I'm still using my G4-400 (Sawtooth). I put in a Sonnet 1GHz accelerator and 1.5G of system RAM and it has been good to go.
One dumb thing I did was to install OS X 10.5. That was a big mistake, as it took a lot of the available RAM in my system. I would limit all G4 systems to Tiger unless they can be expanded past 2G of system RAM.
G4s as of last year cannot run the latest software, and I'm thinking of Adobe's CS4 suite as well as the latest version of Final Cut Studio. But Final Cut Pro HD runs fine, and Adobe's CS3 suite of applications is just fine for me.
I love telling Windows fan-boys about how many years of excellent service my Mac has given me. Then I tell them that Macs cost less than Pee Cees because they cost less per year of service.
I have to respectfully disagree with you on the "midrange" idea. Apple did that under Scully and had a panalopy of mis-named models, like Centris, Deforma? Quadro, Hydra? I think it confused the market.
Apple's midrange is the upper-range iMac and the lower-range Mac Pro. And anyone who totes around the 19" laptop and tries to use it on a plane will recognize it as really a midrange desktop replacement with a bit of portability.
I went to the Apple Store today and started parting out a nice Mac Pro. Total cost with the options I wanted? Over $8.000. I could have gone to $10,000 with Apple RAM. Time to get back to work and earn money.
Well I suppose there are lots of corporations that are doing things this way these days -- but they have to. The SEC rules require it and their stockholders expect it. But they don't announce things like this:
David, Sue, Frank, Jim L. Jim R. and Agnes are being laid off today (or tomorrow) as XYZ Corp. reorganizes to meet the current fiscal crisis.
Instead, they announce the number of persons who will be let go in the corporation, or the sale of a division, or the shutting of a plant. Then everyone inside the company watches as morale plummets because they are being laid off, their friends are being laid off, or everyone is under threat of being laid off and they're waiting for the other shoe to drop.
I've been there, personally as this nameless broadcasting company went through an annual purge. I survived 9 of them and was out just before Christmas. I was told that they needed to reduce two 40-hour person-weeks from their schedule.
Oh, and the person who laid me off? That was the first time I ever met him.
I know a guy who was laid off and actually heard that he was laid off from the press.
He is a many-storied journalist and the bureau he was running was closed down in the annual "cost-cutting" routine performed by a nameless broadcasting company. Since they closed the bureau he was heading up, he retained no access to the company's mail system and could not send anything.
He found out about his layoff from a competitor. I think he's working for them, now.
I find it interesting how this broadcasting company timed these bureau closings: Inevitably it was right before they needed the resources. They closed down their Denver bureau just before the Columbine school shootings. Other bureaus' closings were immediately followed by a major event.
Illegal aliens cannot get welfare. They have to supply a social security card, which is checked to get any entitlements. And some states will license illegal aliens to drive -- it is not the job of a state to do the work of the INS and, for safety reasons, it makes sense to do so.
Maryland and most states actually benefit from illegals. The food on your dinner table is most probably a product of their hard work. The daily work done on a regular basis for cash, under the table, helps support you with all of the necessities you like on a day to day basis, like clean dishes in restaurants, poultry with no feathers on your table, neighbors with clean back yards that are not infested with kudzu or poison ivy...
I'm going to bet your family is not Native American. I'm also going to bet they come from somewhere else than North America. This country was founded and built on people who didn't come from here and you are standing here saying, in effect: "I've got mine, now screw the rest of the world."
As Will Rogers said, "Trouble with Christianity is nobody has tried it yet.
It's interesting. The Wall Street Journal in the 1990s predicted the demise of Apple. I'm still chuckling about the stock purchase I made when I decided that if you broke Apple up into component parts, it would still be worth what WSJ was saying its stock was worth.
I purchased the stock at $14.22.
If only I would have paid attention to the Wall Street Journal. I would have known so much more than I do now.
You don't know me very well.... Bush committed many illegal acts. I do hope that he and those in his administration that acted illegally, will be prosecuted.
Would "Deep Throat" have been caught if the actions taken in recent history were in place then? No. He was a very careful man. Not surprising, considering he was the Deputy Director of the FBI.... I don't agree with the blatant disregard for the US Constitution and laws that have been broken by our administration, but I do recognize the fact that some rules are going to be bent for the greater good. On the scale that the laws have been bent and broken, I honestly don't believe a "greater good" has come of it.
If we are going to follow our Constitution and laws, there is no wiggle room. I know precisely how W. Mark Felt "covered his tracks" during the Watergate fracas. He initiated an investigation on who the leak may be and made lots of noise about that. But had the Nixon administration a record of his phone calls and the content of those phone calls to Bernstein and Woodward about when and where they would meet next, Felt would have been cashiered.
In other words, it was Felt's anonymity that allowed him to blow the whistle and Felt knew he had to protect that at all costs.
I lived through the Nixon era and I knew people who were being spied on by the administration. This was an administration that was bent on keeping its secrets and it kept them only slightly less well than did the Bush administration.
Bush went after reporters because of the Valerie Plame leak. And then, when Congress realized that a law was broken when Scooter Libby told the media about the identity of an active CIA agent, the coverup ensued.
But the whole issue was not national security (which was the rationale for Bush's claim of Executive Privilege) it was nasty "I'll-get-you" politics. You cannot rationalize any need for "bending rules" here, but you can clearly see how the Bush administration desperately wanted to monitor the press so that they could anticipate needs to cover things up.
The Abu Ghraib prisoner abuse scandal made things even worse. The Bush administration's policy of allowing (actually promoting) torture of persons in US custody became readily apparent to everyone. The Bush administration immediately classified everything about the prison and the US operation of it and proceeded to perform a very careful "witch hunt" for those low-level soldiers who were involved. The classification was essential to prevent anyone from knowing about Blackwater's involvement as well as military and CIA involvement in this horrid treatment of mostly "average joes" picked up off the streets of Iraqi cities in random sweeps.
The administration was overjoyed by Specialist Lynndie England's involvement as well as her affair with Charles Graner because it added sexual escapades to titillate the press corps while they covered up the "Copper Green" interrogation orders encouraging this kind of abuse by Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld.
So you can see why the Bush administration didn't like the press. They were exposing specific, classified malfeasance of the administration. And this administration was dedicated to winning re-election at all costs.
Again, this is about politics, not national security.
No, I don't know you well. But I like your comments to the/. community and I have read some of what you have written. I have been in the news business for 25 years. As someone whose phone and e-mails may well have been regularly tapped, I feel personally assaulted by an administration bent on keeping the press from reporting the truth of their criminal malfeasance. I don't and won't "give them a pass" "for the greater good."
The UK has their constitution that, apparently, allows for the kinds of cameras everywhere that they have. I would mention that most of those cameras were installed for the purpose of stopping the IRA from setting bombs.
And legality is the real issue here. It is not legal for the Executive branch to violate the Fourth Amendment. And the people they were specifically flagging, apparently, were journalists who were writing things the Bush administration didn't like. Which makes everyone they spoke to or e-mailed a suspect.
Do you think that the Washington Post would have been able to report on the Watergate break-ins and the subsequent coverup had Nixon the ability to spy continuously on everyone Woodward and Bernstein contacted?
A free and unfettered press is the only defense against autocracy. After September 11th, 2001, I told many of my foreign friends that, since we are a nation of laws we would not be tempted to violate our Constitution, there would be no declaration of Martial Law and no suspension of Habeus Corpus. I was proven wrong. While the President did not declare Martial Law or suspend Habeus Corpus in an official proclamation, he did so in action and fact. The framers of our Constitution thought so highly of Habeus Corpus that they did not wait to write an Amendment to the Constitution for that. Instead, that is in the body of the Constitution in Article I Section 9.
As you all ready know, the President violated that regularly and routinely at Gitmo and regularly and repeatedly violated the Fourth Amendment with respect to all US citizens.
Casual comments did get people into trouble. Further up in the discussion about this, I made a comment on the issue of blacklisting back in the 1940s and 1950s. People were blacklisted from their jobs based on just such "casual comments."
The danger is that these violations of the Constitution set a very ominous precedent and that is why the officials involved in these violations should be brought to trial.
The problem with your assertion is that you are assuming that the reporter(s) in question have no sources who would prefer to not be identified. And none of those sources are persons who work within the government and have a desire to whistleblow.
And there is no protection for anyone who may just have a political axe to grind against the government and who happens to say to the reporter, "Someone ought to kill Bush so that we can get back to the days where we had freedom and the USA didn't torture people."
Of course that kind of "casual" comment is just exactly what would put you on the President's List Of People We Will Spy On At All Times, despite the fact that you may have said, just after the first statement, "Only then we would have the Devil Incarnate as President, because Cheny would take over."
Thereupon putting yourself on the Vice President's List Of People We Will Spy On At All Times.
I am being flippant here, but this is a wholesale violation of the Fourth Amendment. Besides, reporters don't work for law enforcement and ought not be forced to do that service, just as lawyers defending you don't work for the Attorney General and just as your CPA does not work for the IRS.
Bush, Cheny and their administration ought to be brought to trial for this wholesale abuse of the Constitution as well as for crimes of torture and violations of the Geneva Conventions, which they have admitted violating.
It can be illegal to carry a lobster smaller than a certain size is illegal. Anything is considered illegal.
The person carrying the illegal lobster did not specifically swear, as Bush did, to "preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States."
Because Bush did so swear, that places him at higher risk of prosecution for his wholesale violation of the Fourth Amendment, which reads:
The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.
One should not confuse a regular citizen with a US government official who is carrying out specific duties and, rather than abiding by the laws of the land he is sworn to uphold, violates them and does so with legal advice prior to those violations.
If I'm pulling up a lobster pot and upon finding an undersized lobster, I choose to wait until I can show it to my daughter onshore (as one we must let go) -- which may be an illegal act -- I don't have a lawyer standing by my side, as Bush did, offering me advice at a moment's notice. Furthermore, I am not charged with prosecuting others for the crime I am committing.
Its just a political ideology, and just like the rest of them, it has good points and bad points. Discriminating, or ruining peoples lives in this case, against people because you don't personally like their opinion is wrong.
Communism, at the time, was equated with Nazism. The US government, driven by hysteria on the part of a few blowhards whose sole purpose is to win re-election by sowing fear (gee, that sounds familiar) worked to make belief in any political ideology short of "Democracy" (we have never had that on a national level in the United States) illegal. As a member of a union I was forced to join (by nature of my work) I had to, in the 1990s sign a paper indicating that I was not a member of the Communist Party or any organization allied with Communism. Everyone who joins a union today still has to sign such a statement.
Frankly, when I signed that statement, I realized it was a direct violation of my rights as a citizen to associate with whom I wish and to believe in what I prefer to believe in.
As a part of our "campaign against godless Communism," Congress even went as far as to have a new motto imprinted on all of our money: "In God We Trust" and they also changed the Pledge of Allegiance to include under God after "One nation" and before "Indivisible."
These latter measures, designed to oppose Communism, have been "reinterpreted" by part of he political spectrum as proof that the United States is a "Christian nation" which I understand means "theocracy."
But it did matter if people were "commies." They lost their jobs and were forced to find other work, usually for a lot less pay. The blacklist didn't end until the 1960s and was a list of people "convicted" mostly on hearsay evidence with no trial.
The creepy thing about Bush is that he was using the same techniques Nixon used against journalists and others perceived to be "enemies." Everyone knows today that Nixon was extremely paranoid. I don't think Bush is paranoid like Nixon, he is just mean, like his mother.
And, with the President of the United States allowed to incarcerate anyone who he declares to be an "enemy combatant," your hatred of Bush, his policies, wars and Constitutional abuse makes you not anti-American as much as an "enemy combatant."
And I use that term, based on the Bush Administration's definition of "returned to the battlefield" applied to released inmates of Gitmo: Anyone who wrote an article or whose lawyer wrote an article or spoke out to describe their captivity was considered having "returned to the battlefield." So, I am assuming you spoke out about your dislike of the past administration.
In order to be a policemen in New York City, you have to pass the exam at the end of a tour through the Police Academy with 60 college credits (a two-year AA degree) with a 2.0 GPA. These guys aren't lawyers.
But that's the NYPD. Kerzic was detained by Amtrak Rent-A-Cops. These guys are just a whiff of respectability up from Mall "cops."
What has happened here is that the Federal Government has now got these guys all jazzed up about the concept of a terrorist attack on trains or train stations and they have created "rules for behavior" that are based on rights deprivation.
The unfortunate fact is that the local police are called upon and "deputized" by the feds (either the Secret Service or some other federal agency) to enforce the unenforceable. So the Amtrak police arrested Kerzic when he refused to comply with an illegal order. So suing Amtrak actually hurts one of the victims.
In this case, it's pretty near impossible to follow the orders up the chain of command to the federal government. Just like it was in the case of the release of the Abu Graib torture photos, the feds who actually made the decisions to promote these actions will create an aura of "deniability" that will last until they are out of office.
We need to prosecute Bush, Cheny, Rumsfeld, Ashcroft and so on for their crimes -- after they leave office. We need to do this for the same reason why we need to prosecute Agusto Pinochet for his crimes against humanity: Pinochet thought and this administration thinks that once one has retired from office, they are free to pursue their lives without fear of any adverse consequences -- save perhaps vilification.
Nixon believed he was above the law. The US Supreme Court disagreed. Now, we have another opportunity to test the maxim that no man is above the law in the United States. We should prosecute so that never again is our Constitution threatened by someone who believes, as Nixon did, that "when the President does something, it's not illegal."
I suppose he should sue. But he should sue for the purpose of exposing the chain of command that set these dogs loose, and not to dismember Amtrak.
The production of a Prius introduces more pollution into the enviroment before its even rolled off the production line than 'gas guzzlers' do during their normal life span.
I note, with interest, the link you provided to me and the rest of the/. readership here in the above statement. So I did some research on my own.
The Toyota Prius, as well as all other hybrids that include those by Ford (which purchased the rights to use Toyota's technology) and GM (which purchased the rights to use Honda's technology) do use more copper than any non-hybrid cars. So if copper mining is what you are talking about, there is an increase in pollution in the creation of these hybrids, but you could say that may be offset by recycling copper as well as the decreased emissions of the vehicle.
So your point really is:"I hate the fact that while you were getting 45-55 miles per gallon last summer when the price of gasoline was $4.00 per gallon in the US and I was paying through the nose for my low-mileage vehicle and I am going to spout some nonsense on/. to make me feel better about that."
Actually, without deregulation, there would have been no ENRON. That company was created in order to take advantage of the new market in de-regulated utilities.
The electric companies are not the government. They only wish they were.
This is why we ought to re-regulate electricity, natural gas and other commodities that used to be regulated. Regulation will promise utility companies a sustainable amount of profit and can require them to update their grid to better support the population.
We are a number of years away from it, but I am thinking that more and smaller local generation of power may solve a lot of problems. Were there decentralized power supplies that used advantages of the location, like wind, water, geothermal, wave action, solar, biomass and so on, we might find that a lot of the problems would be solved much more quickly.
You can use a Toyota Prius to generate power enough to keep essentials operable.
I think that the first thing I would do is figure out what circuit breakers go to essential services (that you need in a cold weather power outage) and carefully label those fuses. Then run the power to your box with only those circuits hot.
This is not something you can just throw together, this is something you should get a licensed electrician to put together for you. The link to the article should tell any electrician what kind of power is coming off the Prius and that should give him ideas about how to set things up.
I highly recommend that your Prius have plenty of gasoline before you set it up as your generator. But this article suggests one person was able to supply his home with three days worth of power on five gallons of gasoline.
Of course you'll have to take the other car to work.
The port isn't really ready for prime time and someone may have seriously "bricked" their iPhone in doing it, but it does prove the concept.
There are also a lot of open source applications for the iPhone that are not available through the App Store from Apple. All you have to do is unlock your iPhone and you're all set. There are also means by which you can disconnect your iPhone from AT&T and "open source" your phone company. Many of the iPhones sold were going to countries that Apple had no relationship with a phone company. Do these iPhones have access to their 3G networks? Do they have full functionality? Perhaps not, but Apple is always happy to sell their stuff.
Apple is very concerned that someone will attack users' iPhones and they have locked it down as much as possible. Macs running earlier System Software (pre OS X) were closed boxes that had lots of innovation and lots of applications written for them. And I don't think that any malicious code, save one that attacked a vulnerability in Microsoft's Visual Basic for Applications, was ever successful on the Mac running the older System.
Apple's lockdown of the iPhone is understandable. I don't appreciate that the lockdown comes complete with no copy or cut and paste from application to application. But the phone does work and the plethora of applications being written for it are enriching the user's experience.
I have understood this outgoing administration to be more than secretive. they're positively paranoid and the only administration in memory that was similar was Nixon. All internal memos have been classified first. Declassification only happens when there is a strong and abiding reason why the memo should be declassified. Contrast that with Clinton, where all internal memos are not classified, unless there was a strong and abiding reason why the memo(s) should be classified.
To say that the Clinton Administration started with a "clean slate" was an understatement. Later, Clinton lawyers ignored the dangers of historical archive deletion when faced with Republican destruction of historical records. Presumably, they wanted a "pass" from future Republican administrations.
Republican administrations tend to be very secretive. Democratic administrations tend to not. I shall expect the Obama administration shall have to purchase all new computers -- or at least hard drives -- in order to simply start up in their first week. This is a horrid waste of taxpayers' money all in the name of whitewashing one's past deeds (for good or ill).
Due to record-keeping, we now know that Nixon did know about the Watergate break-in. And we do know that he was very interested in its coverup. Nobody can be prosecuted at this time for that (those who were found guilty have all ready served their time). I would be very interested to know if Reagan's CIA planted the stacks of AK-47s used as evidence by his administration that the attack on Grenada was justified. And we still do not know everything about the Iran-Contra affair. These historical records are worth keeping because, well after the Statute of Limitations, America gets another look at how an administration dealt with the world.
It is a shame that any Administration is that interested in "rewriting history" in order to unfairly burnish a legacy, which in the case of "W" is hardly salvageable.
Re:Hey, remember when Ender's Game was good?
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Ender in Exile
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· Score: 0, Flamebait
All of Card's writings can be taken out of parts of The Book of Mormon, which makes them very easy to write, as he has obviously plagiarized it for most of his novels and stories.
I shall suppose that the LDS Church doesn't sue him because they enjoy their message being delivered in his writings.
The only characters who seem to succeed in his novels are ones who fit in with basic Mormon tenants. The reviewer notes that he is sparse on science and all scientific advancements come through alien means with a certain supernatural spin. Card is all for the supernatural, as it is the only way of explaining reality to a Mormon.
I don't mean this as a flame or as flamebait. Card is a polished writer who has created a regular group that meets and helps to develop writing skills. I believe he has, too often, been co-opted by the Missionary wing of his religion.
It would appear that much of this discussion is moot. Ron Paul did not win the Presidential election. Barak Obama did.
I don't know what you're trying to say about Pearl Harbor.
The Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor after the United States, in order to try to get the Japanese Empire to halt their invasion of China and as a protest against the wholesale rapine and butchery practiced on the Chinese people, cut off the flow of oil from the United States to Japan. Additionally, the United States (prudently according to some on this side of the Pacific, aggressively, according to the Japanese) began to fortify and strengthen US bases in the Pacific. This is history and anyone who reads it will know these were the factors precipitating Japan's action.
Japan attacked Pearl Harbor and did so without any advance warning or declaration of war or hostilities. Japanese ambassadors then presented the US State Department with a message that they would take preemptive action "in the face of continued US aggression."
The Bush Doctrine justifies the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor (as well as other US outposts n the Pacific) because it states that if we feel threatened that another country could, potentially attack us, we are justified in attacking, rather than using diplomacy or other means to remove the threat. The Japanese attack was, essentially, unprovoked from the standpoint that the United States committed no warlike action against the Empire of Japan. We just embargoed them and increased the quality of the defenses of US bases in the Pacific.
At the time Bush decided to go to war with Iraq, he was demanding regime change, stating that was the only way the US could be satisfied with Iraq. That is a lot like Germany saying that they will cut off relations with us and go to war until or unless we depose a President (and a Congress). I do not believe Bush's demands ought to have been met by any nation, as Iraq had not attacked the US and no agent of theirs did, either.
In the case of Afghanistan, an agent of that government did attack the US and was being harbored and given safe haven in that country. It is very clear that we were provoked to attack Afghanistan and not provoked to attack Iraq.
Government does not grow by itself. Reagan took specific steps to grow the military industrial complex and to increase the size and scope of US military technology, which included cruise missile and "Star Wars" technology. Our system allows the President to veto any bill Congress sends him.
Because when you have to come up with a 50% down-payment for real estate, it stifles the economy. Our post-war boom was partially based on FHA loans.
Bush was encouraging zero percent down mortgages when he ran in 2004. I remarked to friends that those kinds of mortgages would get us into trouble. I lived through the "easy credit" era of the late 1980s and watched the resultant correction that was the Bush I recession.
I am arguing for fiscal prudence in government. And it is fiscally imprudent for governments to ignore the healthcare needs of their citizens, telling them that if they get sick it is their own fault for not planning to get sick. And for those out there who want to single out smokers, I don't smoke. I'm also very healthy. But were I in an accident or if I was to contract something horrible or if I developed cancer, I wouldn't want my government telling me that I had to just succumb to it without any dignity because they didn't think I was, somehow, worthy of any consideration as a citizen.
Hmm. Perhaps they could use Bush's technique of declaring them "enemy combatants," ignoring the Constitution (Writ of Habeus Corpus) and housing them in a "Constitution-Free Zone" like Guantanamo, Cuba.
Those guys aren't Republicans - they're neocons. The party has, unfortunately, left me. They used to defend the Constitution, and its restrictions on government. They used to try to keep government in check, out of people's lives, and focused on the crucial functions of the federal government: national defense and regulation of commerce. Instead, as you say, they are nationalizing the banks, and passing out money to anyone with a little influence or an associate in power.
It's called corruption, and it's not isolated to one party or another, it's spread around equally, like Obama wants to spread the wealth.
But the Republicans, at least in principal if not current practice, are opposed to big, invasive government and interference in people's lives and the free market. The Democratic party seems to be focused on having the government solve everyone's problems. That's certainly laudable, but unfortunately a government that can solve all your problems is also well-positioned to take everything away from you, including your freedom.
You had me there for a minute. Then I realized you are quoting the Reagan rhetoric he was spouting while he was growing government during his administration. That's right, government grew under Reagan. Grew under Bush I as well. And under Bush II, government grew as almost never before and the Constitution was pushed aside. And the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor was justified by the US Government. And now we have a new Bush Doctrine that says that we don't have to respect any country's borders.
Perhaps Ron Paul is the only Republican who actually stands for the same rhetoric that Reagan was spouting while he was growing government. But under Paul, we'd be a bunch of isolationist, protectionists, closing our borders to trade and influence while we become like North Korea, unable to feed ourselves.
Governments create hyper-inflation when they don't pay their bills. People don't create hyper-inflation, save by voting in stupid governments.
My father purchased a 1966 Ford Mustang in 1967 for under $3,000. Today, they list from $19,250 to $31,845. The difference in price for homes is similar. The cost of the car has increased, in part, due to fuel injection, catalytic converter, improved active and passive restraint systems and other safety mechanisms that make many crashes survivable. But a lot of the increase in the cost of the car consists of paying off the deficits incurred in the Vietnam War as well as deficits incurred in paying for Reagan's unprecedented peacetime military buildup, which we did without paying for these costs in real time.
Mark my words. There will come a time in the not-so distant future when one million dollars will not set anyone "up for life." And the reason for this inflation will be the 13 trillion dollar War in Iraq. Economy cars will cost over $60,000. Homes will start at half a million. We will fondly look back to an era where two quarters would actually buy you something.
Republicans and Libertarians would have you believe that this is all due to taxation. In fact they believe all ills are spawned from taxation. Taxation is not the issue here with this kind of inflation. It's excessive non-budgeted spending without any consideration for how the government will pay for the spending.
Clinton had it right. If you lower the national indebtedness, you can pay for government largesse. He had hoped to introduce tax cuts gradually as the national deficit was reduced to a manageable level. Likewise, the Liberal Party in Canada had it right. They balanced their budget for 12 years, and actually ran budget surpluses that they put away for economic downturns. As a result, the Canadian "Loony" Dollar wound up stronger than the US dollar when Bush's war started running high US deficits.
The result of prudent fiscal policy could have paid for Social Security for many years to come and could have served the Baby Boom just as it served the previous generation. As a result, you will see older people with their dignity stripped away while Social Security checks become so much worthless paper.
There is NO such right, because in order for that right to exist, you must STEAL MONEY from your neighbors' weekly paychecks. You do not have a right to commit theft. That's exactly what the Plantation Masters used to do when they made black & white slaves work without pay.
Plantation masters after 1800 exclusively used black slaves but that is not the issue.
Inalienable rights, like life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness suggests dignity. But perhaps that does not convince. What does convince was FDR's New Deal, where he does talk about one's right to dignity. Perhaps you would prefer to go back to the time when you had to save 50% of the value of a home in order to get a mortgage on it? Dignity is what FDR specifically spoke about when he addressed that with the FHA and the new home loan program where you could put down as little as 20% on a mortgage under the new system.
I shall assume you did not live through the Great Depression. I shall assume you have never read what peoples lives were like back then. I shall assume you have never seen 25% unemployment. That's what you would get under John McCain.
Or, perhaps you are a Libertarian, because they talk a lot about how one has to steal from paychecks in order to create some malevolent, malignant government that has its hands in everyone's pockets. Fine, I understand the Libertarian world and do not agree. Libertarians believe we should not have public schools, an Interstate highway system, a national system to track and land commercial planes safely and so on. So next time you take a trip down a federal highway or on a plane, perhaps you could think about how fast and safe your trip is with our malignancy.
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So, let me get this straight:
The International Astronomical Union is made up of a bunch of size queens?!
I'm still using my G4-400 (Sawtooth). I put in a Sonnet 1GHz accelerator and 1.5G of system RAM and it has been good to go.
One dumb thing I did was to install OS X 10.5. That was a big mistake, as it took a lot of the available RAM in my system. I would limit all G4 systems to Tiger unless they can be expanded past 2G of system RAM.
G4s as of last year cannot run the latest software, and I'm thinking of Adobe's CS4 suite as well as the latest version of Final Cut Studio. But Final Cut Pro HD runs fine, and Adobe's CS3 suite of applications is just fine for me.
I love telling Windows fan-boys about how many years of excellent service my Mac has given me. Then I tell them that Macs cost less than Pee Cees because they cost less per year of service.
I have to respectfully disagree with you on the "midrange" idea. Apple did that under Scully and had a panalopy of mis-named models, like Centris, Deforma? Quadro, Hydra? I think it confused the market.
Apple's midrange is the upper-range iMac and the lower-range Mac Pro. And anyone who totes around the 19" laptop and tries to use it on a plane will recognize it as really a midrange desktop replacement with a bit of portability.
I went to the Apple Store today and started parting out a nice Mac Pro. Total cost with the options I wanted? Over $8.000. I could have gone to $10,000 with Apple RAM. Time to get back to work and earn money.
Well I suppose there are lots of corporations that are doing things this way these days -- but they have to. The SEC rules require it and their stockholders expect it. But they don't announce things like this:
Instead, they announce the number of persons who will be let go in the corporation, or the sale of a division, or the shutting of a plant. Then everyone inside the company watches as morale plummets because they are being laid off, their friends are being laid off, or everyone is under threat of being laid off and they're waiting for the other shoe to drop.
I've been there, personally as this nameless broadcasting company went through an annual purge. I survived 9 of them and was out just before Christmas. I was told that they needed to reduce two 40-hour person-weeks from their schedule.
Oh, and the person who laid me off? That was the first time I ever met him.
Classic.
I know a guy who was laid off and actually heard that he was laid off from the press.
He is a many-storied journalist and the bureau he was running was closed down in the annual "cost-cutting" routine performed by a nameless broadcasting company. Since they closed the bureau he was heading up, he retained no access to the company's mail system and could not send anything.
He found out about his layoff from a competitor. I think he's working for them, now.
I find it interesting how this broadcasting company timed these bureau closings: Inevitably it was right before they needed the resources. They closed down their Denver bureau just before the Columbine school shootings. Other bureaus' closings were immediately followed by a major event.
Illegal aliens cannot get welfare. They have to supply a social security card, which is checked to get any entitlements. And some states will license illegal aliens to drive -- it is not the job of a state to do the work of the INS and, for safety reasons, it makes sense to do so.
Maryland and most states actually benefit from illegals. The food on your dinner table is most probably a product of their hard work. The daily work done on a regular basis for cash, under the table, helps support you with all of the necessities you like on a day to day basis, like clean dishes in restaurants, poultry with no feathers on your table, neighbors with clean back yards that are not infested with kudzu or poison ivy...
I'm going to bet your family is not Native American. I'm also going to bet they come from somewhere else than North America. This country was founded and built on people who didn't come from here and you are standing here saying, in effect: "I've got mine, now screw the rest of the world."
As Will Rogers said, "Trouble with Christianity is nobody has tried it yet.
It's interesting. The Wall Street Journal in the 1990s predicted the demise of Apple. I'm still chuckling about the stock purchase I made when I decided that if you broke Apple up into component parts, it would still be worth what WSJ was saying its stock was worth.
I purchased the stock at $14.22.
If only I would have paid attention to the Wall Street Journal. I would have known so much more than I do now.
You don't know me very well. ... Bush committed many illegal acts. I do hope that he and those in his administration that acted illegally, will be prosecuted.
Would "Deep Throat" have been caught if the actions taken in recent history were in place then? No. He was a very careful man. Not surprising, considering he was the Deputy Director of the FBI. ... I don't agree with the blatant disregard for the US Constitution and laws that have been broken by our administration, but I do recognize the fact that some rules are going to be bent for the greater good. On the scale that the laws have been bent and broken, I honestly don't believe a "greater good" has come of it.
If we are going to follow our Constitution and laws, there is no wiggle room. I know precisely how W. Mark Felt "covered his tracks" during the Watergate fracas. He initiated an investigation on who the leak may be and made lots of noise about that. But had the Nixon administration a record of his phone calls and the content of those phone calls to Bernstein and Woodward about when and where they would meet next, Felt would have been cashiered.
In other words, it was Felt's anonymity that allowed him to blow the whistle and Felt knew he had to protect that at all costs.
I lived through the Nixon era and I knew people who were being spied on by the administration. This was an administration that was bent on keeping its secrets and it kept them only slightly less well than did the Bush administration.
Bush went after reporters because of the Valerie Plame leak. And then, when Congress realized that a law was broken when Scooter Libby told the media about the identity of an active CIA agent, the coverup ensued.
But the whole issue was not national security (which was the rationale for Bush's claim of Executive Privilege) it was nasty "I'll-get-you" politics. You cannot rationalize any need for "bending rules" here, but you can clearly see how the Bush administration desperately wanted to monitor the press so that they could anticipate needs to cover things up.
The Abu Ghraib prisoner abuse scandal made things even worse. The Bush administration's policy of allowing (actually promoting) torture of persons in US custody became readily apparent to everyone. The Bush administration immediately classified everything about the prison and the US operation of it and proceeded to perform a very careful "witch hunt" for those low-level soldiers who were involved. The classification was essential to prevent anyone from knowing about Blackwater's involvement as well as military and CIA involvement in this horrid treatment of mostly "average joes" picked up off the streets of Iraqi cities in random sweeps.
The administration was overjoyed by Specialist Lynndie England's involvement as well as her affair with Charles Graner because it added sexual escapades to titillate the press corps while they covered up the "Copper Green" interrogation orders encouraging this kind of abuse by Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld.
So you can see why the Bush administration didn't like the press. They were exposing specific, classified malfeasance of the administration. And this administration was dedicated to winning re-election at all costs.
Again, this is about politics, not national security.
No, I don't know you well. But I like your comments to the /. community and I have read some of what you have written. I have been in the news business for 25 years. As someone whose phone and e-mails may well have been regularly tapped, I feel personally assaulted by an administration bent on keeping the press from reporting the truth of their criminal malfeasance. I don't and won't "give them a pass" "for the greater good."
The UK has their constitution that, apparently, allows for the kinds of cameras everywhere that they have. I would mention that most of those cameras were installed for the purpose of stopping the IRA from setting bombs.
And legality is the real issue here. It is not legal for the Executive branch to violate the Fourth Amendment. And the people they were specifically flagging, apparently, were journalists who were writing things the Bush administration didn't like. Which makes everyone they spoke to or e-mailed a suspect.
Do you think that the Washington Post would have been able to report on the Watergate break-ins and the subsequent coverup had Nixon the ability to spy continuously on everyone Woodward and Bernstein contacted?
A free and unfettered press is the only defense against autocracy. After September 11th, 2001, I told many of my foreign friends that, since we are a nation of laws we would not be tempted to violate our Constitution, there would be no declaration of Martial Law and no suspension of Habeus Corpus. I was proven wrong. While the President did not declare Martial Law or suspend Habeus Corpus in an official proclamation, he did so in action and fact. The framers of our Constitution thought so highly of Habeus Corpus that they did not wait to write an Amendment to the Constitution for that. Instead, that is in the body of the Constitution in Article I Section 9.
As you all ready know, the President violated that regularly and routinely at Gitmo and regularly and repeatedly violated the Fourth Amendment with respect to all US citizens.
Casual comments did get people into trouble. Further up in the discussion about this, I made a comment on the issue of blacklisting back in the 1940s and 1950s. People were blacklisted from their jobs based on just such "casual comments."
The danger is that these violations of the Constitution set a very ominous precedent and that is why the officials involved in these violations should be brought to trial.
The problem with your assertion is that you are assuming that the reporter(s) in question have no sources who would prefer to not be identified. And none of those sources are persons who work within the government and have a desire to whistleblow.
And there is no protection for anyone who may just have a political axe to grind against the government and who happens to say to the reporter, "Someone ought to kill Bush so that we can get back to the days where we had freedom and the USA didn't torture people."
Of course that kind of "casual" comment is just exactly what would put you on the President's List Of People We Will Spy On At All Times, despite the fact that you may have said, just after the first statement, "Only then we would have the Devil Incarnate as President, because Cheny would take over."
Thereupon putting yourself on the Vice President's List Of People We Will Spy On At All Times.
I am being flippant here, but this is a wholesale violation of the Fourth Amendment. Besides, reporters don't work for law enforcement and ought not be forced to do that service, just as lawyers defending you don't work for the Attorney General and just as your CPA does not work for the IRS.
Bush, Cheny and their administration ought to be brought to trial for this wholesale abuse of the Constitution as well as for crimes of torture and violations of the Geneva Conventions, which they have admitted violating.
It can be illegal to carry a lobster smaller than a certain size is illegal. Anything is considered illegal.
The person carrying the illegal lobster did not specifically swear, as Bush did, to "preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States."
Because Bush did so swear, that places him at higher risk of prosecution for his wholesale violation of the Fourth Amendment, which reads:
The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.
One should not confuse a regular citizen with a US government official who is carrying out specific duties and, rather than abiding by the laws of the land he is sworn to uphold, violates them and does so with legal advice prior to those violations.
If I'm pulling up a lobster pot and upon finding an undersized lobster, I choose to wait until I can show it to my daughter onshore (as one we must let go) -- which may be an illegal act -- I don't have a lawyer standing by my side, as Bush did, offering me advice at a moment's notice. Furthermore, I am not charged with prosecuting others for the crime I am committing.
Does it really matter if people were "commies"?
Its just a political ideology, and just like the rest of them, it has good points and bad points. Discriminating, or ruining peoples lives in this case, against people because you don't personally like their opinion is wrong.
Communism, at the time, was equated with Nazism. The US government, driven by hysteria on the part of a few blowhards whose sole purpose is to win re-election by sowing fear (gee, that sounds familiar) worked to make belief in any political ideology short of "Democracy" (we have never had that on a national level in the United States) illegal. As a member of a union I was forced to join (by nature of my work) I had to, in the 1990s sign a paper indicating that I was not a member of the Communist Party or any organization allied with Communism. Everyone who joins a union today still has to sign such a statement.
Frankly, when I signed that statement, I realized it was a direct violation of my rights as a citizen to associate with whom I wish and to believe in what I prefer to believe in.
As a part of our "campaign against godless Communism," Congress even went as far as to have a new motto imprinted on all of our money: "In God We Trust" and they also changed the Pledge of Allegiance to include under God after "One nation" and before "Indivisible."
These latter measures, designed to oppose Communism, have been "reinterpreted" by part of he political spectrum as proof that the United States is a "Christian nation" which I understand means "theocracy."
But it did matter if people were "commies." They lost their jobs and were forced to find other work, usually for a lot less pay. The blacklist didn't end until the 1960s and was a list of people "convicted" mostly on hearsay evidence with no trial.
The creepy thing about Bush is that he was using the same techniques Nixon used against journalists and others perceived to be "enemies." Everyone knows today that Nixon was extremely paranoid. I don't think Bush is paranoid like Nixon, he is just mean, like his mother.
And, with the President of the United States allowed to incarcerate anyone who he declares to be an "enemy combatant," your hatred of Bush, his policies, wars and Constitutional abuse makes you not anti-American as much as an "enemy combatant."
And I use that term, based on the Bush Administration's definition of "returned to the battlefield" applied to released inmates of Gitmo: Anyone who wrote an article or whose lawyer wrote an article or spoke out to describe their captivity was considered having "returned to the battlefield." So, I am assuming you spoke out about your dislike of the past administration.
How does it feel to be an "enemy combatant?"
In order to be a policemen in New York City, you have to pass the exam at the end of a tour through the Police Academy with 60 college credits (a two-year AA degree) with a 2.0 GPA. These guys aren't lawyers.
But that's the NYPD. Kerzic was detained by Amtrak Rent-A-Cops. These guys are just a whiff of respectability up from Mall "cops."
What has happened here is that the Federal Government has now got these guys all jazzed up about the concept of a terrorist attack on trains or train stations and they have created "rules for behavior" that are based on rights deprivation.
The unfortunate fact is that the local police are called upon and "deputized" by the feds (either the Secret Service or some other federal agency) to enforce the unenforceable. So the Amtrak police arrested Kerzic when he refused to comply with an illegal order. So suing Amtrak actually hurts one of the victims.
In this case, it's pretty near impossible to follow the orders up the chain of command to the federal government. Just like it was in the case of the release of the Abu Graib torture photos, the feds who actually made the decisions to promote these actions will create an aura of "deniability" that will last until they are out of office.
We need to prosecute Bush, Cheny, Rumsfeld, Ashcroft and so on for their crimes -- after they leave office. We need to do this for the same reason why we need to prosecute Agusto Pinochet for his crimes against humanity: Pinochet thought and this administration thinks that once one has retired from office, they are free to pursue their lives without fear of any adverse consequences -- save perhaps vilification.
Nixon believed he was above the law. The US Supreme Court disagreed. Now, we have another opportunity to test the maxim that no man is above the law in the United States. We should prosecute so that never again is our Constitution threatened by someone who believes, as Nixon did, that "when the President does something, it's not illegal."
I suppose he should sue. But he should sue for the purpose of exposing the chain of command that set these dogs loose, and not to dismember Amtrak.
The production of a Prius introduces more pollution into the enviroment before its even rolled off the production line than 'gas guzzlers' do during their normal life span.
I note, with interest, the link you provided to me and the rest of the /. readership here in the above statement. So I did some research on my own.
The Toyota Prius, as well as all other hybrids that include those by Ford (which purchased the rights to use Toyota's technology) and GM (which purchased the rights to use Honda's technology) do use more copper than any non-hybrid cars. So if copper mining is what you are talking about, there is an increase in pollution in the creation of these hybrids, but you could say that may be offset by recycling copper as well as the decreased emissions of the vehicle.
Current hybrids are using lead-acid batteries, which in terms of output for weight are inefficient. But Lead-acid batteries have the highest recycling rate of any product sold in the United States. So the batteries, which last around 180,000 miles, don't add significantly to the pollution issue.
So your point really is: "I hate the fact that while you were getting 45-55 miles per gallon last summer when the price of gasoline was $4.00 per gallon in the US and I was paying through the nose for my low-mileage vehicle and I am going to spout some nonsense on /. to make me feel better about that."
I'm simply happy I am not you.
Actually, without deregulation, there would have been no ENRON. That company was created in order to take advantage of the new market in de-regulated utilities.
The electric companies are not the government. They only wish they were.
This is why we ought to re-regulate electricity, natural gas and other commodities that used to be regulated. Regulation will promise utility companies a sustainable amount of profit and can require them to update their grid to better support the population.
We are a number of years away from it, but I am thinking that more and smaller local generation of power may solve a lot of problems. Were there decentralized power supplies that used advantages of the location, like wind, water, geothermal, wave action, solar, biomass and so on, we might find that a lot of the problems would be solved much more quickly.
You can use a Toyota Prius to generate power enough to keep essentials operable.
I think that the first thing I would do is figure out what circuit breakers go to essential services (that you need in a cold weather power outage) and carefully label those fuses. Then run the power to your box with only those circuits hot.
This is not something you can just throw together, this is something you should get a licensed electrician to put together for you. The link to the article should tell any electrician what kind of power is coming off the Prius and that should give him ideas about how to set things up.
I highly recommend that your Prius have plenty of gasoline before you set it up as your generator. But this article suggests one person was able to supply his home with three days worth of power on five gallons of gasoline.
Of course you'll have to take the other car to work.
Linux has been ported to the iPhone all ready. And that was last month.
The port isn't really ready for prime time and someone may have seriously "bricked" their iPhone in doing it, but it does prove the concept.
There are also a lot of open source applications for the iPhone that are not available through the App Store from Apple. All you have to do is unlock your iPhone and you're all set. There are also means by which you can disconnect your iPhone from AT&T and "open source" your phone company. Many of the iPhones sold were going to countries that Apple had no relationship with a phone company. Do these iPhones have access to their 3G networks? Do they have full functionality? Perhaps not, but Apple is always happy to sell their stuff.
Apple is very concerned that someone will attack users' iPhones and they have locked it down as much as possible. Macs running earlier System Software (pre OS X) were closed boxes that had lots of innovation and lots of applications written for them. And I don't think that any malicious code, save one that attacked a vulnerability in Microsoft's Visual Basic for Applications, was ever successful on the Mac running the older System.
Apple's lockdown of the iPhone is understandable. I don't appreciate that the lockdown comes complete with no copy or cut and paste from application to application. But the phone does work and the plethora of applications being written for it are enriching the user's experience.
I have understood this outgoing administration to be more than secretive. they're positively paranoid and the only administration in memory that was similar was Nixon. All internal memos have been classified first. Declassification only happens when there is a strong and abiding reason why the memo should be declassified. Contrast that with Clinton, where all internal memos are not classified, unless there was a strong and abiding reason why the memo(s) should be classified.
When Bush announced that his administration would immediately prepare for a transition (before the 4th of November, which was election day in the US), I assumed that the first course of action was that this Bush administration would do what the last Bush administration did: [Rip] the hard drives out of their computers and tried to erase "sensitive" computer files in the White House and West Wing.
To say that the Clinton Administration started with a "clean slate" was an understatement. Later, Clinton lawyers ignored the dangers of historical archive deletion when faced with Republican destruction of historical records. Presumably, they wanted a "pass" from future Republican administrations.
Republican administrations tend to be very secretive. Democratic administrations tend to not. I shall expect the Obama administration shall have to purchase all new computers -- or at least hard drives -- in order to simply start up in their first week. This is a horrid waste of taxpayers' money all in the name of whitewashing one's past deeds (for good or ill).
Due to record-keeping, we now know that Nixon did know about the Watergate break-in. And we do know that he was very interested in its coverup. Nobody can be prosecuted at this time for that (those who were found guilty have all ready served their time). I would be very interested to know if Reagan's CIA planted the stacks of AK-47s used as evidence by his administration that the attack on Grenada was justified. And we still do not know everything about the Iran-Contra affair. These historical records are worth keeping because, well after the Statute of Limitations, America gets another look at how an administration dealt with the world.
It is a shame that any Administration is that interested in "rewriting history" in order to unfairly burnish a legacy, which in the case of "W" is hardly salvageable.
All of Card's writings can be taken out of parts of The Book of Mormon, which makes them very easy to write, as he has obviously plagiarized it for most of his novels and stories.
I shall suppose that the LDS Church doesn't sue him because they enjoy their message being delivered in his writings.
The only characters who seem to succeed in his novels are ones who fit in with basic Mormon tenants. The reviewer notes that he is sparse on science and all scientific advancements come through alien means with a certain supernatural spin. Card is all for the supernatural, as it is the only way of explaining reality to a Mormon.
I don't mean this as a flame or as flamebait. Card is a polished writer who has created a regular group that meets and helps to develop writing skills. I believe he has, too often, been co-opted by the Missionary wing of his religion.
It would appear that much of this discussion is moot. Ron Paul did not win the Presidential election. Barak Obama did.
I don't know what you're trying to say about Pearl Harbor.
The Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor after the United States, in order to try to get the Japanese Empire to halt their invasion of China and as a protest against the wholesale rapine and butchery practiced on the Chinese people, cut off the flow of oil from the United States to Japan. Additionally, the United States (prudently according to some on this side of the Pacific, aggressively, according to the Japanese) began to fortify and strengthen US bases in the Pacific. This is history and anyone who reads it will know these were the factors precipitating Japan's action.
Japan attacked Pearl Harbor and did so without any advance warning or declaration of war or hostilities. Japanese ambassadors then presented the US State Department with a message that they would take preemptive action "in the face of continued US aggression."
The Bush Doctrine justifies the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor (as well as other US outposts n the Pacific) because it states that if we feel threatened that another country could, potentially attack us, we are justified in attacking, rather than using diplomacy or other means to remove the threat. The Japanese attack was, essentially, unprovoked from the standpoint that the United States committed no warlike action against the Empire of Japan. We just embargoed them and increased the quality of the defenses of US bases in the Pacific.
At the time Bush decided to go to war with Iraq, he was demanding regime change, stating that was the only way the US could be satisfied with Iraq. That is a lot like Germany saying that they will cut off relations with us and go to war until or unless we depose a President (and a Congress). I do not believe Bush's demands ought to have been met by any nation, as Iraq had not attacked the US and no agent of theirs did, either.
In the case of Afghanistan, an agent of that government did attack the US and was being harbored and given safe haven in that country. It is very clear that we were provoked to attack Afghanistan and not provoked to attack Iraq.
Government does not grow by itself. Reagan took specific steps to grow the military industrial complex and to increase the size and scope of US military technology, which included cruise missile and "Star Wars" technology. Our system allows the President to veto any bill Congress sends him.
Because when you have to come up with a 50% down-payment for real estate, it stifles the economy. Our post-war boom was partially based on FHA loans.
Bush was encouraging zero percent down mortgages when he ran in 2004. I remarked to friends that those kinds of mortgages would get us into trouble. I lived through the "easy credit" era of the late 1980s and watched the resultant correction that was the Bush I recession.
I am arguing for fiscal prudence in government. And it is fiscally imprudent for governments to ignore the healthcare needs of their citizens, telling them that if they get sick it is their own fault for not planning to get sick. And for those out there who want to single out smokers, I don't smoke. I'm also very healthy. But were I in an accident or if I was to contract something horrible or if I developed cancer, I wouldn't want my government telling me that I had to just succumb to it without any dignity because they didn't think I was, somehow, worthy of any consideration as a citizen.
Outlaw the Republican Party...
Hmm. Perhaps they could use Bush's technique of declaring them "enemy combatants," ignoring the Constitution (Writ of Habeus Corpus) and housing them in a "Constitution-Free Zone" like Guantanamo, Cuba.
Oh, wait. That's all ready been tried.
Those guys aren't Republicans - they're neocons. The party has, unfortunately, left me. They used to defend the Constitution, and its restrictions on government. They used to try to keep government in check, out of people's lives, and focused on the crucial functions of the federal government: national defense and regulation of commerce. Instead, as you say, they are nationalizing the banks, and passing out money to anyone with a little influence or an associate in power.
It's called corruption, and it's not isolated to one party or another, it's spread around equally, like Obama wants to spread the wealth.
But the Republicans, at least in principal if not current practice, are opposed to big, invasive government and interference in people's lives and the free market. The Democratic party seems to be focused on having the government solve everyone's problems. That's certainly laudable, but unfortunately a government that can solve all your problems is also well-positioned to take everything away from you, including your freedom.
You had me there for a minute. Then I realized you are quoting the Reagan rhetoric he was spouting while he was growing government during his administration. That's right, government grew under Reagan. Grew under Bush I as well. And under Bush II, government grew as almost never before and the Constitution was pushed aside. And the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor was justified by the US Government. And now we have a new Bush Doctrine that says that we don't have to respect any country's borders.
Perhaps Ron Paul is the only Republican who actually stands for the same rhetoric that Reagan was spouting while he was growing government. But under Paul, we'd be a bunch of isolationist, protectionists, closing our borders to trade and influence while we become like North Korea, unable to feed ourselves.
Governments create hyper-inflation when they don't pay their bills. People don't create hyper-inflation, save by voting in stupid governments.
My father purchased a 1966 Ford Mustang in 1967 for under $3,000. Today, they list from $19,250 to $31,845. The difference in price for homes is similar. The cost of the car has increased, in part, due to fuel injection, catalytic converter, improved active and passive restraint systems and other safety mechanisms that make many crashes survivable. But a lot of the increase in the cost of the car consists of paying off the deficits incurred in the Vietnam War as well as deficits incurred in paying for Reagan's unprecedented peacetime military buildup, which we did without paying for these costs in real time.
Mark my words. There will come a time in the not-so distant future when one million dollars will not set anyone "up for life." And the reason for this inflation will be the 13 trillion dollar War in Iraq. Economy cars will cost over $60,000. Homes will start at half a million. We will fondly look back to an era where two quarters would actually buy you something.
Republicans and Libertarians would have you believe that this is all due to taxation. In fact they believe all ills are spawned from taxation. Taxation is not the issue here with this kind of inflation. It's excessive non-budgeted spending without any consideration for how the government will pay for the spending.
Clinton had it right. If you lower the national indebtedness, you can pay for government largesse. He had hoped to introduce tax cuts gradually as the national deficit was reduced to a manageable level. Likewise, the Liberal Party in Canada had it right. They balanced their budget for 12 years, and actually ran budget surpluses that they put away for economic downturns. As a result, the Canadian "Loony" Dollar wound up stronger than the US dollar when Bush's war started running high US deficits.
The result of prudent fiscal policy could have paid for Social Security for many years to come and could have served the Baby Boom just as it served the previous generation. As a result, you will see older people with their dignity stripped away while Social Security checks become so much worthless paper.
There is NO such right, because in order for that right to exist, you must STEAL MONEY from your neighbors' weekly paychecks. You do not have a right to commit theft. That's exactly what the Plantation Masters used to do when they made black & white slaves work without pay.
Plantation masters after 1800 exclusively used black slaves but that is not the issue.
Inalienable rights, like life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness suggests dignity. But perhaps that does not convince. What does convince was FDR's New Deal, where he does talk about one's right to dignity. Perhaps you would prefer to go back to the time when you had to save 50% of the value of a home in order to get a mortgage on it? Dignity is what FDR specifically spoke about when he addressed that with the FHA and the new home loan program where you could put down as little as 20% on a mortgage under the new system.
I shall assume you did not live through the Great Depression. I shall assume you have never read what peoples lives were like back then. I shall assume you have never seen 25% unemployment. That's what you would get under John McCain.
Or, perhaps you are a Libertarian, because they talk a lot about how one has to steal from paychecks in order to create some malevolent, malignant government that has its hands in everyone's pockets. Fine, I understand the Libertarian world and do not agree. Libertarians believe we should not have public schools, an Interstate highway system, a national system to track and land commercial planes safely and so on. So next time you take a trip down a federal highway or on a plane, perhaps you could think about how fast and safe your trip is with our malignancy.