Last budget: about $3 Trillion, last Defense budget: about $600 Billion. But I do agree that we are overfunding the Air Force, and defense programs in powerful Congress-Critters' localities. Still, the real money is tied up in entitlements.
You got proof of NSA internal to the U.S. and not involving foreigners snooping? If so, NSA is violating the law. And if Congress has been briefed on it, they are also complicit. Lawyers across the country would descend on the government like locusts to the last blade of grass. So where's yer proof, eh?
Reagan was elected as on the Anti-Jimmy Carter vote, not because of some social conservatives decided to vote Republican. You have to recall what was going on at the time. Unemployment was high, interest rates were astronomical because inflation was high and Paul Volcker was stamping it out. On top of that, Carter made the U.S. appear weak and in fact, gutted the military because Stansfield Turner thought it was a bright thing to do. And the final straw was the Iranian revolution. The American people couldn't give a crap about the Shah, but they very much resented Americans being held hostage. Then Carter made it even worse by authorizing a helicopter raid that failed.
I recall one moment before Reagan was inaugurated but after he'd been elected. Mind you he campaigned on (among other things) increasing military might. He was about to get into a car and a reporter asked him if the Iranians would do better to wait until he was in office rather than releasing the hostages while Carter was still Pres. Without skipping a beat, he remarked, "I wouldn't if I were them". That pretty much summed up why Reagan got elected. The Democrats looked like weenies who couldn't rub sticks together to generate a fire, the Reagan looked like John Wayne. By the way, most Americans fail to recall that John Wayne fought very hard during WWII...to stay out of the military...and he succeeded.
There was an article in last friday's Wall Street Journal how some IT companies were finding censorship to be a growth industry. It is a disgusting display of the breakdown between ethics and the free market when the free market is allowed to be run by Business School Product.
So what you mean is there is a cabal of companies working together to limit competition by limiting entry thus making it a non-free market. And somehow Apple must accede to this regime. How fetching.
I think your observation is apropos but could be strengthened a bit. Let's take it as writ that China's government is stealing. No doubt they have been stealing from Google as well. So in a world where information and its flow is your breadbasket, stealing information is like poking holes in the pipes leading to Google (1) losing control of information they are monetizing, (2) losing control over their own IP which is all that keeps them a step above their competitors (such as Baidu and a Chinese government backed Baidu that might attempt to compete worldwide with Google).
So, Google, looking down the road several years realizes that unless they make like difficult for the Chinese government to get away with kneecapping Google's income stream over time, they used their specialized knowledge to trap the Chinese government.
Another issue I think is that Google's control of information or at least monetizing it runs counter to the Chinese government's wish to do the same. There's no reason they would stop at controlling information within their borders. The interwebs have a way of allowing invasions of ideas, the very thing the Chinese government does not want lest their people get the idea the government is just a bunch of pikers who should be first up against the wall. So if Google came to the conclusion that the Chinese government's long term plan was a world-wide control of information, then they would have absolutely no reason to play the Chinese game and reducing their exposure to China in this instance is probably only Google's first step in what they might believe is going to be a long drawn out war.
Foreign policy has nothing or very little to do with U.S. debt. The total Defense budget was around $600 Billion while the total budget was about $3 Trillion. About $100 Billion of defense was spent on the Iraq and Afghanistan.
The biggest drivers of U.S. debt are....the American People. They created the current recession by buying and selling real estate in a game of musical chairs they thought they would not lose at. They were aided by the Congress-critters and blood-suckers on Wall Street. This exposed the hollowing out of U.S. manufacturing by those other blood-suckers, Business School Product who were last spotted attempting to outsource their grandmothers to Asia.
There are other problems that space and blood pressure prevent me from expressing to an audience with such delicate sensibilities.
Comparing jailing political dissidents to Guantanamo Bay is comparing apples and oranges. China jails internal dissidents, Gitmo is for enemy combatants who are necessarily foreign to the U.S. There are no American citizens in Gitmo, their lawyers would have a field day.
And equating DMCA with political censorship is plain silly. Sure, some lawyers may try to pervert DMCA, but that isn't the law's intent.
But I don't think Japan and Taiwan are apropos examples. Both had new governments after the war and they didn't have the systemic graft or reach that the Communists in China have. I do not think it is a forgone conclusion that Chinese goods will become better manufactured. Japan and Taiwan had to compete with the U.S. in a different time. Now, with Wally-World ruling the retail market, any crap is fine as long as the price is right. I am also not convinced that the Chinese will demand better products. That would work for them if China would allow better made products in from the outside for competition. I don't see that happening.
I agree with what you say about Chinese military action. I think the probability is high they will do something stupid for two reasons: there is a lot of Chinese men that cannot find wives and the Government must find something to do with them or risk these guys putting their energies to things outside Party control, and the Chinese leadership suffers from penis-envy that they really have no legitimacy as government. In order to show they are not two-bit wonders, I think Taiwan is too juicy a target for them.
Yep, Barney Frank and the rest of his Merry Men suffer from the illusion that if you are rich, someone else must have been made poor as a result. So after they get through sacking the people with investment money, they'll be crying the blues about how Americans are not starting small businesses like they used to.
There's a microcosm of that happening now, business cannot find investment money because Congress fixed the rules to make the real estate bubble possible. It was a necessary condition, the sufficient condition was Americans: they bought houses they couldn't afford, flipped houses, bought second houses, etc. They knew it was musical chairs, they just never figured they'd be the losers.
Bell Labs was a lot more than software. And unless you actually work for Google, I very much doubt your comment on them being unorganized is an informed comment.
There are two other problems the Chinese face with dumping dollars. The increase in inflationary pressure makes the dollar cheaper and hence U.S. exports more competitive with their Chinese crap. And with those inflated dollars, since Americans won't be earning any more of them than before, Americans won't have as much money to buy the Chinese crap.
There is also a third problem but not directly related to the dollar, the Chinese economy is addicted to hypergrowth. With hypergrowth comes inefficiencies and graft. If the Chinese economy slows, it runs the risk of imploding as investment heads for the exits. It is a growing problem for them because the rest of the world has Chinese goods coming out their various orifices. The only way to soak them up in the future will be for the Chinese to increase domestic consumption. That's when the Chinese will be forced to use the crap they've been pawning off on the rest of the world. Their legal system won't be able to sort out the mess, the government is already sclerotic and gets the heebie-jeebies when the Falon Gong start doing exercises in the street.
What will be a problem for the U.S. is when the Chinese get tired of buying U.S. debt. Congress-critters won't be able to kick the can down the road any further and the budget will be forced into a better alignment with revenues. Congress-critters will only make changes when they have no other option. The Obama administration is all hat and no cattle so they will be mere by-standers.
Oh, well, if there is a law involved, that makes it okay then. There is a Seinfeld episode where George is going to a chiropractor and he had to cancel an appt. They charged him because he canceled within the 48 hour limit specified in their policy. Later on, the chiropractor had to cancel whereupon George attempted to charge the chiropractor because he now had a policy. There's much truth in that episode.
Wow, what an amazing evolution of Western culture, i.e., a way to make money off dead people. And all the lawyers needed to defend this income stream get rewarded also. As well as the pols who get to piss off the new income. What people will do for sex is weird, what people will do for money is downright alien.
Oh hell, we should all be paying Africans for the use of their genes starting from the Australopithecus Lucy. Or maybe the chimps since they are our closest relative and we share 95% of their genes. They could compensate us with...err....bananas. Anyhow, don't we already pay Monkey Boy enough...uh...how'd he get in there....
Tyler, Harrison, Adams, Lincoln, Grant, Filmore, Jackson, Jefferson, Teddy Roosevelt, Wilson, Coolidge, Hoover, Taft. After them, I draw a blank. What do I win?
Here's a hint, the satellites are not in geo-synchronous orbit. They go around a planet which is mainly water and sometimes over land which has no bin Ladens doing unspeakable things with their turbans. So...err...why not put their spare time and compute resources to good use.
A weather guy on our local station showed recent temperature maps of the globe (don't know where the data came from). It was indeed abnormally cold in the eastern U.S. and Europe. However, it was abnormally warm over Greenland and all its lovely glaciers. If that persists over several decades, the U.S. and Europe could still be abnormally cold but suprisingly, Florida will be underwater. Frankly, I wouldn't complain, however, it does point that anecdotal evidence like "SO why is it so f-cking cold?" is a bit misdirected.
Incidentally, the reason we are not building nuke plants is all the enviro-nutjobs who complained and filed lawsuits in years past rather than do something intelligent like get physics degrees and learning how to build the current safe generation plants. Add to that a liberal dose of getting in tune with their inner little girl who told them that science is bad but subsistence farming is good and a general belief if someone made money, then someone else had to lose an equal amount, and you get the current cluster f-ck that is liberal America.
DoD factotums would lose their mind without pdf forms. The alternative is some microsoft crap, them are worse. Anyhow, they are handy except for one thing, some forms are set up in such a way that you cannot save them; you can print them though...sort of defeats the purpose. I suspect the rest of the fed. gov. is similarly encased in this stupid behavior.
NIH. Unless you really want the drug companies to be in complete control of your future health. DOE. Unless you really want the oil companies to be in complete control of your future energy. NSF. Unless you really want the bean counters at IBM and HP in charge of your future computation theory. The problem with people like you is that you can only see how you would spend the money and discern it is different than how others would.
And incidentally, UAV technology, widely dispersed, means that not all the UAVs you wish to be flying around the country are the ones not carring terrorist bombs.
If your Thetans are not regulated, i.e., running amok, overloading your credit card with charges, then it is because you haven't yet contributed the required amount to the Church of Scientology for reaching the Next Level. You, sir, are one crystal short of Full Sparkle Consciousness. Ask Tom Cruise for pointers.
ORGANIC Kinkgo supports odd and unusual sexual positions, usually requiring various pieces of external mechanical assemblages. However, if you use the inorganic kind, then you might be required to supply batteries.
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Last budget: about $3 Trillion, last Defense budget: about $600 Billion. But I do agree that we are overfunding the Air Force, and defense programs in powerful Congress-Critters' localities. Still, the real money is tied up in entitlements.
You got proof of NSA internal to the U.S. and not involving foreigners snooping? If so, NSA is violating the law. And if Congress has been briefed on it, they are also complicit. Lawyers across the country would descend on the government like locusts to the last blade of grass. So where's yer proof, eh?
Reagan was elected as on the Anti-Jimmy Carter vote, not because of some social conservatives decided to vote Republican. You have to recall what was going on at the time. Unemployment was high, interest rates were astronomical because inflation was high and Paul Volcker was stamping it out. On top of that, Carter made the U.S. appear weak and in fact, gutted the military because Stansfield Turner thought it was a bright thing to do. And the final straw was the Iranian revolution. The American people couldn't give a crap about the Shah, but they very much resented Americans being held hostage. Then Carter made it even worse by authorizing a helicopter raid that failed.
I recall one moment before Reagan was inaugurated but after he'd been elected. Mind you he campaigned on (among other things) increasing military might. He was about to get into a car and a reporter asked him if the Iranians would do better to wait until he was in office rather than releasing the hostages while Carter was still Pres. Without skipping a beat, he remarked, "I wouldn't if I were them". That pretty much summed up why Reagan got elected. The Democrats looked like weenies who couldn't rub sticks together to generate a fire, the Reagan looked like John Wayne. By the way, most Americans fail to recall that John Wayne fought very hard during WWII...to stay out of the military...and he succeeded.
There was an article in last friday's Wall Street Journal how some IT companies were finding censorship to be a growth industry. It is a disgusting display of the breakdown between ethics and the free market when the free market is allowed to be run by Business School Product.
So what you mean is there is a cabal of companies working together to limit competition by limiting entry thus making it a non-free market. And somehow Apple must accede to this regime. How fetching.
I think your observation is apropos but could be strengthened a bit. Let's take it as writ that China's government is stealing. No doubt they have been stealing from Google as well. So in a world where information and its flow is your breadbasket, stealing information is like poking holes in the pipes leading to Google (1) losing control of information they are monetizing, (2) losing control over their own IP which is all that keeps them a step above their competitors (such as Baidu and a Chinese government backed Baidu that might attempt to compete worldwide with Google).
So, Google, looking down the road several years realizes that unless they make like difficult for the Chinese government to get away with kneecapping Google's income stream over time, they used their specialized knowledge to trap the Chinese government.
Another issue I think is that Google's control of information or at least monetizing it runs counter to the Chinese government's wish to do the same. There's no reason they would stop at controlling information within their borders. The interwebs have a way of allowing invasions of ideas, the very thing the Chinese government does not want lest their people get the idea the government is just a bunch of pikers who should be first up against the wall. So if Google came to the conclusion that the Chinese government's long term plan was a world-wide control of information, then they would have absolutely no reason to play the Chinese game and reducing their exposure to China in this instance is probably only Google's first step in what they might believe is going to be a long drawn out war.
Foreign policy has nothing or very little to do with U.S. debt. The total Defense budget was around $600 Billion while the total budget was about $3 Trillion. About $100 Billion of defense was spent on the Iraq and Afghanistan.
The biggest drivers of U.S. debt are....the American People. They created the current recession by buying and selling real estate in a game of musical chairs they thought they would not lose at. They were aided by the Congress-critters and blood-suckers on Wall Street. This exposed the hollowing out of U.S. manufacturing by those other blood-suckers, Business School Product who were last spotted attempting to outsource their grandmothers to Asia.
There are other problems that space and blood pressure prevent me from expressing to an audience with such delicate sensibilities.
Comparing jailing political dissidents to Guantanamo Bay is comparing apples and oranges. China jails internal dissidents, Gitmo is for enemy combatants who are necessarily foreign to the U.S. There are no American citizens in Gitmo, their lawyers would have a field day.
And equating DMCA with political censorship is plain silly. Sure, some lawyers may try to pervert DMCA, but that isn't the law's intent.
But I don't think Japan and Taiwan are apropos examples. Both had new governments after the war and they didn't have the systemic graft or reach that the Communists in China have. I do not think it is a forgone conclusion that Chinese goods will become better manufactured. Japan and Taiwan had to compete with the U.S. in a different time. Now, with Wally-World ruling the retail market, any crap is fine as long as the price is right. I am also not convinced that the Chinese will demand better products. That would work for them if China would allow better made products in from the outside for competition. I don't see that happening.
I agree with what you say about Chinese military action. I think the probability is high they will do something stupid for two reasons: there is a lot of Chinese men that cannot find wives and the Government must find something to do with them or risk these guys putting their energies to things outside Party control, and the Chinese leadership suffers from penis-envy that they really have no legitimacy as government. In order to show they are not two-bit wonders, I think Taiwan is too juicy a target for them.
Yep, Barney Frank and the rest of his Merry Men suffer from the illusion that if you are rich, someone else must have been made poor as a result. So after they get through sacking the people with investment money, they'll be crying the blues about how Americans are not starting small businesses like they used to.
There's a microcosm of that happening now, business cannot find investment money because Congress fixed the rules to make the real estate bubble possible. It was a necessary condition, the sufficient condition was Americans: they bought houses they couldn't afford, flipped houses, bought second houses, etc. They knew it was musical chairs, they just never figured they'd be the losers.
Bell Labs was a lot more than software. And unless you actually work for Google, I very much doubt your comment on them being unorganized is an informed comment.
Why can't retail goods be searched? Scale, my friend, learn to get a sense of proportion (hint: do some math)
There are two other problems the Chinese face with dumping dollars. The increase in inflationary pressure makes the dollar cheaper and hence U.S. exports more competitive with their Chinese crap. And with those inflated dollars, since Americans won't be earning any more of them than before, Americans won't have as much money to buy the Chinese crap.
There is also a third problem but not directly related to the dollar, the Chinese economy is addicted to hypergrowth. With hypergrowth comes inefficiencies and graft. If the Chinese economy slows, it runs the risk of imploding as investment heads for the exits. It is a growing problem for them because the rest of the world has Chinese goods coming out their various orifices. The only way to soak them up in the future will be for the Chinese to increase domestic consumption. That's when the Chinese will be forced to use the crap they've been pawning off on the rest of the world. Their legal system won't be able to sort out the mess, the government is already sclerotic and gets the heebie-jeebies when the Falon Gong start doing exercises in the street.
What will be a problem for the U.S. is when the Chinese get tired of buying U.S. debt. Congress-critters won't be able to kick the can down the road any further and the budget will be forced into a better alignment with revenues. Congress-critters will only make changes when they have no other option. The Obama administration is all hat and no cattle so they will be mere by-standers.
Oh, well, if there is a law involved, that makes it okay then. There is a Seinfeld episode where George is going to a chiropractor and he had to cancel an appt. They charged him because he canceled within the 48 hour limit specified in their policy. Later on, the chiropractor had to cancel whereupon George attempted to charge the chiropractor because he now had a policy. There's much truth in that episode.
Wow, what an amazing evolution of Western culture, i.e., a way to make money off dead people. And all the lawyers needed to defend this income stream get rewarded also. As well as the pols who get to piss off the new income. What people will do for sex is weird, what people will do for money is downright alien.
No, the Aztecs worshiped Disney characters. The Mexican government should be paying Disney.
Oh hell, we should all be paying Africans for the use of their genes starting from the Australopithecus Lucy. Or maybe the chimps since they are our closest relative and we share 95% of their genes. They could compensate us with...err....bananas. Anyhow, don't we already pay Monkey Boy enough...uh...how'd he get in there....
Tyler, Harrison, Adams, Lincoln, Grant, Filmore, Jackson, Jefferson, Teddy Roosevelt, Wilson, Coolidge, Hoover, Taft. After them, I draw a blank. What do I win?
Does it help you to believe in the existence of Mac Fanbois?
Here's a hint, the satellites are not in geo-synchronous orbit. They go around a planet which is mainly water and sometimes over land which has no bin Ladens doing unspeakable things with their turbans. So...err...why not put their spare time and compute resources to good use.
A weather guy on our local station showed recent temperature maps of the globe (don't know where the data came from). It was indeed abnormally cold in the eastern U.S. and Europe. However, it was abnormally warm over Greenland and all its lovely glaciers. If that persists over several decades, the U.S. and Europe could still be abnormally cold but suprisingly, Florida will be underwater. Frankly, I wouldn't complain, however, it does point that anecdotal evidence like "SO why is it so f-cking cold?" is a bit misdirected.
Incidentally, the reason we are not building nuke plants is all the enviro-nutjobs who complained and filed lawsuits in years past rather than do something intelligent like get physics degrees and learning how to build the current safe generation plants. Add to that a liberal dose of getting in tune with their inner little girl who told them that science is bad but subsistence farming is good and a general belief if someone made money, then someone else had to lose an equal amount, and you get the current cluster f-ck that is liberal America.
DoD factotums would lose their mind without pdf forms. The alternative is some microsoft crap, them are worse. Anyhow, they are handy except for one thing, some forms are set up in such a way that you cannot save them; you can print them though...sort of defeats the purpose. I suspect the rest of the fed. gov. is similarly encased in this stupid behavior.
NIH. Unless you really want the drug companies to be in complete control of your future health. DOE. Unless you really want the oil companies to be in complete control of your future energy. NSF. Unless you really want the bean counters at IBM and HP in charge of your future computation theory. The problem with people like you is that you can only see how you would spend the money and discern it is different than how others would.
And incidentally, UAV technology, widely dispersed, means that not all the UAVs you wish to be flying around the country are the ones not carring terrorist bombs.
The key words there were "raw materials". Meds are rarely raw materials, they are very concentrated.
If your Thetans are not regulated, i.e., running amok, overloading your credit card with charges, then it is because you haven't yet contributed the required amount to the Church of Scientology for reaching the Next Level. You, sir, are one crystal short of Full Sparkle Consciousness. Ask Tom Cruise for pointers.
ORGANIC Kinkgo supports odd and unusual sexual positions, usually requiring various pieces of external mechanical assemblages. However, if you use the inorganic kind, then you might be required to supply batteries.