On Windows those tend to be the only two places most users need to find. Most users can create folders in those places, understand the concept of folders, and of folders within folders. At that point they understand file systems even if they don't understand the arcane specifics of all the other places different OS's keep files.
No doubt Apple did this because it is simpler for users, but its a simple fact they had to do it that way because the OS and every app is sandboxed, and you don't really want general purpose file browsers or access to the whole file system when everything is sandboxed. It dramatically enhances security and maintainability if no user or app can get to the operating system's files, and apps can't get to each others files unless they go through carefully controlled protocols.
There is nothing stopping apps from having file systems of their own and subjecting users to them, Dropbox certainly does.
Exactly how many major "Wiki-Leaks dump" events have there been in the U.S.. One?
The overwhelming majority of damaging leaks are whistleblowers going to places like the NY Times to spill information on some secret program they think the public should know about, like Stuxnet/Flame, Abu Graib, NSA spying on Americans, government agencies wasting money on stupid classified projects etc.
I don't see how this "fog of disinformation" program would even work in these numerous cases, the whistleblowers have an extensive knowledge of actual events, are describing it in detail to a reporter, aren't really dumping large quantities of verbatim documents like Manning did. or if they do pass on documents they would probably know if the jive with actual events.
If you want to prevent dissemination of large quantities of secret diplomatic cables I think the first thing to try be would be to keep them on isolated classified networks, and keep them on computers that don't have writable/removable media, or USB. An iPad would be a pretty good choice in some respects:)
As best I recall Manning used a DVD burner. Having a DVD burner on a computer full of secret documents is criminal negligence on the part of the IT people responsible. Why dont they put them in the brig instead of Manning.
All things considered I think the "Fog of disinformation" "plan" is a self referential fog of disinformation itself. I see absolutely no value in actual implementing it that outweights the risks, and if you were going to implement it I see no value of leaking that you are planning to do it. Maybe they are trying to scare people who are leaking or thinking about it in to not leaking, out of fear of this program, although its unlikely to ever actually be implemented.
I seriously doubt user confusion with file systems is the reason. Most people who've grown up with computers basically understand files.
Are you sure the real reason for depracating general purpose file systems is you need to do it to sandbox apps from one another. There is a legitimate security concern in letting apps look at or modify files that don't belong to them.
I'm curious how they are going to flood their own people with a "fog of disinformation" and not cause chaos. The information has to be believable but false, and once its out there how do they stop their own people from acting on it as though it is accurate?
Maybe if they have someone who is already a suspect and target it only at them they can contain the self inflicted damage, but if they start to dessimate information on any scale the self inflicted damage they could outweigh the damage the leakers do.
If someone is already a suspect I doubt they really need this tactic to nail them.
Once it becomes a wide spread suspicion that there is intentional disinformation in the system, wouldn't everyone stop trusting all the information.
Of course after the "missile gap, WMD's in Iraq and reading some of the stuff that came out of the State department and DOD through Wikileaks the quality of their information is already pretty shitty. Maybe this is just a way to thrown in the towel on intelligence and information gathering and admit its all garbage so they should just make it all up, because its cheaper.
A possible ulterior motive is they actually want to flood leakers with disinformation, and in turn flood news channels with misinformation, so they can mislead and bombard the public with propaganda but have plausible deniability that thats what they are doing.
Re:Fire is natural you know
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Insects As Weapons
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· Score: 4, Insightful
I think he may have been arguing that global warming and climate change might be a possible source of the record breaking heat wave and drought, and that global warming may be due to people burning fossil fuels. It is certainly a possibility though its obviously hard to prove definitively (and certain to ignite a troll fest on/. if the leftist and rightists smell the global warming blood in the water).
It is pretty well established that people did get over zealous in preventing forest fires for most of the last century and it was a really bad idea, since forests need to be burned off at regular intervals with low intensity fires. If you dont and let brush build up and trees get too dense then when they happen now they explode and are much more dangerous and destructive. Its also true that when people building houses in brush filled canyons and in dense forest they are pretty much asking for their homes to eventually burn. Putting wooden shingles on a house, also pretty much begging to lose your home to a forest fire. Not clearing trees and brush from the immediate area around your house, strike three.
The environmentalist backlash against logging has also helped contribute to forests that are too dense, especially when coupled with aggressive forest fire prevention.
I seem to recall a few months ago one researcher had a theory that the debris field in the Pacific from the tsunami from Japan was causing a significant hot spot in the Pacific and could be altering the climate this year, though that would also be hard to prove. If it were true then it would be because people built houses on a tsunami plagued coast though needless to say people don't cause tsunamis.
Costolo IS an idiot, and so is most of his team apparently. What did you expect from him?
I kind of thought Jack Dorsey had a clue. Either he really doesn't or he is getting outvoted by Costolo and the board.
I thought it was pure awesomness when Brett Taylor, Facebook's CTO, resigned almost precisely 2 weeks before Zuckerberg went ape shit and started changing everyones email addresses to facebook.com without their knowledge or permission. I imagine Brett's stock was vested and he still got rich on his way out the door, but people walking when companies do stupid shit is cool.
Dictatorships tend to be a lot faster at doing just about everything. If they pick the right things to do and the right way to do it, its a win-win.
The problems only start when they decide to do the wrong things or pick the wrong way to do it, because then you are in deep shit.
One thing the Chinese have going for them is their central committee members tend to be degreed engineers and technocrats. That is head and shoulders better than the U.S. where the vast majority of the leaders are lawyers. Any time U.S. political leaders open their mouths they make technocratic dictatorships look pretty appealing.
Another Chinese advantage is they had, until recently, none of the drags associated with environmental protection, property rights, worker safety, etc. If they decide they want to do something it gets done really fast, while in the U.S. things like new reactors wallow in red tape for decades. The down side is they've made the place unlivable with pollution, they throw people off their land and out of their homes and business at a furios pace and they kill and maim a lot of workers.
Some other down sides the Chinese have going against them:
Its a freaking dictatorship, there is no way in hell I want to live under their system. Of course at the rate the rest of the world is rushing towards totalitarianism, the U.S. and U.K. in particular, there may not be many free places left to live much longer.
The corruption and deception in their system is truly horrible. If they don't figure out a way to fix their corruption problem it will eventually destory them. Thanks to their deception problem you can't believe a single thing you hear out of the place. Their economic data, and a lot of their economic miracle, is fabrication. The build stuff, and misappropriate massive amounts of capital just to hit targets set from above. Its stimulus spending gone mad. If they are still missing their targets then they just lie.
Most of their companies run multiple sets of books so you can't believe anything they say or any of their reports. They often collude with their banks so dedicated ourside auditors don't even catch the frauds, because the bankers will tell the auditors numbers matching the cooked books not what the company actually has.
Some issues with Bitcoin need to be resolved and they are kind of hard to resolve.
A) You need trusted and secure exchanges. Letting any douche who can throw up a web site run an exchange handling significant quantities of cash would seem doomed to fail. Banks are douches too but at least there are bank regulators who occassionally check up on them and shut them down when they veer in to fraud or incompetence resulting in insolvency. Our regulators have proved to not work well but its better than none at all.
B) Its extremely hard to come up with the right amount of a currency to have in circulation. Bitcoin made it too easy for early adopter to win bitcoins and now its become too difficult which is why its been accused of being a ponzi scheme for the benefit of early adopters. If bitcoin had become widely adopted or replaced money, like that had any chance of happening, it would have caused massive problems becuase there wouldn't have been enough of them in circulation. They would have been pushed to extreme valuations and would probably have stangled any economy relying on them. By contrast institutions like the Fed have little constraint on printing more dollars which is why they've been printing too many for most of the last 40 years, have severely damaged the value of the dollar, and stolen large quantities of money from savers through rampant inflation and devaluation.
What part of the last 10 years did you miss where judges have been letting the U.S. government literally get away with murder. They sure haven't been any kind of brake on stopping the government from spying on its citizens.
Judges aren't saints, they are political appointees and they aren't any more reliable or trustworthy than the politicians who appoint them. If you put them on 3, 5 or 9 judge panels they get a little more reliable but if you manage to pack a 9 person court with 5 corrupted or partisan judges, all voting together, you are still screwed.
You should have zero confidence in letting one judge control anything important.
When it comes to nebulous social issues, facts tend to live in the eyes of the beholder, which is why they end up being beliefs and not science. You cant reduce every issue to facts, which is why your assertion probably doesn't fly.
"Belief in Santa Claus at 4 and 5 is a "fixed belief""
I'm not sure you noticed but Santa Claus is mostly about training kids to expect free toys at the end of the calendar year, and compelling their parents to buy them whether they can afford it or not. Its a fairly essential tactic to insure retailers turn a profit by the end of the calendar year. Schools are more likely to reinforce the Santa Claus myth than challenge it. The Santa Claus myth is a basic part of keeping a consumer driven economy functioning now, and the primary purpose of education is to drive economies.
"#7) Referring to a post a post you authored as "the least ideological post I've seen"."
That wasn't really saying much about the ideology of my post, it was more a comment on the rabid ideological bias of all the other posts on this thread, which if you've read it is pretty undeniable.
Anyone who expects to be "taken seriously" around here is delusional.
Back in the good ole days/. was a pretty good place to debate. Now its just an ugly partisan free-for-all, everyone has already picked sides and its just an exercise in trolling & counter trolling. It seems to reflect the decline of discourse in America quite well.
LIBOR rates were a little low in '92-'93 but that was long before the Internet bubble started. The interest rates in 2003 are where the real estate bubble was born. It also wasn't just interest rates. The Fed completely failed at its basic regulatory duty letting massive loan and securitazation fraud occur.
There was very little fraud in the Internet bubble, there was just a lot of mania.
Not sure why you managed to veer off in to global warming but lets get all scientific and start out really simply.
Would you conceed that there is a possibility that there might be consequences to releasing significant amounts of CO2 in to Earth's atmosphere, or Methane, another even worse green house gas. I'm not saying they are even bad effects but would you conceed there might be effects.
"Bush spent roughly the same amount of money that Clinton did on NASA."
NASA hasn't been particularly about "scientific spending" for a while. NASA is mostly a high tech jobs program, being viciously defended by the congress people with NASA centers or major contractors in their districts. Promising to spend money on manned space programs in particular is pretty crucial to winning votes in parts of Florida and you may have noticed Florida is closely divided and really important to getting elected President. As a result Presidents routinely advocate big manned space programs like Clinton/Gore's NASP or Bush's Return to the Moon, lots of money is spent on them in Florida and Texas and the program is routinely killed by the next President before anything launches.
P.S.
Last night you said CONGRESS sets these budgets and the President has nothing to do with it, so you just contradicted yourself talking about how Clinton and Bush do these things which, gasp, effect the economy.
The really fascinating issue in this submission to me is the part about schools doing things which challenge "'student's fixed beliefs' and undermine 'parental authority'"
Do we have to conceed that parents should have some control over the things their children are taught in public education?
Do we have to conceed that students should be allowed to have fixed beliefs which should go unchallenged by educators?
There is so much essence of civilization in these questions. On one hand you want to have some continuity in belief systems because they are an anchor for civilizations. If you completely throw them out and start over every generation it will be chaos. The Texas Republicans are advocating this continuity and its not totally unreasonable.
On the other hand, what happens when parents and students have belief systems that have gone totally rigid to the point of being dead or worst case gone, completely off the rails. Using education to maintain bad belief systems just because they are the prevailing belief system seems like a truly horrible idea.
I personally wrankle at the concept that this party platform seems to advocate locking children in to the belief system of their parents until they are 18. You ever wonder why kids tend to veer hard left when the hit college. Its because they are compensating for being locked in to the usually conservative belief systems of their aging parents, along with churches they were compelled to attend, and schools many of which are idealogically suffocating due to the often conservative tendencies of state and local school boards.
Seems to me there is a chance the idealogy being promoted in Texas might produce two divirgent sets of children.
A) Reactionary automatons who are going to go through life locked in to the ideaology they were indoctrinated in to as children and fear or hate everyone not adhering to it
B) Radicals who are going to reject everything the system attempted to indoctrinate in to them and probably try to blow up that system every chance they get.
The two group will eventually land on/. and proceed to troll the crap out of each other, like tonight.
Maybe we should try to frame the problem here better and get out of this massive exercise in left wing/right wing trolling and counter trolling. This is not an interesting discussion so far. I often wonder is this deterioration in discourse:
A) Deterioration of/. discourse B) Deterioration and polarization of American discourse C) Deterioration of global discourse, and this Internet things is actually not all good D) Discourse has always sucked, its just getting really obvious thanks to the Internet
One problem with education is we've turned our system in to a bunch of monoliths where state school boards, political parties and ivory tower liberal intellectuals get to dictate cirriculum and teaching methods to millions of unfortunate kids who are locked in to public schools in a particular state and cant afford to escape to private schools with cirricula of their choice.
Believe it or not all of those kids are actually different. Some of them would probably thrive in Montessori schools learning higher order thinking skills (lower case since using HOTS is apparently trolling). They might go on to found Amazon and Google and become global leaders.
Some kids will be lucky to manage memorizing crap for 12 years, make it out with a diploma, and find a high paying career in factory work, burger flipping or roughnecking.
We do actually need more people with higher order thinking skills, intense creativity and the ability and willingness to challenge entrenched thinking. Competing for low wage factory jobs with the Chinese is not something to aspire to.
One solution I wish could happen would be to move education entirely online and let parents and, gasp!, children gravitate to the curricula and methodologies that work for them. The one key benefit is kids wouldn't be locked in to the rigid ideologies of the school boards and communites they happen to be stuck living in, whether it be left or right wing. The coolness of the Internet is people from all over the world can get together and do interesting things together, and escape the trap of locality.
The reason this wont work is, face it, public schools today are primarily to provide subsidized day care since the new economy demands both parents work full time unless they are affluent. The affluent then go to private schools. Schools are also there to socialize kids and you kind of need to lock them all in rooms together with authority figures dictating societal doctrine to do that. Actual dducation is at least third on the list if not lower.
And since this comment is already too long part II will be in a different post
The Fed had very little to do with the internet bubble. The internet bubble was caused by a disruptive new technology called the Internet, just like the railroad bubble in the 19th century was caused the railroad.
The Fed caused the housing bubble by A) setting interest rates too low for too long after 9/11 and the Internet bubble burst and B) not doing their job and regulating banks to stop them from issuing predatory loans and junk bonds that were rated AAA by corrupted rating agencies
Apologies man, when people start ranting about Pelosi and Obama that is just classic Fox News. They do it all day, every day, day after day. You sound just like them.
One reason the GDP goes up under Republicans is they tend to run massive deficits and pour massive amounts of money in to the military. Win win for GDP. Its the way Republican's do stimulus, they just wont admit it is stimulus.
"CONGRESS, NOT THE PRESIDENT, CONTROLS THE ECONOMY"
Dude, you are wrong again. The Executive branch controls the DOD, the DOJ, the SEC and a host of other agencies that directly influence the economy.
Bush's insane push for a war in Iraq, for no reason, did more damage to the economy than anything in the last decade. Congress had nothing to do with it other than rubber stamping it.
When Bush put Christopher Cox in charge of the SEC that was a green light to Wall Street that it could run amuck. The entire Bush agenda was to gut regulation and they did most of it without any involvement from Congress, it was all executive appointments and orders.
I lean libertarian so I'm OK with no regulation but if you are gonna do it you also have to get rid of all the Federal backstops, bailouts and meddling. If the Bush crowd wanted to let Wall Street run amuck that's fine with me, they should have just let them all go down in ruin when they acted irresponsibly. Deregulating everything, letting Wall Street amuck, and then bailing them out at taxpayer expense when it all went bad, wrong on every level.
Bush also nominated Greenspan to his 5th term at the Fed in 2004. If Greenspan had retired in 2004 that would have done more to prevent the crisis than anything, assuming a competent replacement.
"Well, figure out what turned a $400 billion deficit into a $1400 billion dollar deficit and that will be your answer."
The deficits for the last four years are directly attributable to:
A) A crashed economy and high unemployment, which led to crashed tax revenues at all levels of government. Crashed economy leads back to Bush
B) Massive tax cuts. It is stimulatory but it is also hammering revenues. Traces back to Bush though Obama deserves blame for renewing them as is. Taxing the rich at 15% on capital gains while working people get whacked at 20-33% for Federal income tax, plus state taxes, plus 10%+ payroll taxes, plus regressive sales taxes is inequitable.
C) Stimulus spending, and extended unemployment benefits, which is only there because the economy crashed under Bush.
D) Massive military and homeland security spending, mostly traced to Bush and Lieberman
E) Massive health care spending, blame both parties, though Bush and the Republicans rammed through medicare D which was a blank check to the drug companies
F) A tax code that is swiss cheese. Big corporations and the wealthy bitch about U.S. tax rates constantly but the dirty little secret is they seldom pay anything close to those rates. Blame both parties but Republicans especially. They still fight to the death to give huge tax breaks to oil companies that are making massive profits.
He probably should give his Nobel prize to Bush. The only reason he got it was the people who award it were apparently so glad to see the end of Bush that they chose to celebrate by giving a Peace prize to Obama for no reason. I assume it was there way of giving an anti-Peace prize to Bush.
Obama has certainly done nothing to deserve a Peace prize, considering he continued Bush's wars and even ramped up the one in Afghanistan. He kept Gitmo running, kept spying on American and is running drone wars all over the world, killing people, including U.S. citizens, on very dodgy suspicions and killing innocent women and children if they happen to be at the wrong place at the wrong time.
The only other reason I can see he got it is because he was black and it was a way to celebrate the end of America's slave/segregationist past.
You are such a partisan hack there isn't much point in arguing with you anyway.
I'm no fan of Obama or Pelosi, and you will seldom catch be defending them, but your position that nothing is Bush's fault is delusional.
Do you actually believe the stuff you say or do you just regurgitate the crap you hear on Fox News day after day, like a mindless automaton.
About all Pelosi did impacting the economy was to sign off on Bush/Paulson's bailouts. Bush/Paulson no doubt acted on the old axiom, never let a good crisis go to waste used it to transfer billions of tax payer dollars to Wall Street including his former company, Goldman-Sach using AIG as a front. Pelosi just caved to their scare tactics.
What exactly in the 110th Congress did Pelosi do that made it "her" economy. They did a small $160 billion stimulus but that was mostly tax cuts every Republican can love. They increased the minimum wage to $7.25/hr. Is that how she destroyed the global economy?
"half of the debt exists entirely because of the war in afghanistan(which I actually support)"
What is there to support in it? The government the U.S. is propping up is so massively corrupt, incompetent and hated the Taliban is going to topple it five minutes after the U.S. leaves.
And, the U.S. is going to leave in two years.
As soon as the U.S. leaves Afghanistan is going to revert to Taliban control and look exactly like it did in 2001 with one exception. Bin Laden is dead but he probably hasn't even been in Afghanistan for most of the last ten years. There are plenty of other lawless countries Al Qaeda or its successors can use as bases. Its obviously taken us a lot more time, money and blood to deny them one base that it has for them to move to ten new ones in Yemen, Somalia, Indonesia, Pakistan, Phillipines, etc.
If you are going to squander that kind of blood and treasure you need to have a plan to get something out of it that makes it worth it. The U.S. didn't.
Slashdot Mirror
On Windows those tend to be the only two places most users need to find. Most users can create folders in those places, understand the concept of folders, and of folders within folders. At that point they understand file systems even if they don't understand the arcane specifics of all the other places different OS's keep files.
No doubt Apple did this because it is simpler for users, but its a simple fact they had to do it that way
because the OS and every app is sandboxed, and you don't really want general purpose file browsers or access to the whole file system when everything is sandboxed. It dramatically enhances security and maintainability if no user or app can get to the operating system's files, and apps can't get to each others files unless they go through carefully controlled protocols.
There is nothing stopping apps from having file systems of their own and subjecting users to them, Dropbox certainly does.
Exactly how many major "Wiki-Leaks dump" events have there been in the U.S.. One?
The overwhelming majority of damaging leaks are whistleblowers going to places like the NY Times to spill information on some secret program they think the public should know about, like Stuxnet/Flame, Abu Graib, NSA spying on Americans, government agencies wasting money on stupid classified projects etc.
I don't see how this "fog of disinformation" program would even work in these numerous cases, the whistleblowers have an extensive knowledge of actual events, are describing it in detail to a reporter, aren't really dumping large quantities of verbatim documents like Manning did. or if they do pass on documents they would probably know if the jive with actual events.
If you want to prevent dissemination of large quantities of secret diplomatic cables I think the first thing to try be would be to keep them on isolated classified networks, and keep them on computers that don't have writable/removable media, or USB. An iPad would be a pretty good choice in some respects :)
As best I recall Manning used a DVD burner. Having a DVD burner on a computer full of secret documents is criminal negligence on the part of the IT people responsible. Why dont they put them in the brig instead of Manning.
All things considered I think the "Fog of disinformation" "plan" is a self referential fog of disinformation itself. I see absolutely no value in actual implementing it that outweights the risks, and if you were going to implement it I see no value of leaking that you are planning to do it. Maybe they are trying to scare people who are leaking or thinking about it in to not leaking, out of fear of this program, although its unlikely to ever actually be implemented.
I seriously doubt user confusion with file systems is the reason. Most people who've grown up with computers basically understand files.
Are you sure the real reason for depracating general purpose file systems is you need to do it to sandbox apps from one another. There is a legitimate security concern in letting apps look at or modify files that don't belong to them.
I'm curious how they are going to flood their own people with a "fog of disinformation" and not cause chaos. The information has to be believable but false, and once its out there how do they stop their own people from acting on it as though it is accurate?
Maybe if they have someone who is already a suspect and target it only at them they can contain the self inflicted damage, but if they start to dessimate information on any scale the self inflicted damage they could outweigh the damage the leakers do.
If someone is already a suspect I doubt they really need this tactic to nail them.
Once it becomes a wide spread suspicion that there is intentional disinformation in the system, wouldn't everyone stop trusting all the information.
Of course after the "missile gap, WMD's in Iraq and reading some of the stuff that came out of the State department and DOD through Wikileaks the quality of their information is already pretty shitty. Maybe this is just a way to thrown in the towel on intelligence and information gathering and admit its all garbage so they should just make it all up, because its cheaper.
A possible ulterior motive is they actually want to flood leakers with disinformation, and in turn flood news channels with misinformation, so they can mislead and bombard the public with propaganda but have plausible deniability that thats what they are doing.
I think he may have been arguing that global warming and climate change might be a possible source of the record breaking heat wave and drought, and that global warming may be due to people burning fossil fuels. It is certainly a possibility though its obviously hard to prove definitively (and certain to ignite a troll fest on /. if the leftist and rightists smell the global warming blood in the water).
It is pretty well established that people did get over zealous in preventing forest fires for most of the last century and it was a really bad idea, since forests need to be burned off at regular intervals with low intensity fires. If you dont and let brush build up and trees get too dense then when they happen now they explode and are much more dangerous and destructive. Its also true that when people building houses in brush filled canyons and in dense forest they are pretty much asking for their homes to eventually burn. Putting wooden shingles on a house, also pretty much begging to lose your home to a forest fire. Not clearing trees and brush from the immediate area around your house, strike three.
The environmentalist backlash against logging has also helped contribute to forests that are too dense, especially when coupled with aggressive forest fire prevention.
I seem to recall a few months ago one researcher had a theory that the debris field in the Pacific from the tsunami from Japan was causing a significant hot spot in the Pacific and could be altering the climate this year, though that would also be hard to prove. If it were true then it would be because people built houses on a tsunami plagued coast though needless to say people don't cause tsunamis.
Costolo IS an idiot, and so is most of his team apparently. What did you expect from him?
I kind of thought Jack Dorsey had a clue. Either he really doesn't or he is getting outvoted by Costolo and the board.
I thought it was pure awesomness when Brett Taylor, Facebook's CTO, resigned almost precisely 2 weeks before Zuckerberg went ape shit and started changing everyones email addresses to facebook.com without their knowledge or permission. I imagine Brett's stock was vested and he still got rich on his way out the door, but people walking when companies do stupid shit is cool.
Dictatorships tend to be a lot faster at doing just about everything. If they pick the right things to do and the right way to do it, its a win-win.
The problems only start when they decide to do the wrong things or pick the wrong way to do it, because then you are in deep shit.
One thing the Chinese have going for them is their central committee members tend to be degreed engineers and technocrats. That is head and shoulders better than the U.S. where the vast majority of the leaders are lawyers. Any time U.S. political leaders open their mouths they make technocratic dictatorships look pretty appealing.
Another Chinese advantage is they had, until recently, none of the drags associated with environmental protection, property rights, worker safety, etc. If they decide they want to do something it gets done really fast, while in the U.S. things like new reactors wallow in red tape for decades. The down side is they've made the place unlivable with pollution, they throw people off their land and out of their homes and business at a furios pace and they kill and maim a lot of workers.
Some other down sides the Chinese have going against them:
Its a freaking dictatorship, there is no way in hell I want to live under their system. Of course at the rate the rest of the world is rushing towards totalitarianism, the U.S. and U.K. in particular, there may not be many free places left to live much longer.
The corruption and deception in their system is truly horrible. If they don't figure out a way to fix their corruption problem it will eventually destory them. Thanks to their deception problem you can't believe a single thing you hear out of the place. Their economic data, and a lot of their economic miracle, is fabrication. The build stuff, and misappropriate massive amounts of capital just to hit targets set from above. Its stimulus spending gone mad. If they are still missing their targets then they just lie.
Most of their companies run multiple sets of books so you can't believe anything they say or any of their reports. They often collude with their banks so dedicated ourside auditors don't even catch the frauds, because the bankers will tell the auditors numbers matching the cooked books not what the company actually has.
Some issues with Bitcoin need to be resolved and they are kind of hard to resolve.
A) You need trusted and secure exchanges. Letting any douche who can throw up a web site run an exchange handling significant quantities of cash would seem doomed to fail. Banks are douches too but at least there are bank regulators who occassionally check up on them and shut them down when they veer in to fraud or incompetence resulting in insolvency. Our regulators have proved to not work well but its better than none at all.
B) Its extremely hard to come up with the right amount of a currency to have in circulation. Bitcoin made it too easy for early adopter to win bitcoins and now its become too difficult which is why its been accused of being a ponzi scheme for the benefit of early adopters. If bitcoin had become widely adopted or replaced money, like that had any chance of happening, it would have caused massive problems becuase there wouldn't have been enough of them in circulation. They would have been pushed to extreme valuations and would probably have stangled any economy relying on them. By contrast institutions like the Fed have little constraint on printing more dollars which is why they've been printing too many for most of the last 40 years, have severely damaged the value of the dollar, and stolen large quantities of money from savers through rampant inflation and devaluation.
What part of the last 10 years did you miss where judges have been letting the U.S. government literally get away with murder. They sure haven't been any kind of brake on stopping the government from spying on its citizens.
Judges aren't saints, they are political appointees and they aren't any more reliable or trustworthy than the politicians who appoint them. If you put them on 3, 5 or 9 judge panels they get a little more reliable but if you manage to pack a 9 person court with 5 corrupted or partisan judges, all voting together, you are still screwed.
You should have zero confidence in letting one judge control anything important.
When it comes to nebulous social issues, facts tend to live in the eyes of the beholder, which is why they end up being beliefs and not science. You cant reduce every issue to facts, which is why your assertion probably doesn't fly.
"Belief in Santa Claus at 4 and 5 is a "fixed belief""
I'm not sure you noticed but Santa Claus is mostly about training kids to expect free toys at the end of the calendar year, and compelling their parents to buy them whether they can afford it or not. Its a fairly essential tactic to insure retailers turn a profit by the end of the calendar year. Schools are more likely to reinforce the Santa Claus myth than challenge it. The Santa Claus myth is a basic part of keeping a consumer driven economy functioning now, and the primary purpose of education is to drive economies.
"#7) Referring to a post a post you authored as "the least ideological post I've seen"."
That wasn't really saying much about the ideology of my post, it was more a comment on the rabid ideological bias of all the other posts on this thread, which if you've read it is pretty undeniable.
Anyone who expects to be "taken seriously" around here is delusional.
Back in the good ole days /. was a pretty good place to debate. Now its just an ugly partisan free-for-all, everyone has already picked sides and its just an exercise in trolling & counter trolling. It seems to reflect the decline of discourse in America quite well.
To me /. is just rhetorical sport these days.
What ideology would that be exactly? Pretty sure that was the least ideological post I've seen on this topic tonight?
Interest rates weren't particularly low in the 90's. Here is a a chart.
Here are LIBOR rates
LIBOR rates were a little low in '92-'93 but that was long before the Internet bubble started. The interest rates in 2003 are where the real estate bubble was born. It also wasn't just interest rates. The Fed completely failed at its basic regulatory duty letting massive loan and securitazation fraud occur.
There was very little fraud in the Internet bubble, there was just a lot of mania.
Not sure why you managed to veer off in to global warming but lets get all scientific and start out really simply.
Would you conceed that there is a possibility that there might be consequences to releasing significant amounts of CO2 in to Earth's atmosphere, or Methane, another even worse green house gas. I'm not saying they are even bad effects but would you conceed there might be effects.
"Bush spent roughly the same amount of money that Clinton did on NASA."
NASA hasn't been particularly about "scientific spending" for a while. NASA is mostly a high tech jobs program, being viciously defended by the congress people with NASA centers or major contractors in their districts. Promising to spend money on manned space programs in particular is pretty crucial to winning votes in parts of Florida and you may have noticed Florida is closely divided and really important to getting elected President. As a result Presidents routinely advocate big manned space programs like Clinton/Gore's NASP or Bush's Return to the Moon, lots of money is spent on them in Florida and Texas and the program is routinely killed by the next President before anything launches.
P.S.
Last night you said CONGRESS sets these budgets and the President has nothing to do with it, so you just contradicted yourself talking about how Clinton and Bush do these things which, gasp, effect the economy.
The really fascinating issue in this submission to me is the part about schools doing things which challenge "'student's fixed beliefs' and undermine 'parental authority'"
Do we have to conceed that parents should have some control over the things their children are taught in public education?
Do we have to conceed that students should be allowed to have fixed beliefs which should go unchallenged by educators?
There is so much essence of civilization in these questions. On one hand you want to have some continuity in belief systems because they are an anchor for civilizations. If you completely throw them out and start over every generation it will be chaos. The Texas Republicans are advocating this continuity and its not totally unreasonable.
On the other hand, what happens when parents and students have belief systems that have gone totally rigid to the point of being dead or worst case gone, completely off the rails. Using education to maintain bad belief systems just because they are the prevailing belief system seems like a truly horrible idea.
I personally wrankle at the concept that this party platform seems to advocate locking children in to the belief system of their parents until they are 18. You ever wonder why kids tend to veer hard left when the hit college. Its because they are compensating for being locked in to the usually conservative belief systems of their aging parents, along with churches they were compelled to attend, and schools many of which are idealogically suffocating due to the often conservative tendencies of state and local school boards.
Seems to me there is a chance the idealogy being promoted in Texas might produce two divirgent sets of children.
A) Reactionary automatons who are going to go through life locked in to the ideaology they were indoctrinated in to as children and fear or hate everyone not adhering to it
B) Radicals who are going to reject everything the system attempted to indoctrinate in to them and probably try to blow up that system every chance they get.
The two group will eventually land on /. and proceed to troll the crap out of each other, like tonight.
Maybe we should try to frame the problem here better and get out of this massive exercise in left wing/right wing trolling and counter trolling. This is not an interesting discussion so far. I often wonder is this deterioration in discourse:
A) Deterioration of /. discourse
B) Deterioration and polarization of American discourse
C) Deterioration of global discourse, and this Internet things is actually not all good
D) Discourse has always sucked, its just getting really obvious thanks to the Internet
One problem with education is we've turned our system in to a bunch of monoliths where state school boards, political parties and ivory tower liberal intellectuals get to dictate cirriculum and teaching methods to millions of unfortunate kids who are locked in to public schools in a particular state and cant afford to escape to private schools with cirricula of their choice.
Believe it or not all of those kids are actually different. Some of them would probably thrive in Montessori schools learning higher order thinking skills (lower case since using HOTS is apparently trolling). They might go on to found Amazon and Google and become global leaders.
Some kids will be lucky to manage memorizing crap for 12 years, make it out with a diploma, and find a high paying career in factory work, burger flipping or roughnecking.
We do actually need more people with higher order thinking skills, intense creativity and the ability and willingness to challenge entrenched thinking. Competing for low wage factory jobs with the Chinese is not something to aspire to.
One solution I wish could happen would be to move education entirely online and let parents and, gasp!, children gravitate to the curricula and methodologies that work for them. The one key benefit is kids wouldn't be locked in to the rigid ideologies of the school boards and communites they happen to be stuck living in, whether it be left or right wing. The coolness of the Internet is people from all over the world can get together and do interesting things together, and escape the trap of locality.
The reason this wont work is, face it, public schools today are primarily to provide subsidized day care since the new economy demands both parents work full time unless they are affluent. The affluent then go to private schools. Schools are also there to socialize kids and you kind of need to lock them all in rooms together with authority figures dictating societal doctrine to do that. Actual dducation is at least third on the list if not lower.
And since this comment is already too long part II will be in a different post
The Fed had very little to do with the internet bubble. The internet bubble was caused by a disruptive new technology called the Internet, just like the railroad bubble in the 19th century was caused the railroad.
The Fed caused the housing bubble by A) setting interest rates too low for too long after 9/11 and the Internet bubble burst and B) not doing their job and regulating banks to stop them from issuing predatory loans and junk bonds that were rated AAA by corrupted rating agencies
"First, I don't get FoxNews."
Apologies man, when people start ranting about Pelosi and Obama that is just classic Fox News. They do it all day, every day, day after day. You sound just like them.
One reason the GDP goes up under Republicans is they tend to run massive deficits and pour massive amounts of money in to the military. Win win for GDP. Its the way Republican's do stimulus, they just wont admit it is stimulus.
"CONGRESS, NOT THE PRESIDENT, CONTROLS THE ECONOMY"
Dude, you are wrong again. The Executive branch controls the DOD, the DOJ, the SEC and a host of other agencies that directly influence the economy.
Bush's insane push for a war in Iraq, for no reason, did more damage to the economy than anything in the last decade. Congress had nothing to do with it other than rubber stamping it.
When Bush put Christopher Cox in charge of the SEC that was a green light to Wall Street that it could run amuck. The entire Bush agenda was to gut regulation and they did most of it without any involvement from Congress, it was all executive appointments and orders.
I lean libertarian so I'm OK with no regulation but if you are gonna do it you also have to get rid of all the Federal backstops, bailouts and meddling. If the Bush crowd wanted to let Wall Street run amuck that's fine with me, they should have just let them all go down in ruin when they acted irresponsibly. Deregulating everything, letting Wall Street amuck, and then bailing them out at taxpayer expense when it all went bad, wrong on every level.
Bush also nominated Greenspan to his 5th term at the Fed in 2004. If Greenspan had retired in 2004 that would have done more to prevent the crisis than anything, assuming a competent replacement.
"Well, figure out what turned a $400 billion deficit into a $1400 billion dollar deficit and that will be your answer."
The deficits for the last four years are directly attributable to:
A) A crashed economy and high unemployment, which led to crashed tax revenues at all levels of government. Crashed economy leads back to Bush
B) Massive tax cuts. It is stimulatory but it is also hammering revenues. Traces back to Bush though Obama deserves blame for renewing them as is. Taxing the rich at 15% on capital gains while working people get whacked at 20-33% for Federal income tax, plus state taxes, plus 10%+ payroll taxes, plus regressive sales taxes is inequitable.
C) Stimulus spending, and extended unemployment benefits, which is only there because the economy crashed under Bush.
D) Massive military and homeland security spending, mostly traced to Bush and Lieberman
E) Massive health care spending, blame both parties, though Bush and the Republicans rammed through medicare D which was a blank check to the drug companies
F) A tax code that is swiss cheese. Big corporations and the wealthy bitch about U.S. tax rates constantly but the dirty little secret is they seldom pay anything close to those rates. Blame both parties but Republicans especially. They still fight to the death to give huge tax breaks to oil companies that are making massive profits.
Maybe you would understand until the shrapnel killed someone in your family, or maybe your whole family, then I doubt you would understand.
What were they actually trying to do? If you actually know I'd like to hear it.
He probably should give his Nobel prize to Bush. The only reason he got it was the people who award it were apparently so glad to see the end of Bush that they chose to celebrate by giving a Peace prize to Obama for no reason. I assume it was there way of giving an anti-Peace prize to Bush.
Obama has certainly done nothing to deserve a Peace prize, considering he continued Bush's wars and even ramped up the one in Afghanistan. He kept Gitmo running, kept spying on American and is running drone wars all over the world, killing people, including U.S. citizens, on very dodgy suspicions and killing innocent women and children if they happen to be at the wrong place at the wrong time.
The only other reason I can see he got it is because he was black and it was a way to celebrate the end of America's slave/segregationist past.
You are such a partisan hack there isn't much point in arguing with you anyway.
I'm no fan of Obama or Pelosi, and you will seldom catch be defending them, but your position that nothing is Bush's fault is delusional.
Do you actually believe the stuff you say or do you just regurgitate the crap you hear on Fox News day after day, like a mindless automaton.
About all Pelosi did impacting the economy was to sign off on Bush/Paulson's bailouts. Bush/Paulson no doubt acted on the old axiom, never let a good crisis go to waste used it to transfer billions of tax payer dollars to Wall Street including his former company, Goldman-Sach using AIG as a front. Pelosi just caved to their scare tactics.
What exactly in the 110th Congress did Pelosi do that made it "her" economy. They did a small $160 billion stimulus but that was mostly tax cuts every Republican can love. They increased the minimum wage to $7.25/hr. Is that how she destroyed the global economy?
"half of the debt exists entirely because of the war in afghanistan(which I actually support)"
What is there to support in it? The government the U.S. is propping up is so massively corrupt, incompetent and hated the Taliban is going to topple it five minutes after the U.S. leaves.
And, the U.S. is going to leave in two years.
As soon as the U.S. leaves Afghanistan is going to revert to Taliban control and look exactly like it did in 2001 with one exception. Bin Laden is dead but he probably hasn't even been in Afghanistan for most of the last ten years. There are plenty of other lawless countries Al Qaeda or its successors can use as bases. Its obviously taken us a lot more time, money and blood to deny them one base that it has for them to move to ten new ones in Yemen, Somalia, Indonesia, Pakistan, Phillipines, etc.
If you are going to squander that kind of blood and treasure you need to have a plan to get something out of it that makes it worth it. The U.S. didn't.