Even the biggest fools who have ever taken the time to study the history of Wall Street will recognize the assumption that there won't be any outright fraud, dishonest, or breach of contracts is a rather big assumption.
So, you're saying that because there will be a non-zero amount of fraud, etc, that regular people need to be kept out and only the rich and connected, bankers, corporations, and the government should be allowed the chance to invest their own money and choose their own risks as they see fit?
By the way, less regulation =/= no regulation, stop with the strawman. I plainly specified in my first sentence the assumption of sufficient regulation & oversight to ensure a relatively fair and honest market as such things go. Nothing is perfect.
Keeping people from participating in one of the major ways to grow capital that way smacks of class warfare against the poor & middle classes. It prevents them from being able to judge their own risks, use their savvy & cunning, and grow their money in the same way those who are in the "1%" do, and many times did to get into that 1% in the first place.
It's another obstacle placed in the way of the lower classes to keep upwards-migration to a manageable (for the rich/powerful in business and government) minimum, and thus maintain the status-quot.
Sometimes I think that there may be people in government working towards this as a way to somehow seize power & control, and that they imagine that they will somehow be able to tame the mobs and use them to their personal ends.
What makes mob rule so much worse then a rule of corrupt politicians?
Well, that's sort of the point, then, isn't it?
First, citizens allow government size and power to grow which results in corruption, then the mob rises up and kills the corrupt politicians and cronies, then the mob's attentions run wherever the mob-rage of the moment takes them. That's been the historical pattern.
And yet, many people are screaming to expand the size and power of the government even more, resulting in corruption becoming correspondingly worse, and bringing on the mobs and widespread violent atrocities even sooner and increasing their levels of hatred.
Sometimes I think that there may be people in government working towards this as a way to somehow seize power & control, and that they will somehow be able to tame the mobs and use them to their personal ends. They are fools, as have been many through history who have attempted similar machinations.
Once the mobs and violence starts, they and their plans will be one of the very first casualties, and the mobs won't stop until they satisfy their rage & hatred, which has been stoked for over 50 years now by politicians seeking more power, wealth, and control. It will not die out in a handful of weeks or months...or possibly even years or decades.
For many people, even that amount will cause serious problems...
That may be true, but beyond assuring there is no outright fraud or dishonest dealing and/or breach of agreements/contracts, what freaking business is it of the government whether I invest my wealth wisely or unwisely?
The same logic would dictate that individuals & households should have weekly/monthly/yearly budgets & financial planning performed by the government as well, particularly for the poor, as they're typically the ones with the worst wealth-management skills.
Heck, just have the government own and run all financial/wealth/investment both corporate/business & personal. After all, I guess only the government is smart enough to run your life and the nation's economy, and we wouldn't want anyone to suffer because of their poor choices.
No, the corporations that own the federal government are more of a threat.
Well, if corporations and other wealthy interests seek to control the powers of government as they always have and always will seek to do, then why the hell are we sweetening the pot for them by making the target (government) an even juicier plum for those interests by making it larger and more powerful, with ever-growing control over the behavior of common citizens, and controlling ever-growing percentage of the nation's wealth, and with even deeper levels of bureaucratic obfuscation in which to hide bad deeds and their perpetrators?
I mean, it's not like passing laws/Acts or forming oversight committees will ever change basic human behavior. People have always and will always seek to influence/corrupt government as long as government has enough power to be an attractive target, and is large enough that being caught-out and punished is more unlikely than likely.
Why is it that those that appear to be most vocally upset by the corruption in their government persist in insisting on making it more certain that corruption will increase in both depth & breadth by making it increasingly easy to hide and providing an increasingly-attractive target by making government increasingly larger and more powerful?
It's like being upset with being mugged, so you carry more cash and valuables, walk down more dark & deserted alleyways, post your route on FB/Twitter, and give the muggers bigger guns and better masks.
if democracy could change things, it would be outlawed.
And yet, quite strangely it would seem, many that share your opinion want a larger, more powerful government.
Not saying you, personally, do. I just find it to be a major reality-disconnect when people who complain about the government expanding it's powers, spying on the domestic populace, commonly employing military-style strike teams on individual civilians not convicted or suspected of a major/violent crime, and taking away their rights and abusing them in general, turn right around and vote for those politicians and laws/policies that give the government even more power and ability to control their lives and screw them over even worse than they currently are in "new and improved" ways.
By the way, pure democracy is nothing but mob rule, and woe to those in the minority. I wouldn't want to live someplace that practiced pure democracy. It wouldn't take long for it to collapse at any rate, and likely in a very violent way.
Them Tennessee hicks are a bunch of Johnny-come-latelies when it comes to making their school children stupid as a matter of policy.
Yeah, thank goodness we have the shining examples of Detroit, LA, and NYC public school systems to show those "hicks" what a real, sophisticated education system is!
No, I don't believe in a 4,000-year-old Earth (6,000? I dunno the exact claims) or that man sprang into being in modern form with a wave of God's hand. Now, I'm not sure (and neither can anyone else be sure) what caused the Big Bang, what exactly "banged" and where it came from, or who/what created it in the first place. Insufficient data. God? Aliens from another universe? The Giant Panda-King Of The Known Multiverse? Who knows?
That being said, I don't think you come off well dumping on the entire TN population and school system. People in glass houses and all.
But my preference would be to expand it, getting rid of the state education departments, have it directly regulate local, give it massive funding and have a European style education system.
Really? You're for a one-size-fits-all education system in the US with it's wide ethnic, economic, and social differences across the nation? I'm afraid we'll have to agree to disagree. I'm against centralizing government power for all but essential national functions like defense and international treaties, relations, and negotiations. History has shown over and over that the more power a central government has, the more corrupt it will become, and the less personal liberty there will be.
Try paying some kid to mow your lawn, shovel your driveway, dig a ditch without cash.
Easy!
Pull out your smartphone, scan the kid's universal citizen barcode tattooed on his forearm, scan your universal citizen barcode, and voila! The kid gets paid, and you get an electronic court summons to face charges for employing an underage worker.
Oh, we're not there yet? Just wait. It won't be long now.
Not to mention the real reasons Citizens want cash (easily accessible, accepted everywhere and untrackable) - so they can loan money, barter/trade goods without tax burden (yard sales, craigslist, etc), gamble/wager or anything else you can imagine.
Criminals! Tax cheats! They must all be thrown in prison! Cash==criminal! How dare they expect their government to honor individual privacy when there's a possibility for the government to confiscate even more in taxes than it already does (and then wastes most of what it already collects, then borrows more, and wastes that too).
Besides, the private prison companies need more inmates to contract out as cheap labor. Gotta keep up with China & Indonesia! The US is suffering a prison-labor gap!
I like how we're talking about the activities of a private corporation and somehow you turn the discussion toward how "government is bad, m'kay"?
--Jeremy
Private corporations these days gain power by "capturing" the powers held by politicians and government bureaucracies. If the politicians and government bureaucracies didn't have so much power, private corporations wouldn't bother bribing/lobbying them.
That's the whole idea behind a decentralized government with only a weak national government and most power divided up between the States, cities, towns, counties, etc. In order for some entity to use it's power to influence policies/laws/regulations nationwide, it would have to bribe/lobby/blackmail thousands across the nation...politicians, regulators, and legislators in every State, county, and town, instead of simply buying off a powerful handful in Washington DC, while being able to keep it relatively quiet.
A strong central government with great power is simply a one-stop-shop for those who desire to corrupt the government.
So, you're going to ignore the ever-more totalitarian government policies and legislation [list of technical restrictions]
As a trade off to have 1/3rd of the planet that used to be subject to imprisonment without trial, no property rights at all.... Yes I think those things are comparatively minor.
You must not read much. Both the US and the UK can "disappear" people. Read up on the US recent passage of the NDAA (National Defense Authorization Act). As for property rights, see the SCOTUS' Kelo decision.
the emergence of domestic civilian drone surveillance,
A generation ago the FBI and police departments were running active domestic spying campaigns in US organizations.
Now, they no longer restrict spying to certain organizations. They want to put the entire population under surveillance, and the new drone tech allows them to achieve this with much, much less manpower required, and thanks to legislation and SCOTUS decisions, less oversight. See also: National Security Letters. You're not even allowed to inform your lawyer in order to contest the government's actions.
Things like government environmental protection departments seizing private property and also dictating what activities may occur upon private property?
The government did that far more a generation ago, and multiple departments like labor were involved. As for dictating what activities may occur on private property that has always been US policy. They are much less restrictive (overall) than they used to be.
Citation? By whose measure? Waving your hands about does not make it so.
The effective outlawing of the ability to change or modify your own property (game consoles)?
I'm not sure that it is illegal to modify a game console. If it is... oh well, game consoles are likely far more free than a generation ago regardless of restrictions.
Yeah, tell that to Geohot and the hundreds of others prosecuted for installing/making mod chips and other such nonsense. You again make claims without any logical argument, citation, or examples, despite numerous counterexamples to your claims.
Unless you're willing to agree on a common reality upon which to base a discussion, this one is over. Arguing against a bunch of hand-waving is a waste of time.
What does that have to do with the Federal Department of education. They don't establish curriculum, nor certify teachers, nor determine teacher competency... Until no child left behind they had almost no involvement other than feeding kids, providing school boards with resources and making sure schools were integrated.
Great! Then you're on-board with eliminating the DoE, since it doesn't do much, right?
The erosion of property/ownership rights is to be expected, given the ever-more totalitarian direction of many, if not most Western governments
What are you talking about. The totalitarian government of eastern europe are gone. The harsher elements of state socialism in most of western governments is gone. Property / ownership policies all over the world are much stronger than a generation ago. There is no erosion.
So, you're going to ignore the ever-more totalitarian government policies and legislation that enables the taking-down of websites and web services without due process, the restrictions on free speech, the loss of basic rights in being scanned & searched at airports, the emergence of domestic civilian drone surveillance, and a thousand other examples of the erosion of individual rights? Things like government environmental protection departments seizing private property and also dictating what activities may occur upon private property? The effective outlawing of the ability to change or modify your own property (game consoles)?
Burying one's head in the sand and going "LA LA LA LA I can't hear you!" doesn't make things like the loss of individual freedoms go away.
Thanks to the Federal Government and it's education policies, they've already managed to drastically lower literacy rates
There has been no lowering of literacy rates in the USA. Further the federal government's main education policy for the last generation as been to provide subsidized food to children from poor homes so they have absorbed enough nutrition to learn.
The problems with US education are substantial, but the federal government isn't heavily involved.
If you are incapable of seeing the decline in the level of scholastic skills & competency of US H.S. graduates since the Federal Dept of Education was created/formed in 1979, then you're simply refusing to see a problem either because you haven't cared to look, or it's inconveniently inconsistent with your political biases. Or both.
The more government has become involved with education, the worse it's gotten, and unfortunately, there are too many people in government for whom such involvement enriches them personally, either financially or in terms of personal power and ability to promote an ideological agenda.
In fact, society at large is going down this passive-aggressive path when it comes to rights and it is a big problem if one cares for personal liberty, not just politically, but also in terms of what one may do with his property and existence.
The erosion of property/ownership rights is to be expected, given the ever-more totalitarian direction of many, if not most Western governments, the US being one of the most glaring examples, as the US started out long ago with relatively much more personal liberty.
History shows that where governments remove personal liberty, property and ownership rights are one of the first rights to be weakened/removed. History also shows that these encroachments typically occur gradually until a tipping-point is reached, which then results in either the citizens overthrowing the government or the government winning and taking total, violent, control.
The other thing is that, most notably in the US, the government is getting very paranoid about people having what they might consider "dual-use" skills.
For instance, the guy that has an electronics workbench visible from his front door can get himself thoroughly questioned by police as if he were a possible terrorist/bomber/meth-lab-operator, (yes, they asked specific questions about all three possibilities, AND entered the apartment and examined the bench against protests) with hands on weapons in unsnapped holsters, that just happened to come to the door about something entirely unrelated and nonthreatening, and saw wires and parts and strange electronics test equipment. Yes, that was me. I build vacuum-tube guitar amps. Apparently, loud guitar amps must be a domestic security concern. Who knew?
Rocketry, chemistry, and other hobbies and activities have also seen pressure from government. Maybe they hope that by the time they pull the curtain back on the new, officially-Fascist USA, we'll be too stupid to make roadside bombs or devise means to securely communicate & organize. Thanks to the Federal Government and it's education policies, they've already managed to drastically lower literacy rates and other scholastic skill levels over the past ~50 years. Illiterate & unskilled, people become totally dependent on, and at the mercy of, government.
Of course, you know that the next step will be to only allow encrypted connections and VPNs to white-listed addresses/domains, right?
After all, we *must* be protected from terrorism, child-porn, and file-sharing, and especially against individuals having the ability to promote themselves and share their music/video/news/software/inventions/ideologies all unrestricted, without going through "proper" corporate & government/political channels and filters, so as to restrict/halt the spread of "dangerous" ideas, identify the individuals responsible and imprison/kill them, while also maintaining/extending control over media/content/entertainment/news distribution, and extract wealth.
What would the world come to if people could exchange ideas freely? Corporations would fall!! Governments would be changed!! It's already happened to some extent. They (corporations and governments) see this as an existential threat to their continued existence and accustomed lifestyle.
There *will* be blood shed over these issues before all is said & done. Governments and corporations will not go quietly into the night, and they view a free and open internet as one of the greatest threats they've ever known. When push comes to shove, they will be (and have been) ruthless. They will not play by any rules, laws, or set of morals once the gloves come off.
Gee, thanks for your concern for the condition of my small arms, but I assure you they are secure, well supplied, well taken care of, and most have a low-maintenance matte finish or coating for low reflection and harsh environments!
It's good to see a counter-example to the typical knee-jerk stereotyping and ad hominem attacks from Progressives and others on the Left. Your tolerant and inclusive attitude and empathic dialog is to be commended, sir!
So much government that it's costs cripple people & business while killing our competitiveness in a world economy? Enough government to track everyone & everything?
If all we paid for with our taxes was "civilization", we could do away with the Federal income tax and cut most state taxes to nearly zero.
I think we're well past the point of "paying for civilization", and we are and have been, especially in the last several decades, paying for our own enslavement. Paying to pass and enforce so many laws and regulations that no person is innocent, as there is no way to live without breaking some obscure law or regulation, so therefor the government can "crack down" on practically anyone it cares to for whatever reason it desires.
You'll excuse me if I don't share your enthusiasm for paying the costs for my own enslavement. If I can find a way to avoid having the fruits of my labor stolen to pay for the police state, I'm all for it. If the Federal Government wants to pay to put shrimp on treadmills, they can do without a domestic surveillance drone or two instead of raping the public...again.
no need for that, take a galois LFRPRNG [wikipedia.org] (a pseudo random number generator with a period of (2^n) -1), share the init vector and the polynomial expression in person with your mates, use that stream as an OTP. If it is good enough for the military it is good enought for us !
Bah!
Just stick the leads to the RNG in a nice, piping-hot cup of tea and let the Brownian motion take care of the rest! [warning: HHGTTG reference]
The part I found interesting in TFS (yes, it's/. and I know reading it is unpossible) was; "The company says it is 'working through the rebuild of the satellite tapping into the resources that were involved in the original program.' "
Who here in the US feels another taxpayer-reaming coming up?
I wish the government, if it has to be involved in somehow assisting/subsidizing/granting the areas of technology/green energy/space/etc would stop just freaking handing out money to people, usually with political donors/backers somewhere in the mix, instead of setting up a results-oriented reward system. This crap happens regardless of party, year after year. Everybody knows it's corrupt, but no politician or party will stop it.
There needs to be some kind of vetting system where those who want money from our pockets must first produce/create/design a practical working example to a predetermined state of capability, sophistication, and reliability in order to earn ANY taxpayer funds. DARPA has done some exploring here and had some success, of course there's the X Prize Foundation and other such organizations and private-sector backers as well, but there needs to be more of that work-before-reward thinking applied across more of the systems through which the government subsidizes private entities with taxpayer money and procures goods and services.
The way it is with government funding/grants/contracts now is nothing more than a money pump taking from our pockets and going into political donor's/backer's and politician's and their operative's pockets, with only a small fraction trickling down to just barely keep the doors (mostly) open on the actual program/activity/research being funded or maintain standards and/or delivery/completion dates for goods/services being procured/contracted for.
Yes, the politicians of both parties think we're stupid. Yes, the politicians of both parties want to strip people of Constitutional rights and protections. They know they're right on the former because we let them get away with the latter. They make laws against guns when the 2nd Amendment plainly says the right to bear arms "shall not be infringed". The Supreme Court rules that your town can take your land and give it to some other citizen that will pay the town more in taxes. Yet, there are no enormous angry mobs ready to burn DC Federal/Government buildings to the ground and hang the scoundrels inside.
This is the kind of thing that must happen from time to time with any national government in order for people to keep their freedom in the face of a growing, and therefor increasingly corrupt, government. The US has actually done pretty well in that it has only had one major civil war in some ~230 years. The downside is that the government has grown wildly out of control, the government is surviving on borrowed money and money-printing, the economy is near collapse, unemployment is high, and the nation is on the fast-track to an Orwellian police state that tries to tell you how much salt you may eat meanwhile sending heavily-armed paramilitary teams on raids into Gibson Guitars and to organic food markets, as well as raiding residential homes of people convicted of no crime, shooting family pets and family members. Heck one team I saw on YT killed a young child in a raid by tossing a flash-bang through a window right onto the young child laying on a couch by the window.
And still, nobody does shit.
We deserve a real nightmare-worthy police state. Maybe, in a generation or ten, or fifty, our descendants might one day win back their freedom. Hopefully, their disgust and anger at our apathy and the fresh memories of atrocities and oppression will keep them freer for longer than they did us.
Slashdot Mirror
Even the biggest fools who have ever taken the time to study the history of Wall Street will recognize the assumption that there won't be any outright fraud, dishonest, or breach of contracts is a rather big assumption.
So, you're saying that because there will be a non-zero amount of fraud, etc, that regular people need to be kept out and only the rich and connected, bankers, corporations, and the government should be allowed the chance to invest their own money and choose their own risks as they see fit?
By the way, less regulation =/= no regulation, stop with the strawman. I plainly specified in my first sentence the assumption of sufficient regulation & oversight to ensure a relatively fair and honest market as such things go. Nothing is perfect.
Keeping people from participating in one of the major ways to grow capital that way smacks of class warfare against the poor & middle classes. It prevents them from being able to judge their own risks, use their savvy & cunning, and grow their money in the same way those who are in the "1%" do, and many times did to get into that 1% in the first place.
It's another obstacle placed in the way of the lower classes to keep upwards-migration to a manageable (for the rich/powerful in business and government) minimum, and thus maintain the status-quot.
Strat
Crap!
Sometimes I think that there may be people in government working towards this as a way to somehow seize power & control, and that they imagine that they will somehow be able to tame the mobs and use them to their personal ends.
Sorry.
What makes mob rule so much worse then a rule of corrupt politicians?
Well, that's sort of the point, then, isn't it?
First, citizens allow government size and power to grow which results in corruption, then the mob rises up and kills the corrupt politicians and cronies, then the mob's attentions run wherever the mob-rage of the moment takes them. That's been the historical pattern.
And yet, many people are screaming to expand the size and power of the government even more, resulting in corruption becoming correspondingly worse, and bringing on the mobs and widespread violent atrocities even sooner and increasing their levels of hatred.
Sometimes I think that there may be people in government working towards this as a way to somehow seize power & control, and that they will somehow be able to tame the mobs and use them to their personal ends. They are fools, as have been many through history who have attempted similar machinations.
Once the mobs and violence starts, they and their plans will be one of the very first casualties, and the mobs won't stop until they satisfy their rage & hatred, which has been stoked for over 50 years now by politicians seeking more power, wealth, and control. It will not die out in a handful of weeks or months...or possibly even years or decades.
Strat
For many people, even that amount will cause serious problems...
That may be true, but beyond assuring there is no outright fraud or dishonest dealing and/or breach of agreements/contracts, what freaking business is it of the government whether I invest my wealth wisely or unwisely?
The same logic would dictate that individuals & households should have weekly/monthly/yearly budgets & financial planning performed by the government as well, particularly for the poor, as they're typically the ones with the worst wealth-management skills.
Heck, just have the government own and run all financial/wealth/investment both corporate/business & personal. After all, I guess only the government is smart enough to run your life and the nation's economy, and we wouldn't want anyone to suffer because of their poor choices.
Man, we're hosed.
Strat
No, the corporations that own the federal government are more of a threat.
Well, if corporations and other wealthy interests seek to control the powers of government as they always have and always will seek to do, then why the hell are we sweetening the pot for them by making the target (government) an even juicier plum for those interests by making it larger and more powerful, with ever-growing control over the behavior of common citizens, and controlling ever-growing percentage of the nation's wealth, and with even deeper levels of bureaucratic obfuscation in which to hide bad deeds and their perpetrators?
I mean, it's not like passing laws/Acts or forming oversight committees will ever change basic human behavior. People have always and will always seek to influence/corrupt government as long as government has enough power to be an attractive target, and is large enough that being caught-out and punished is more unlikely than likely.
Why is it that those that appear to be most vocally upset by the corruption in their government persist in insisting on making it more certain that corruption will increase in both depth & breadth by making it increasingly easy to hide and providing an increasingly-attractive target by making government increasingly larger and more powerful?
It's like being upset with being mugged, so you carry more cash and valuables, walk down more dark & deserted alleyways, post your route on FB/Twitter, and give the muggers bigger guns and better masks.
Silly humans.
Strat
Actually, they never were.
if democracy could change things, it would be outlawed.
And yet, quite strangely it would seem, many that share your opinion want a larger, more powerful government.
Not saying you, personally, do. I just find it to be a major reality-disconnect when people who complain about the government expanding it's powers, spying on the domestic populace, commonly employing military-style strike teams on individual civilians not convicted or suspected of a major/violent crime, and taking away their rights and abusing them in general, turn right around and vote for those politicians and laws/policies that give the government even more power and ability to control their lives and screw them over even worse than they currently are in "new and improved" ways.
By the way, pure democracy is nothing but mob rule, and woe to those in the minority. I wouldn't want to live someplace that practiced pure democracy. It wouldn't take long for it to collapse at any rate, and likely in a very violent way.
Strat
Them Tennessee hicks are a bunch of Johnny-come-latelies when it comes to making their school children stupid as a matter of policy.
Yeah, thank goodness we have the shining examples of Detroit, LA, and NYC public school systems to show those "hicks" what a real, sophisticated education system is!
http://i62.photobucket.com/albums/h103/stratman_el84/Junk/detro.jpg
No, I don't believe in a 4,000-year-old Earth (6,000? I dunno the exact claims) or that man sprang into being in modern form with a wave of God's hand. Now, I'm not sure (and neither can anyone else be sure) what caused the Big Bang, what exactly "banged" and where it came from, or who/what created it in the first place. Insufficient data. God? Aliens from another universe? The Giant Panda-King Of The Known Multiverse? Who knows?
That being said, I don't think you come off well dumping on the entire TN population and school system. People in glass houses and all.
Strat
A General lying about his intentions to the enemy?
Say it ain't so!
The problem here is that the US Government seems to regard it's citizens as "the enemy".
Strat
But my preference would be to expand it, getting rid of the state education departments, have it directly regulate local, give it massive funding and have a European style education system.
Really? You're for a one-size-fits-all education system in the US with it's wide ethnic, economic, and social differences across the nation? I'm afraid we'll have to agree to disagree. I'm against centralizing government power for all but essential national functions like defense and international treaties, relations, and negotiations. History has shown over and over that the more power a central government has, the more corrupt it will become, and the less personal liberty there will be.
Strat
Don't worry, Google's working on a birth control ray to come standard with Android's next release.
Nah, Google contracted the birth-control-ray-thing out to the TSA.
They've already got a "leg up", so to speak.
Strat
After playing Super Mario Brothers, I can't even see a mushroom without stomping on it. I can't go to the supermarket, restaurants, it's hell!
I think these congressmen (and most Federal officials and politicians, it seems) have been smoking their mushrooms, not stomping them.
Strat
Try paying some kid to mow your lawn, shovel your driveway, dig a ditch without cash.
Easy!
Pull out your smartphone, scan the kid's universal citizen barcode tattooed on his forearm, scan your universal citizen barcode, and voila! The kid gets paid, and you get an electronic court summons to face charges for employing an underage worker.
Oh, we're not there yet? Just wait. It won't be long now.
Not to mention the real reasons Citizens want cash (easily accessible, accepted everywhere and untrackable) - so they can loan money, barter/trade goods without tax burden (yard sales, craigslist, etc), gamble/wager or anything else you can imagine.
Criminals! Tax cheats! They must all be thrown in prison! Cash==criminal! How dare they expect their government to honor individual privacy when there's a possibility for the government to confiscate even more in taxes than it already does (and then wastes most of what it already collects, then borrows more, and wastes that too).
Besides, the private prison companies need more inmates to contract out as cheap labor. Gotta keep up with China & Indonesia! The US is suffering a prison-labor gap!
Strat
I like how we're talking about the activities of a private corporation and somehow you turn the discussion toward how "government is bad, m'kay"?
--Jeremy
Private corporations these days gain power by "capturing" the powers held by politicians and government bureaucracies. If the politicians and government bureaucracies didn't have so much power, private corporations wouldn't bother bribing/lobbying them.
That's the whole idea behind a decentralized government with only a weak national government and most power divided up between the States, cities, towns, counties, etc. In order for some entity to use it's power to influence policies/laws/regulations nationwide, it would have to bribe/lobby/blackmail thousands across the nation...politicians, regulators, and legislators in every State, county, and town, instead of simply buying off a powerful handful in Washington DC, while being able to keep it relatively quiet.
A strong central government with great power is simply a one-stop-shop for those who desire to corrupt the government.
Strat
You must not read much. Both the US and the UK can "disappear" people. Read up on the US recent passage of the NDAA (National Defense Authorization Act). As for property rights, see the SCOTUS' Kelo decision.
Now, they no longer restrict spying to certain organizations. They want to put the entire population under surveillance, and the new drone tech allows them to achieve this with much, much less manpower required, and thanks to legislation and SCOTUS decisions, less oversight. See also: National Security Letters. You're not even allowed to inform your lawyer in order to contest the government's actions.
Citation? By whose measure? Waving your hands about does not make it so.
Yeah, tell that to Geohot and the hundreds of others prosecuted for installing/making mod chips and other such nonsense. You again make claims without any logical argument, citation, or examples, despite numerous counterexamples to your claims.
Unless you're willing to agree on a common reality upon which to base a discussion, this one is over. Arguing against a bunch of hand-waving is a waste of time.
Strat
What does that have to do with the Federal Department of education. They don't establish curriculum, nor certify teachers, nor determine teacher competency... Until no child left behind they had almost no involvement other than feeding kids, providing school boards with resources and making sure schools were integrated.
Great! Then you're on-board with eliminating the DoE, since it doesn't do much, right?
Strat
So, you're going to ignore the ever-more totalitarian government policies and legislation that enables the taking-down of websites and web services without due process, the restrictions on free speech, the loss of basic rights in being scanned & searched at airports, the emergence of domestic civilian drone surveillance, and a thousand other examples of the erosion of individual rights? Things like government environmental protection departments seizing private property and also dictating what activities may occur upon private property? The effective outlawing of the ability to change or modify your own property (game consoles)?
Burying one's head in the sand and going "LA LA LA LA I can't hear you!" doesn't make things like the loss of individual freedoms go away.
If you are incapable of seeing the decline in the level of scholastic skills & competency of US H.S. graduates since the Federal Dept of Education was created/formed in 1979, then you're simply refusing to see a problem either because you haven't cared to look, or it's inconveniently inconsistent with your political biases. Or both.
The more government has become involved with education, the worse it's gotten, and unfortunately, there are too many people in government for whom such involvement enriches them personally, either financially or in terms of personal power and ability to promote an ideological agenda.
Strat
In fact, society at large is going down this passive-aggressive path when it comes to rights and it is a big problem if one cares for personal liberty, not just politically, but also in terms of what one may do with his property and existence.
The erosion of property/ownership rights is to be expected, given the ever-more totalitarian direction of many, if not most Western governments, the US being one of the most glaring examples, as the US started out long ago with relatively much more personal liberty.
History shows that where governments remove personal liberty, property and ownership rights are one of the first rights to be weakened/removed. History also shows that these encroachments typically occur gradually until a tipping-point is reached, which then results in either the citizens overthrowing the government or the government winning and taking total, violent, control.
The other thing is that, most notably in the US, the government is getting very paranoid about people having what they might consider "dual-use" skills.
For instance, the guy that has an electronics workbench visible from his front door can get himself thoroughly questioned by police as if he were a possible terrorist/bomber/meth-lab-operator, (yes, they asked specific questions about all three possibilities, AND entered the apartment and examined the bench against protests) with hands on weapons in unsnapped holsters, that just happened to come to the door about something entirely unrelated and nonthreatening, and saw wires and parts and strange electronics test equipment. Yes, that was me. I build vacuum-tube guitar amps. Apparently, loud guitar amps must be a domestic security concern. Who knew?
Rocketry, chemistry, and other hobbies and activities have also seen pressure from government. Maybe they hope that by the time they pull the curtain back on the new, officially-Fascist USA, we'll be too stupid to make roadside bombs or devise means to securely communicate & organize. Thanks to the Federal Government and it's education policies, they've already managed to drastically lower literacy rates and other scholastic skill levels over the past ~50 years. Illiterate & unskilled, people become totally dependent on, and at the mercy of, government.
Strat
Encryption is the key here, dont trust them.
Of course, you know that the next step will be to only allow encrypted connections and VPNs to white-listed addresses/domains, right?
After all, we *must* be protected from terrorism, child-porn, and file-sharing, and especially against individuals having the ability to promote themselves and share their music/video/news/software/inventions/ideologies all unrestricted, without going through "proper" corporate & government/political channels and filters, so as to restrict/halt the spread of "dangerous" ideas, identify the individuals responsible and imprison/kill them, while also maintaining/extending control over media/content/entertainment/news distribution, and extract wealth.
What would the world come to if people could exchange ideas freely? Corporations would fall!! Governments would be changed!! It's already happened to some extent. They (corporations and governments) see this as an existential threat to their continued existence and accustomed lifestyle.
There *will* be blood shed over these issues before all is said & done. Governments and corporations will not go quietly into the night, and they view a free and open internet as one of the greatest threats they've ever known. When push comes to shove, they will be (and have been) ruthless. They will not play by any rules, laws, or set of morals once the gloves come off.
Strat
Signed,
Strat's #1 Fan
Great!
Make sure you spend lots and lots of your time following me around and trolling on my posts.
That means you have less time to annoy others with better things to do.
Strat
What does your penis size have to do with this, Tea Bagger?
Ask your mom when she calls you up from the basement for dinner.
Strat
Go polish your gun, Tea Bagger.
Gee, thanks for your concern for the condition of my small arms, but I assure you they are secure, well supplied, well taken care of, and most have a low-maintenance matte finish or coating for low reflection and harsh environments!
It's good to see a counter-example to the typical knee-jerk stereotyping and ad hominem attacks from Progressives and others on the Left. Your tolerant and inclusive attitude and empathic dialog is to be commended, sir!
Strat
We need to fund the government somehow.
Yeah, but how much government do we really need?
So much government that it's costs cripple people & business while killing our competitiveness in a world economy? Enough government to track everyone & everything?
If all we paid for with our taxes was "civilization", we could do away with the Federal income tax and cut most state taxes to nearly zero.
I think we're well past the point of "paying for civilization", and we are and have been, especially in the last several decades, paying for our own enslavement. Paying to pass and enforce so many laws and regulations that no person is innocent, as there is no way to live without breaking some obscure law or regulation, so therefor the government can "crack down" on practically anyone it cares to for whatever reason it desires.
You'll excuse me if I don't share your enthusiasm for paying the costs for my own enslavement. If I can find a way to avoid having the fruits of my labor stolen to pay for the police state, I'm all for it. If the Federal Government wants to pay to put shrimp on treadmills, they can do without a domestic surveillance drone or two instead of raping the public...again.
Strat
no need for that, take a galois LFRPRNG [wikipedia.org] (a pseudo random number generator with a period of (2^n) -1), share the init vector and the polynomial expression in person with your mates, use that stream as an OTP. If it is good enough for the military it is good enought for us !
Bah!
Just stick the leads to the RNG in a nice, piping-hot cup of tea and let the Brownian motion take care of the rest! [warning: HHGTTG reference]
Strat
Just wondering if anyone has the exact latitude & longitude coordinates for this facility.
Gonna need 'em for programming all the home-brew autonomous high-explosive and incendiary-carrying kamikaze drones needed to take this facility out.
Strat
The part I found interesting in TFS (yes, it's /. and I know reading it is unpossible) was; "The company says it is 'working through the rebuild of the satellite tapping into the resources that were involved in the original program.' "
Who here in the US feels another taxpayer-reaming coming up?
I wish the government, if it has to be involved in somehow assisting/subsidizing/granting the areas of technology/green energy/space/etc would stop just freaking handing out money to people, usually with political donors/backers somewhere in the mix, instead of setting up a results-oriented reward system. This crap happens regardless of party, year after year. Everybody knows it's corrupt, but no politician or party will stop it.
There needs to be some kind of vetting system where those who want money from our pockets must first produce/create/design a practical working example to a predetermined state of capability, sophistication, and reliability in order to earn ANY taxpayer funds. DARPA has done some exploring here and had some success, of course there's the X Prize Foundation and other such organizations and private-sector backers as well, but there needs to be more of that work-before-reward thinking applied across more of the systems through which the government subsidizes private entities with taxpayer money and procures goods and services.
The way it is with government funding/grants/contracts now is nothing more than a money pump taking from our pockets and going into political donor's/backer's and politician's and their operative's pockets, with only a small fraction trickling down to just barely keep the doors (mostly) open on the actual program/activity/research being funded or maintain standards and/or delivery/completion dates for goods/services being procured/contracted for.
Yes, the politicians of both parties think we're stupid. Yes, the politicians of both parties want to strip people of Constitutional rights and protections. They know they're right on the former because we let them get away with the latter. They make laws against guns when the 2nd Amendment plainly says the right to bear arms "shall not be infringed". The Supreme Court rules that your town can take your land and give it to some other citizen that will pay the town more in taxes. Yet, there are no enormous angry mobs ready to burn DC Federal/Government buildings to the ground and hang the scoundrels inside.
This is the kind of thing that must happen from time to time with any national government in order for people to keep their freedom in the face of a growing, and therefor increasingly corrupt, government. The US has actually done pretty well in that it has only had one major civil war in some ~230 years. The downside is that the government has grown wildly out of control, the government is surviving on borrowed money and money-printing, the economy is near collapse, unemployment is high, and the nation is on the fast-track to an Orwellian police state that tries to tell you how much salt you may eat meanwhile sending heavily-armed paramilitary teams on raids into Gibson Guitars and to organic food markets, as well as raiding residential homes of people convicted of no crime, shooting family pets and family members. Heck one team I saw on YT killed a young child in a raid by tossing a flash-bang through a window right onto the young child laying on a couch by the window.
And still, nobody does shit.
We deserve a real nightmare-worthy police state. Maybe, in a generation or ten, or fifty, our descendants might one day win back their freedom. Hopefully, their disgust and anger at our apathy and the fresh memories of atrocities and oppression will keep them freer for longer than they did us.
Strat