) It appears he passed up a golden opportunity to destroy Microsoft when he rejected their advances.
Well duh, since I'm working on a sample size of two, Raymond and this JACK developer of course its speculation.
"maybe, just maybe, MS is recruiting for talent"
The problem with your "speculation" is we are talking about Raymond here, at least he is half of the known "talent" pool being discussed here. The obvious problem is its unclear what "talent" Raymond would bring to a company these days. Its not like he is a prolific coder. His only known "talents" lately are:
- publicity hound
- author of really embarrassing rants which he unwisely tries to distribute as widely as possible
- gun fanatic
- worked in partnership with Augustine to cash in on the Linux bubble with VA Linux and then promptly declared selling Linux based hardware was an infeasible business mode, took the money and ran
All in all it would be something of a gift to the open source community if Microsoft did hire Raymond so he could embarrass them with his rants and show up in front of news camera dressed like a seedy Jedi Knight. The most effective strategy I can think of for Raymond to undermine Microsoft is for him to take a job at Microsoft and be himself
"although being one of the poorer areas of the US"
Assuming New Orleans is rebuilt I think its open to debate if it will still be poor after its done. One possibility is all the low income housing gets bulldozed, which is a key motivator in forced evacuations, and it will replaced by yuppie friendly condos and high rises. Most of the poor have been scattered to the wind already and may stay where they landed, since its hard for poor with no cash reserves.
New Orelans would be an ideal city for yuppies due to its ambiance, food, music, etc. The only obstacle is they needed to get rid of the poor and fix the oppressive crime rate which is something Katrina solved.
On the flip side its open to debate if anyone will want to develop it or move there with the realization that it will always be vulnerable to flooding without massive and more importantly sustained investment in its levees. reclamation of its wetland buffers, and maybe raising some of the low lying areas (and putting green space in the lowest areas).
It would be odd to put it mildly to spend hundreds of billions of dollars rebuilding New Orleans, and spend billions on expensive new levees in perpetuity to recreate and preserve slums. The French quarter, garden district and downtown will come out of the rebuild intact but I doubt any of the crime ridden low income areas will be there in the rebuilt New Orlean, other than maybe some token government planned and subsidized low income housing for the maids and gardeners to live in.
If New Orleans gets rebuilt it will be a "model" city. One has to wonder if, in the process, it will lose all its ambiance and charm.
"Maybe we could all pitch in and hire an out of work TV actor"
I vote for Leo Laporte, the easy going guy from TechTV who fits your description to a tee though I think he might be getting his old job back recently. He would be a million times better as an open source advocate than Raymond, of course tha could be said of anyone.
Raymond can't seem to write more than two consecutive sentences with out tilting in to the worst stereotype of an open source fanatic. He reinforces all the bad part of the bad image open source fanatics have and seems to add nothing positive other than maybe, um, passion. I remember the time he showed up to one of the Microsoft protests dressed as a Jedi Knight, how much of a bad stereotype reinforcement is that.
Of course we would need to figure out how to pay Leo. ESR seems to have done his cashing in on VA Linux stock. Remember VA Linux? As nearly as I can tell they created a semi phony Linux hardware company and IPO'ed right at the heart of the Linux craze. To the positive they gave stock and a lot of cash to worthy open source developers but Augustine and ESR(he was on the board) made a shitload of undeserved money cashing in on Linux, and about a week after the IPO completely abandoned their entire business model and screwed all their employees and investors.
"Please look at the tax code. Those that are considered poor pay very little in taxes (except for FICA)."
Nice to dismiss it like you just did. That is, if I recall 12.5% by the time you count both employee and employer contribution which is a LOT for low and middle income people, and there are still income taxes hammering the middle class in particular thanks to the alternative minimum tax. You have to count the hidden employer contribution because it would be going to salary were it not for that tax.
Payroll taxes used to be worth it when it was a lot lower especially before the rates soared in the 1980's. You used to get more back than you put in. Since the 1980's when the taxes and surpluses soared those payroll taxes have been going to keep a deficit obsessed government afloat(Bush and Reagan in particular) so all those surpluses have been squandered and when Social Security and Medicare hit the red either benefits will be savaged or people will be taxed AGAIN to make up the shortfalls.
You can't dismiss payroll taxes like you just did, they have turned in to highway robbery of working people since the 1980's, they keep going up while taxes on corporations and the wealthy keep going down and it will be a miracle if working people ever get it back like todays seniors do.
"Furthermore, corporation do in fact pay a large amount of taxes. Check the annual statements of any public company to see how much they do pay."
Actually the corprate share of the nation's tax burden has been in steady decline for years. I think it was down to something like 9% though I'd have to go Googling to find the exact number. Any company paying a lot of taxes must have a bad accountant because the number of easily exploited loopholes are huge. If you may recall from the overshoring debate, the tax code actually rewards companies with tax breaks for offshoring jobs.
"Socialist, Fascist, call it what you like." ...excepting one allows and promotes private ownership of capital which is a vast difference. ...excepting Western businessmen are welcomed in to and will pour investment in to a Fascist country and wont touch or be able to touch most Socialist countries with a 10 foot pool.
Other than everything about their economic model, yea they are exactly the same thing.
"No, the ChiCom regime is going to fall in its own way, and this has nothing to do with comparisons to the west. There are similarities to the Soviets of course, since the Red Dynasty tried to follow the Soviet model."
Dude get it through the thick, dwelling in the past, skull it isn't ChiCom any more its ChiFascist, yea they tried to follow the Soviet model from 1950 to 1990 something. They completely abandoned it and adopted Fascism instead. They went from bein boycotted and isolated by the West which led to economic devestation in both places to one now where the West is giving them everything for nothing but short term profits and promises...machine tools, intellectual property, whole factories, jobs, R&D funding etc. If the Soviet Union had all the infusion of capital and IP from the West the Chinese are getting it NEVER would have fallen.
"I guess I have more faith in the Chinese people than you do."
I have some faith there are a lot of brave dissidents who might have had a shot at forcing change....were it not for the supposedly freedom loving west selling them down the river in the name of a beloved buck, just like Yahoo did here.
There is more to a job these days than stock and stock options. Stock options are fading fast for established companies because the accounting rules are changing so most companies are charging them against their bottomline now. They are only really good now people working at startups through IPO. Of course if you purchase stock you want it to go up but there is still... ... just a hefty big salary, cash bonuses, benefits especially health insurance which might be pretty attractive to someone living in a basement barely making ends meet doing what they "love". There are also probably some open source developers who have crappy day jobs and would love to get paid full time to develop code, even if it means selling their soul to the devil.
You should also note that Microsoft has been handing out big chunks of cash as dividends to people who actually own their stock. Since the Republicans changed the tax rules for dividends that money is tax free so owning stock and getting dividends is WAY more attractive now than it was. I think it was last December a big dividend payout by Microsoft single handedly lifted national economic data for the quarter because it was billions of dollars pumped in to people's pockets instead of sitting in Microsoft's huge reserves. Of course a huge percentage of it went in to the pockets of Gates, Ballmer, Allen etc tax free. There is something seriously wrong with working people barely making ends meet paying taxes on every penny they make while rich fat cats can now rake in windfall profits from dividends and not pay a dime. The con game used to sell it was the company already paid taxes on that money, so taxing dividends was double taxation. The problem is the tax code is so full of loopholes, shelters and corprate welfare, most big corporations already don't pay anything like the taxes working people do. America is a place rushing to make the rich richer and the poor poor. Over a million new people landed below the poverty line last year.
"1. You shouldn't use your work e-mail address for private stuff. Everything that goes through your employer's server should be considered suspect"
And I forgot to add the problem is more you can't control what someone malicious or clueless who has your work email sends you. You obviously can't insure the corprate man doesn't look at it but leaving it on a mail server and having it backed up ensures its there forever if the corporate man wants to go on a digging expedition.
"1. You shouldn't use your work e-mail address for private stuff. Everything that goes through your employer's server should be considered suspect"
Excepting in the case of law suits what I was saying applies to work email, not personal email, and the FBI investigation could apply to either work or personal.
Of course in the case of the FBI or someone who has a warrant they are going to capture it all at an telecom or ISP office so you are screwed at that point and probably should just stop using email for anything you don't want the whole world to read, or at maybe PGP encrypt though its open to debate if the NSA can't crack that and its a red flag you are hiding something.
I wouldn't be surprised if Microsoft is seeing how many open source people will succumb to high paying jobs with nice stock options, though it was silly to contact Eric because there was 100% probability he would just flame them, use it to pump up his ego and be his usual publicity hound self.
If they identify a lot of open source contributors who are struggling to make ends meet working in the open source world and hire them they both reduce contributions to open source, and they make open source look bad. In particular they are testing to see if people will sell out and sell open source down the river in exchange for piles of cash. Their coffers are deep enough they could hire a lot of struggling open source developers with ease.
They kind of did this to OpenGL a while ago, hiring Kurt Akeley, David Blythe and Michael Cohen in particular. Those people were faced with clinging to the sinking ship that is SGI and OpenGL or sell out to Microsoft and DirectX which totally dominates the desktop and gaming. They both get good researchers and they drain talent away from OpenGL in hopes of pushing it further in to irrelevance.
If you hop in to the wayback machine they did the same thing to Borland, hiring all their top people just to put them out to pasture.
Well the obvious yin and yang here is if you are a corporation that wants to spy on all your employees email, and you want to ensure all your email is around for an attorney to twist and use against you in a lawsuit then yes I think you should leave it all on a corprate server some place and back it up really well.
Me personally I cherish the concept of getting my email off the server at the first opportunity and hope whomever is running the server isn't spying on it or backing it up as it comes in. The ideal is a system focused on IMAP where someone left POP enabled and the admin doesn't entirely grok that fact. I also periodically move my old mail on my machine in to PGP so no a**shole snake of a lawyer or FBI agent can use it against me some day at least without some serious work.
I guess it just depends on whether you want your email to be transient and yours or you want to have it hang around forever to come to haunt you like it did Bill Gates in the DOJ antitrust suit. If I ran a big corporation I think I would make sure all the corprate email got flushed on a regular basis.
Bottomline is I love POP and wish it more instantaneously transfered my mail out of the grip of whomere is running the server.
"Socialism is always more appealing to destitute peasants than to a prosperous middle class."
China isn't Socialist unless you use the broad definition that defines Fascism as Socialism.
Chine is a peasant state anymore either. Its a state devoted to rapid economic development devoted to urban Chinese and especially to enriching party members.
Fascism is entirely pallatable to the middle and upper class, as long as they stay in the good graces of the party, which they do by keeping their mouths shut, and are reaping economic benefits.
You seem to be talking about China of 10 or 20 years ago, not the one of today, they are two completely different animals, which is something Westerners completely don't grasp. You need to be equating China to Nazi Germany because the economic and political systems are very similar now. Westerners fell all over themselves to invest in Nazi Germany in the 30's too because it was a booming, capitalism friendly, growing economy, with a ruthlessly oppresive government that kept order and kept profits flowing (until it started ill advised wars).
"No, what will bring them down is the loss of popular support"
Dream on. The Soviet economy was in a shambles economically, China's isn't. The Soviet Union impaled its self on a war in Afghanistan while China is studiously avoiding war and imperial delusions. The Soviet Union relaxed its iron grip allowing its opponents to sense weakness and to seize the opportunity. China isn't going to relax its grip especially after seeing what happened in the Soviet Union.
"The effect of internal communication on this, is that the party will lose the ability lie effectively, which is crucial for maintaining a tyranny."
That is silly, what makes you think the Chinese aren't monitoring and censoring internal communication just as much as external communication. Computerization allows for monitoring and censorship that was impossible a few decades ago.
It boggles the mind that right wingers want to delude themselves that either:
A. China is going to fall like the Soviet Union because its system is inherently "inferior" to the west. If anything Western nations are going to become more repressive and more like China.
B. Its sham free market reforms are going to lead to a sudden rush to Democracy.
I'll eat my keyboard if either happen in the next two decades.
Sorry, pudge. I didn't actually look at your link to notice you were talking about someone else.
You forgot to list whether you are a fiscal conservative or not. If so how exactly do you con yourself into voting for a party that's squandering and borrowing money at a rate big spending Democrats could only dream about.
You also didn't say if you are a free marketeer. If you are how do you con yourself into voting for a party that is massively intervening in markets with things like their "Energy" bill, Medicare "reform", "farm" bill, and the $200+ billion "transportation" bill that is building a $231 million dollar bridge to an island in Alaska with 50 people on it(this being about equal to how much money they cut out of New Orelans levee maintenance in the last 5 years that might have lead to a $150 billion dollar disaster).
I'm assuming you don't call yourself a true conservative in foreign policy, but if you are how do you con yourself in to voting for a government that is getting its self entangled in misguided foreign adventures like Iraq that have no actual bearing on American national security.
All in all you listed all the thing you are for and against but you didn't actually say what it is about today's Republican party that actually drives you to vote for them. How for example can you be "anti-church" and pro-choice but vote for a party that is now completely dominated by Christian fundamentalists who are pro-life and are going to ban all forms of choice as soon as the Supreme court is stacked. Seems like you are voting against some of your your own self interests. I could see you voting Republican in 1976 but not anytime since 2000.
The thing that I find amazing is that you not only admit it but that you actually seem to be proud of it, voting for Bush I mean not using a Mac.
In case you haven't noticed most people, even right wingers are, to put it mildly, "distancing" themselves from the guy, if not running as far and fast away from him as they can, especially Republican politicians up for election in 2006.
After the expensive disaster that Iraq has turned in to, which no one can deny any more, after Katrina and Michale Brown, and after its become obvious that a completely Republican dominated government is squandering and borrowing money at a rate the Democrats could only dream of, there aren't many real conservatives that want anything to do with the guy any more.
I'm pretty sure the only people that are still admitting they voted for, like and support Bush/Cheney are corporate fat cats making windfall profits from his tax cuts and pork laden bills, Fox news and right wing radio anchors and the Christian fundamentalists who will back him no matter how bad his leadership is as long as he bashes gays, keeps promising to overturn Roe V. Wade, and keeps claiming to be a born again.
Which one are you?
" What they fail to realize is that it's internal communcation that will bring them down."
Unless they let peer to peer flourish, like 802.11 meshes, they can monitor and suppress SMS, and faxes, just like anything else. Its trivial to monitor and censor SMS and they no doubt do.
What made you think the party wasn't encouraging or at least allowing the anti Japanese riots.
"The days when they could truck in completely uninformed soldiers from way out in the sticks to put down an uprising in Beijing are coming to an end."
You ignored my point that people with a rising standard of living and affluence are unlikely to risk their new found possessions through insurrection.
Like I said it totally amazes me how Westerners are underestimating the people running China now. They have created a potentially unstoppable system:
- Oppressive and regimented
- Very successful economically
- Westerners are turning over their wealth to them with complete abandon
The only thing likely to bring them down such a power is war. Franco's Spain survived World War II by maintaining neutrality and lasted until his death decades later.
It boggles the mind how Western politicians and businessman can be so stupid to have anything to do with China at all
"That said, so far he has basically flown a rocket plane really high.:"
Rutan and T/Space are hard at work on orbital vehicle on a below the radar NASA contract called CXV.
They have come amazingly far, amazingly fast on $6 million dollars. They have drop tested a 23% scale model of the launch stack and done a parachute test for the capsule. They are taking advantage of a new low cost, ultra reliable Air Force developed launcher and a proven capsule desigh used to recover film from spy satellites. It looks to be a great can do kind of program though it has a long ways to go.
Compare this to CEV, where Boeing and Lockheed are spending $52 million dollars in the same time frame and doing nothing but generating paper and preparing for a design review meeting in 2006 when they MAY settle on a basic concept for a launch vehicle and have so far not gotten past artists conceptions.
"Also, where do you think he got his start in aerospace? NASA!"
Actually he started out working at Edwards Air Force base for the Air Force, maybe you should read his bio. He has worked on NASA projects off and on over the years but you are totally mistaken to paint it like he owes his existence to NASA.
"what DOESN'T delay the shuttle?"
... and the pay is the same.
A key point is that the people in the Shuttle program get paid the same whether they fly or not. At this point they have zero incentive to fly. It just unnecessary risk and aggravation.
The people at NASA during Apollo had an incentive to launch, they were trying to accomplish something hard and revolutionary.
The people at NASA today, even if they did launch, are doing nothing worthwhile. The ISS is a waste of time and money and everyone knows it at this point. The fundamental problem here is there is no incentive for anyone in that program to do anything. Life is easier, better and safer if they sit on the ground
Only way you are going to fix this problem is you stop paying contractors and people if they don't fly, but they would really start taking some serious risks which would be both good and bad. If the risks are stupid they just have more accidents so its bad. If the risks are calculated and wise then they might start accomplishing something again instead of being the current towering pile of Jello.
I'm puzzled where Mike Griffin is in this. I suspect he does in fact want the ISS and Shuttle to get killed so he can redirect all the money to something with a point, I'm betting on CXV from T/Space and Burt Rutan. But until it does get killed he is squandering vast sums on nothing worthwhile and he is looking like an incompetent administrator, which I don't think he is.
"The Red Dynasty will fall, and it will fall when it loses the ability to control the flow of information within the country."
That is very unlikely though Westerners keep deluding themselves on that score, especially right wingers. They keep letting China dominate the world economically under the delusion that someday the wheels will fall of which it wont.
The quality of life in China isn't the greatest, especially if you get out in to the rural areas, but it is improving dramatically thanks to the massive influx of Western capital and Western trade deficit dollars. As long the Communist party gives people better housing, better jobs, cars, and appliances the Chinese will be about as docile as Americans are. For successful rebellion you need to have people whose standard of living is plunging and who are starving. China is not that, things are better for them they have been in a really long time. Many expats are going home to try to cash in on the booming economy.
The Chinese also saw how the U.S.S.R. collapsed. As soon as Gorbachev started relaxing the iron grip the situation got out of hand. I am very confident that the Chinese aren't going to relax that iron grip at all. The top party members have multimillion and multibillion dollar fortunes riding on maintaining the status quo now.
About the worst problem the Chinese are openly protesting lately is the devastation their rapid growth is doing to the environment, mostly unbreathable air and rivers that are black sludge.
"5) When operating in freedom-hostile countries"
Well that would include the U.S., U.K and most countries on the planet. The U.S. and U.K. will come demanding the same information in a "terrorism" investigation which is pretty synonymous with what the Chinese would call a dissident they are investigating. The U.S. has now established precedent for arresting people, holding them indefinitely without trial, and without access to lawyer or family. You might notice this is exactly the same the Chinese do and Americans get so indignant over (when the Chinese do it, not the Bush administration).
With the reach of the U.S. military, FBI and intelligence agencies in to something like 120 countries now I'm not really sure there are many countries left where you could keep logs that would be safe from local authorities packing a warrant under pressure from the U.S., U.K. or China. You could maybe argue an offshore oil rig in international waters ala Sea Haven but I think its been made clear in the past that if you hid anything there a country with commandos wanted bad enough that wouldn't be safe either.
I think we really are approaching the point you should realize there really aren't any "freedom-friendly" countries any more, if there ever was even such a thing. The fact is you are "free" to do anything until the government where you live, or some other government with influence on the government where you live, takes exception to what you are doing.
Exactly right. China transitioned from authoritarian Communism to Fascism as soon as it started replacing state ownership of everything with private ownership of capital and corporations, most of which went to loyal and high ranking member of the Communist party. Nazi Germany had the same system, a big oppressive government which constantly intervened in a sham free market economy, where most of the corporations, capital and wealth landed in the hands of ranking party members. The same description could be applied to the U.S. under the increasing dominance of the Republican party though the authoritarian aspect is in its infancy.
None of the politicians or the businessmen in the West will admit this to themselves or to the public. They kid themselves that China is slowly going to transition to democracy just because it is transitioning to sham private ownership of capital. They leave out the fact that private ownership of capital and authoritarian government are quite compatible, and is normally referred to as Fascism. For some reason no one uses that word anymore since it became a dirty word in World War II. There would be an uproar if the CIA fact book someone quoted below referred to China as Communist instead of Fascist so it doesn't, but referring to it as Communist is completely inaccurate and has been for years.
Zhang Ruimin is referred to as the "Jack Welch of China" and is CEO of Haier one of China's larger corporations, manufacturer of appliances and recently made a failed bid for Maytag. He is also a member of the Central committee and was previously a party bureaucrat in charge of state owned factories. Most big Chinese companies are same-same. There is a large number of companies where a top party member or their family are in the top position of the company.
This transition worked great for the elite in the communist party since they've been able to propel themselves to vast wealth simply by using their position in the party. They are also accumulating wealth to an extent which would have resulted in execution under Mao. Its also resulted in Western business transferring vast quantities of IP, market access, capital and jobs in to China that wouldn't have gone there unless they had made the transition to Fascism.
At this point China is the worlds fastest growing market and every Western business with no scruples would sell their mother in to slavery if it meant they got a piece of the action.
I read yesterday in the news on Kai Fu Lee, the Chinese Microsoft VP hired by Google that a key reason he quit was after Bill Gates launched a verbal tirade at him about how the Chinese people and government were f***ing him and Microsoft. Whatever you think about Bill Gates he is a very smart and astute businessman. China is f***ing every company that wants to do business in China and doing it VERY WELL.
Well I'd say yes and no.
The fact is multiplayer online role playing games like Warcraft and Everquest might in fact result in some major breakthroughs in the way children learn and mature. But they are a double edged sword.
They do teach how to communicate and work on a team either in a guild or groups, though its a lesson some children seem to have real problems learning....
They teach kids the value of money, how to make it, how to save it, how to blow it and what the consequences are when you do, how to spend it wisely, how to turn in to ruthless, greedy auction house farmers which will prepare them for later in life as greedy businessmen and EBay farmers.
They teach how to set goals, problem solve, obtain objectives, and how to be patient.
On the down side they do encourage disconnection from reality, totally hammer physical exercise, discourage interaction with others in meat space just because of the extent to which they are a time sink. They also cultivate a time wasting grind mentality. They are ruthless Pavlovian training to the point of addiction, on how to waste vast amounts of time doing things that are tedious to get rewards of dubious value.
I think virtual worlds have great potential to vastly improve and accelerate learning and growth. The problem is dungeon crawl games have kind of hit a wall in terms of creativity. It would also be interesting if they could inject learning real skills that are of value in the real world instead of training people in fantasy trade skills of no actual value, for example require learning math and chemistry instead of tailoring and alchemy. Though as soon as you made a game look like home work people would probably not touch it with a ten foot pole. This while in fact they are basically doing tedious homework style learning in these games already, its just on subjects of no actual value.
Onlnee games also have great potential to totally crater whole nations as vast amounts of time and productivity disappear in to this time sink, though in this regard at least they are better than TV because they are less passive.
" Since you don't know me well enough to read my mind"
Don't need to read your mind, just pointing out you are using the same rhetoric the Bush administration uses, dropping 9/11 at every turn to avoid having to making a coherent argument. I'll take you at your word that is was harmless but I like a lot of people am sick of hearing people drop 9/11 everytime they want to use a sledge hammer to make a point.
"I'm so glad you have specific information about what was censored in that report. Perhaps you can share?"
Obviously not it was CENSORED and to my knowledge it hasn't leaked which is miraculous as leak prone as Washington is. They only thing we know is the Bush administration censored everything in the report relating to Saudi Arabia, some 90-100 pages. The congressmen who wrote the report said that much.
"You know that? How? I've never seen anything along those lines except for pure speculation."
We know with as much certainty as anyone can know about anything the CIA does, that the CIA starting tailing Atta in Germany as far back as 2000, the trusty Wikipedia article. Its well known the CIA tracked him until he entered the U.S. and then dropped surveillance of him because they are precluded from operations in the U.S. Either they didn't flag him to the FBI when he entered or the FBI didn't follow up, I don't remember which.
There is a distinct chance Able Danger learned Atta was an Al Qaeda suspect from someone in the CIA and claimed their data mining project discovered this fact independently to make themselves look good.
Bottomline is you really can't believe anything Able Danger people say, waiting until 4 years later to claim they could have foiled 9/11.
"First of all, the president gets briefed on thousands of those kinds of possibilities"
So what is the point of spending billions on intelligence and intelligence briefings if you don't follow up on any of it unless its a "slam dunk".
"Secondly, the FBI doesn't need direct presidential authority to put potential terrorists under surveillance, and they don't wait for it in other cases."
Well obviously they did need it because they in fact failed to track the known Al Qaeda members when they entered the country, didn't track 9/11 hijackers training in U.S. flight schools to fly but not land airliners, even after one of their agents in Phoenix red flagged them, didn't follow up on Moussaui. My only point is that had the President had directed them to look at the threat that might have set off some light bulb in someones head about the hijackers training in U.S. flight schools they might have foiled the plot.
Though at this point I really can't stand playing the 9/11 blame game anymore. There is a lot more current stuff to blame the Bush administration for which are "slam dunks" in particular the disaster that is Iraq. I quit on the 9/11 blame game, its not even interesting any more.
Excellent job of twisting everything I said... where to begin.
..... like they just did, which is what I said. Try to argue the point instead of twist what I said.
"blame the Bush Administration for the New Orleans levee system,"
About all I said here was the truth, the Bush administration has been more aggressively slashing funding for them than any previous administration. Are they "to blame" for them, never said they were, but they are to blame for cutting both funding and Army personnel who work on them for one simple reason, they moved much of the money and Army Corp people to Iraq. The Bush administration spent $100 million or so on the reclamation of the marshes in Iraq in the last year, and transfered the top Army expert on Louisiana's wetlands there to work on it.
The New Orleans levees are an exercise in pork and corruption, throwing money at them is mostly a waste. Unfortunately they DO have to be maintained otherwise they eventually fail. If you aren't going to maintain them properly then you DO have to move all the people out of the bowl the create otherwise they die
"You are not only stereotyping entire states as one party or another "
Uh thats not me doing that, that is Karl Rove in the White House doing that, and in fact all President's do that. All President's focus their pork and attention on swing states first because they want to insure they carry them in the next election, Florida is #1 on the list. Next they focus their attention on states that vote for them. Dead last on their priority list are states that will never vote for them. Simple fact, you can deny all you want but it just shows you have no clue how politics work.
As for Florida getting preferential treatment its obvious they do. The governor is the President's brother for CHRISTS SAKES, its not just preferential treatment, its NEPOTISM. If Christine Blanco and Jeb Bush call the White House at the same time asking for help you want to lay odds on whose call the President takes. Yesterday Bush flew in to Louisiana without bothering to tell Governor Blanco he was coming. She found out from a reporter and had to cancel a trip to visit refugees in Houston. They were also trying to force her to relinquish control of her National Guard which is against the Constitution. Its obvious the Bush administration hates her and its certainly coloring Federal aid to her state. Simple fact dude, why don't you stop ranting and mud slinging at me when all I did was point out the obvious.
I did my time contracting so I'm speaking from experience which is something you obviously didn't know when you started your little tirade. Saw way to many bureaucrats milking Congress for tax dollars to squander and to many contractors milking those bureaucrats for all they were worth.
Fact is classified programs are by design excluded from public scrutiny which makes them ripe for fraud, waste and abuse. Disgusted Congressmen do still expose them though. I've read articles of late that indicate pretty much every current spy satellite contract is suffering massive cost overruns and schedule slips. Some in Congress are so disgusted with this black hole of corruption they are going to start defunding them, especially since long range stealth RPV's can do most of the jobs for far less money and in some ways better, because they are less predictable, more flexible and less vulnerable. RPV programs seem to be one of the few shining lights in a sea of defense contracting failures in recent years.
Take a look at the B-2 and F-22 for case studies in gross excess in defense contracting. The B-2 would be cheaper if it were made of solid gold, At a billion dollars a copy its to expensive to use any place it might actually be at risk, and to few in number to be of any real value in a real war, so when you need a bomber the air force STILL calls the B-52 or F-117 most of the time. The F-22 is 10 years behind schedule, has seen one huge cost overrun and schedule slip after another, and by the time it finally reached production had become so expensive the numbers produced had to be slashed, causing the per unit cost to go even further through the roof just like the B-2.
Lockheed's C-130J was supposed to be a big improvement for aging C-130's in need of retirement, for hurricane watching in particular. Unfortunately they program had massive overruns and the plans are unusable without major modifications. The fancy composite propellers, for example self destruct when flown in rain which is a problem for a Hurricane chaser.
V-22 Osprey again massive schedule slips and overruns.
Maybe you could list some large defense contracts that came in on time and on budget for comparison.
Pretty good post excepting trying to compare the situation in New Orleans to MS, AB or FL is a stretch. The situation in Mississippi was trivial by comparison. They lost 3-4 blocks on the coast but the rest of the state was in tact and no really big cities were hit. Alabama wasn't hit that hard at all. Mississippi's worst economic hit was gambling and its a blessing in disguise that it got wiped. Not sure I would cite as "successful" a state whose main economic agenda appears to be fleecing people in casinos. This isn't producing useful economic activity its just transferring money from those stupid enough to part with it in to state coffers and the pockets of big casino companies. I also can't put Hally Barber and good governance in the same sentence, he is as corrupt as the come and a closet racist in the Trent Lott mold.
Citing Florida as a success in recent years might be due to good governance, or it might be because Jeb can call up his brother and can instantly get anything he wants both in emergency relief and in giant FEMA handouts that insure both Jeb and George get Florida's precious votes. By contrast I don't think George even returns Blanco's calls because she is one of those subhuman Democrats that Bush and Rove just want to see thrown out in the next election. Making her look bad in a disaster was probably a political tactic by Rove that turned horribly wrong.
"massive truckloads of supplies and relief from outside the Hurricane devastation quickly"
The argument that the problem getting relief to New Orleans was due to blocked highways is B.S. A CNN reporter who had never driven to New Orleans drove in, in an SUV towing a boat. He had to stop and ask directions once. Was it straightforward no, but somehow I think a government with helicopters could have scouted some routes. Supplies didn't go in to New Orleans by design, not because of insurmountable barriers. Me personally I'm baffled that the didn't use barges to both get people out and supplies in. The bloody convention center is right next to the Mississippi and I'm pretty sure it remained open to barge traffic with some caution. I assume FEMA is so used to helicopters and trucks they didn't grasp boats work great when next to a giant navigable river.
A few days ago I pointed out here Walmart could have had supplies to all those people in 24 hours to someone whining about how hard it is to get truckloads of supplies together on short notice. I heard today that Walmart did in fact offer to drive their trucks in with food and water and FEMA told them to go to hell.
At this point I dearly wish for a truly independent, no white wash investigation though it probably wont happen, and find out exactly how much incompetence and how much malevolence there was on the part of all government agencies involved in this screwup.