The US seems to quickly be turning into a third world hell hole.
You're confusing "the US" with "Chicago" and a few other spots. Generally, violent crime and burglaries are significantly down and have been for many years now. It's bad in places where the local politicians and thug culture don't want to fix themselves, and the local population can't bring themselves to admit they have a cultural problem that will only be fixed by a major personal commitment to getting local family life together, and off-the-charts corrupt, pandering politicians out of business. As mentioned, see Chicago - where those things simply will not happen.
The US does run the third-world-hell-hole risk, though, due to major fiscal problems that the current administration doesn't think are real problems. That's a much broader trouble.
Fact: Violent crime has gone steadily down for many years now. Pretending it hasn't so you can complain that the government doesn't hand out enough of other people's money is just embarrassing. Come on, now.
We know that poor people commit more crimes
And most of it has nothing whatsoever to do with taking cash from the person who has it for the sake of that cash, right then and there, but rather it's turf war killings over crime territory. And again, this has been going down for 20+ years.
Now, if I declared that I had a solution and that it was the only solution, that would be flamebait.
Unless it was correct. But because you seem to be operating on some strangely mixed premises and bad information...
Actually we are asking people who benefit disproportionately to pay a [very] little extra for that privilege, such that the services of government can be applied for everyone.
All very lefty-pious and serious sounding, to be sure. And complete BS, as you obviously know - or you wouldn't be going to such trouble to sound like you mean it.
First - what's disproportionate? Wouldn't you agree that someone who pays no income tax (like roughly half of the entire country) but who receives any benefit from income-tax based services is the person who's really getting the disproportionate share? And aren't the small minority of people who pay the vast majority of all of the taxes, actually carrying the vast majority of that fiscal load (pretty much by definition)? Anyone who pays no income taxes but still reaps the benefits of such taxes is the one getting away with something. Not only that, they still get to vote, and play a role in protecting the special arrangements by which they are kept on the taking-only side of that equation.
Regardless, the main point is that your "[very] little extra" is complete nonsense. If you taxed the "rich" people at 100% of their income, that still wouldn't close the budget deficit past April of any given year. If you really do take only a "very little" more than the majority of the country's income taxes they already pay, that would do nothing to reduce the wildly escalating debt that is the real thing killing prosperity in this country (by way of its impact on the credit market, and thus, ultimately jobs and the giant tax revenue increase that comes with having more people employed and out spending money).
You're not asking rich people to pay a little more in taxes to solve a problem, you're wanting to put a "we got rich people who are already paying most of the income taxes to pay even more" mark up on the scoreboard because the desire to do so is a central pandering point on the left side of the political spectrum. Anybody with a clue knows it cannot do anything to fix the massive over-spending problem and the already almost unbearable level of debt service - which is getting much, much worse by the minute.
All of your "hoarding" symbolism is just deliberate class war flamebait, and completely disconnected from reality.
Or, you could just not visit sites run by people who want to show ads. You obviously think the person whose content you're trying to consume is making a poor choice. You don't like their judgement, you think they're offending you... so, just walk away. That's how you stop seeing those ads. Become a site's member or whatever is needed to reduce the ad displays, or just go away.
Dear "Webmaster", nobody cares about your shitty website packed full of annoying ads. Get over it already.
Spoken like a typical leech. No surprise, but always amazing.
And nowhere does it explain how you can have decreased traffic but increased bandwidth usage. Because it's not possible.
Oh, I get it now, You're a moron. You don't understand the difference between thumbnail images and higher-resolution files. Does it physically hurt to sound like such a jackass while also being so uninformed?
Substantial press coverage addresses that exact topic. Which of course you know. The strike in Yemen that killed the crew that planned and trained the underwear bomber was working on another such, and were operating in rural Yemen specifically so they'd have some breathing room. Which as been well established, and is as plain as day if you bother to read. Which means that you are, of course, just a sniffling little troll who doesn't want to admit that there are guys like that out there. Which there are. Which you know.
Sure, there's nothing wrong with his policy. Until some faceless bureaucrat pops your name on some list and a sequence of different equally unaccountable government employees push buttons and gets you bombed by remote. When someone that cared about you objects, they're told that you were a terrorist, and they get on that list themselves.
This is an interesting scenario. Pure bad-movie-fantasy rubbish, of course.
we'll look back on this era as the second dark ages
We might. It depends on whether or not the people who want it to be the dark ages (the fundamentalist wack job Islamists) get their way.
In the drone strikes you had people actively driving or riding in a car.
While, during all of their waking hours, doing things like planning and acting to achieve the deaths of hundreds of people in Detroit via a downed airliner. And doing so while deliberately operating in the middle of the Yemeni desert where normal law enforcement (in terms of apprehension of mass-murder-minded active terrorists) would be completely impossible without the huge commitment of special forces - at least - on the ground. It doesn't matter if the day to day activity of planning the deaths of hundreds of people, and training/financing the morons who will (attempt to) carry it out is a finger-on-the-trigger scenario or not. A US citizen who works to kill hundreds of people and who places himself deliberately in a place where he knows he's not going to get arrested - is pretty much demanding (and deserving) to get some death from above, so shut him down. This isn't exactly confusing, or difficult to understand.
Just what do you suggest that said black males do about that?
For the ones that actually do come across that way (just like their white, or latino or any other counterparts who do), knock it off with the thuggish body language, thug-life clothing, the deliberately hostile stares and glares, and all the rest of the deliberate trappings meant to give people the impression that they're dangerous. Because that's exactly where that vibe comes from. Sure, some people see that, calibrate to it, and then extend the impression erroneously to others that superficially look similar. But we all know exactly what gives people that impression, and see that it's cultivated, sold, and celebrated by some slices of pop culture.
We can't push that stuff while in the same breath complaining when it impacts people's impression of entire swaths of culture that embrace it as cool.
Hilarious that somebody considers that flamebait. It's basic facts! It must be hard to go through life considering every presentation of basic information to be inflaming.
And in the course of doing so, they write things that are put to work by the school, a teaching institution. Things that are used in the process of evolving the school's collected body of lessons, procedures, and the rest - those are things the teachers are paid a salary to produce, along with their other duties. You seem to be implying that if the teachers were employed as grocery store clerks, they'd still be preparing essay tests, lesson plans, and school program material on the side, just for fun and personal expression. Absurd.
If a teacher has a personal hobby of writing essay test questions or clever math test word problems, and it's such a passion that they want to continue to do so above and beyond doing the exact same thing for pay by taxpayers that employ them, then that rare teacher just needs to negotiate that language into their employment contract.
You don't have to "copyright" your creative works - you own the copyright automatically by the act of creating the work. Unless, of course, you're employed by the organization paying you to create it, in a classic "work for hire" situation. In which case your employer owns the work they paid you to create. Working as a contractor can change that, as can negotiating a different employment contract for a full time employee.
I can vaguely see an exceptionally unethical argument for teachers work
It's called "work for hire," and it's entirely common, and understandable. Someone else is paying you a salary to produce things for the organization that's paying you to do so. It's their work, because they hired you to produce it on their dime. Of course you can negotiate an employment contract that takes those rights away from the people who pay you to create the work, but that can be pretty hard to settle when you're dealing with the government (the school system being part of the government).
You're getting this wrong. Look up "work for hire." The default position is that work you do for your employer is theirs. Only a contract that specifically changes that would put the rights back in the hands of the employee who was getting paid a salary to do the work.
You're confused. It wasn't a Java hack on YOUR computer, it was a Java hack on a machine internally at Twitter, via which accounts were snooped. Relax.
Who said they banned pizza? I said that they banned the word pizza. Here, read up.. I'd hate for you to take my word for it, on the subject of Elastic Loaves.
Perhaps. But the difference is that in one country you've got the religion directly and unapologetically running the government (including the courts and prisons and military) and in the other you don't. In one you've got an obnoxious bunch of religious wingnuts shooting down the teaching of evolution in schools - as dictated from the top of the power chain - and in the other you've got attempts to do shouted down in public, and ruled down in courts at every jurisdictional level. There's being surrounded by jerky religions and religious people, and there's government formally and specifically run in religious terms by those religious jerks - a fundamental difference.
"Freedom fries" or "Peace pies", is it so different?
Yes, it's 100% entirely different. Because you can't go to jail for using such phrases (or not using them in lieu of others, etc). We're talking about dictates from religious dictators that carry with them the force of law. That, and using a snarky name for a product while in the middle of some political back-and-forth with another country over policy, are worlds apart.
More to the point, clearly you never have. Because you aren't going to be able to point out where the people there stone rape victims to death, dish out lashings to women not covering their heads, or throw people in prison (and worse) for being the wrong flavor of Christian. Get a grip.
You mean other than the fact that you don't run the risk of having the religious police give you trouble over your beard length, that you don't get locked up in prison for being insufficiently Muslim? That you can still say the word "pizza," which has been banned in that country for being too western? That little details like being sent to prison or even killed for having been raped tend to stand out? Or charming features of Iran's foreign policy such as backing the annihilation of a specific country on religious grounds, or the steady support of some of the worst medieval-minded terrorist groups in the world because they are such?
Never mind your completely spurious and disingenuous comparison of the school systems, or the fact that you just sitting here talking about it openly would - there - put in at risk of death in prison.
No. I'm saying that once they are in a position to demand anything, they're going to demand that the government become less involved in dictating their day to day lives. They can't demand anything now, because the government they have imposes upon them, by force, the entire relationship. This isn't complicated!
Slashdot Mirror
The US seems to quickly be turning into a third world hell hole.
You're confusing "the US" with "Chicago" and a few other spots. Generally, violent crime and burglaries are significantly down and have been for many years now. It's bad in places where the local politicians and thug culture don't want to fix themselves, and the local population can't bring themselves to admit they have a cultural problem that will only be fixed by a major personal commitment to getting local family life together, and off-the-charts corrupt, pandering politicians out of business. As mentioned, see Chicago - where those things simply will not happen.
The US does run the third-world-hell-hole risk, though, due to major fiscal problems that the current administration doesn't think are real problems. That's a much broader trouble.
only state a fact
Fact: Violent crime has gone steadily down for many years now. Pretending it hasn't so you can complain that the government doesn't hand out enough of other people's money is just embarrassing. Come on, now.
We know that poor people commit more crimes
And most of it has nothing whatsoever to do with taking cash from the person who has it for the sake of that cash, right then and there, but rather it's turf war killings over crime territory. And again, this has been going down for 20+ years.
Now, if I declared that I had a solution and that it was the only solution, that would be flamebait.
Unless it was correct. But because you seem to be operating on some strangely mixed premises and bad information ...
It would also almost certainly be bullshit.
Actually we are asking people who benefit disproportionately to pay a [very] little extra for that privilege, such that the services of government can be applied for everyone.
All very lefty-pious and serious sounding, to be sure. And complete BS, as you obviously know - or you wouldn't be going to such trouble to sound like you mean it.
First - what's disproportionate? Wouldn't you agree that someone who pays no income tax (like roughly half of the entire country) but who receives any benefit from income-tax based services is the person who's really getting the disproportionate share? And aren't the small minority of people who pay the vast majority of all of the taxes, actually carrying the vast majority of that fiscal load (pretty much by definition)? Anyone who pays no income taxes but still reaps the benefits of such taxes is the one getting away with something. Not only that, they still get to vote, and play a role in protecting the special arrangements by which they are kept on the taking-only side of that equation.
Regardless, the main point is that your "[very] little extra" is complete nonsense. If you taxed the "rich" people at 100% of their income, that still wouldn't close the budget deficit past April of any given year. If you really do take only a "very little" more than the majority of the country's income taxes they already pay, that would do nothing to reduce the wildly escalating debt that is the real thing killing prosperity in this country (by way of its impact on the credit market, and thus, ultimately jobs and the giant tax revenue increase that comes with having more people employed and out spending money).
You're not asking rich people to pay a little more in taxes to solve a problem, you're wanting to put a "we got rich people who are already paying most of the income taxes to pay even more" mark up on the scoreboard because the desire to do so is a central pandering point on the left side of the political spectrum. Anybody with a clue knows it cannot do anything to fix the massive over-spending problem and the already almost unbearable level of debt service - which is getting much, much worse by the minute.
All of your "hoarding" symbolism is just deliberate class war flamebait, and completely disconnected from reality.
Or, you could just not visit sites run by people who want to show ads. You obviously think the person whose content you're trying to consume is making a poor choice. You don't like their judgement, you think they're offending you ... so, just walk away. That's how you stop seeing those ads. Become a site's member or whatever is needed to reduce the ad displays, or just go away.
Dear "Webmaster", nobody cares about your shitty website packed full of annoying ads. Get over it already.
Spoken like a typical leech. No surprise, but always amazing.
And nowhere does it explain how you can have decreased traffic but increased bandwidth usage. Because it's not possible.
Oh, I get it now, You're a moron. You don't understand the difference between thumbnail images and higher-resolution files. Does it physically hurt to sound like such a jackass while also being so uninformed?
It might be surprising to you, but the government is not infallible
Which is also why there's no mechanism in place for "some faceless bureaucrat to push a button and get you bombed." What a load of crap.
Substantial press coverage addresses that exact topic. Which of course you know. The strike in Yemen that killed the crew that planned and trained the underwear bomber was working on another such, and were operating in rural Yemen specifically so they'd have some breathing room. Which as been well established, and is as plain as day if you bother to read. Which means that you are, of course, just a sniffling little troll who doesn't want to admit that there are guys like that out there. Which there are. Which you know.
Sure, there's nothing wrong with his policy. Until some faceless bureaucrat pops your name on some list and a sequence of different equally unaccountable government employees push buttons and gets you bombed by remote. When someone that cared about you objects, they're told that you were a terrorist, and they get on that list themselves.
This is an interesting scenario. Pure bad-movie-fantasy rubbish, of course.
we'll look back on this era as the second dark ages
We might. It depends on whether or not the people who want it to be the dark ages (the fundamentalist wack job Islamists) get their way.
In the drone strikes you had people actively driving or riding in a car.
While, during all of their waking hours, doing things like planning and acting to achieve the deaths of hundreds of people in Detroit via a downed airliner. And doing so while deliberately operating in the middle of the Yemeni desert where normal law enforcement (in terms of apprehension of mass-murder-minded active terrorists) would be completely impossible without the huge commitment of special forces - at least - on the ground. It doesn't matter if the day to day activity of planning the deaths of hundreds of people, and training/financing the morons who will (attempt to) carry it out is a finger-on-the-trigger scenario or not. A US citizen who works to kill hundreds of people and who places himself deliberately in a place where he knows he's not going to get arrested - is pretty much demanding (and deserving) to get some death from above, so shut him down. This isn't exactly confusing, or difficult to understand.
Just what do you suggest that said black males do about that?
For the ones that actually do come across that way (just like their white, or latino or any other counterparts who do), knock it off with the thuggish body language, thug-life clothing, the deliberately hostile stares and glares, and all the rest of the deliberate trappings meant to give people the impression that they're dangerous. Because that's exactly where that vibe comes from. Sure, some people see that, calibrate to it, and then extend the impression erroneously to others that superficially look similar. But we all know exactly what gives people that impression, and see that it's cultivated, sold, and celebrated by some slices of pop culture.
We can't push that stuff while in the same breath complaining when it impacts people's impression of entire swaths of culture that embrace it as cool.
Hilarious that somebody considers that flamebait. It's basic facts! It must be hard to go through life considering every presentation of basic information to be inflaming.
The teachers are paid to teach
And in the course of doing so, they write things that are put to work by the school, a teaching institution. Things that are used in the process of evolving the school's collected body of lessons, procedures, and the rest - those are things the teachers are paid a salary to produce, along with their other duties. You seem to be implying that if the teachers were employed as grocery store clerks, they'd still be preparing essay tests, lesson plans, and school program material on the side, just for fun and personal expression. Absurd.
If a teacher has a personal hobby of writing essay test questions or clever math test word problems, and it's such a passion that they want to continue to do so above and beyond doing the exact same thing for pay by taxpayers that employ them, then that rare teacher just needs to negotiate that language into their employment contract.
You don't actually understand this stuff, do you?
You don't have to "copyright" your creative works - you own the copyright automatically by the act of creating the work. Unless, of course, you're employed by the organization paying you to create it, in a classic "work for hire" situation. In which case your employer owns the work they paid you to create. Working as a contractor can change that, as can negotiating a different employment contract for a full time employee.
I can vaguely see an exceptionally unethical argument for teachers work
It's called "work for hire," and it's entirely common, and understandable. Someone else is paying you a salary to produce things for the organization that's paying you to do so. It's their work, because they hired you to produce it on their dime. Of course you can negotiate an employment contract that takes those rights away from the people who pay you to create the work, but that can be pretty hard to settle when you're dealing with the government (the school system being part of the government).
You're getting this wrong. Look up "work for hire." The default position is that work you do for your employer is theirs. Only a contract that specifically changes that would put the rights back in the hands of the employee who was getting paid a salary to do the work.
Claiming ownership of the student's creations is rediculous
It is awful! It's not only diculous, it comes back around for more and is re-diculous.
You're confused. It wasn't a Java hack on YOUR computer, it was a Java hack on a machine internally at Twitter, via which accounts were snooped. Relax.
Orbital dynamics, you do not understand them.
Come on, man. Get it right. "Understand orbital mechanics, you do not."
Who said they banned pizza? I said that they banned the word pizza. Here, read up. . I'd hate for you to take my word for it, on the subject of Elastic Loaves.
All 3 Abrahamic religions are just as evil.
Perhaps. But the difference is that in one country you've got the religion directly and unapologetically running the government (including the courts and prisons and military) and in the other you don't. In one you've got an obnoxious bunch of religious wingnuts shooting down the teaching of evolution in schools - as dictated from the top of the power chain - and in the other you've got attempts to do shouted down in public, and ruled down in courts at every jurisdictional level. There's being surrounded by jerky religions and religious people, and there's government formally and specifically run in religious terms by those religious jerks - a fundamental difference.
"Freedom fries" or "Peace pies", is it so different?
Yes, it's 100% entirely different. Because you can't go to jail for using such phrases (or not using them in lieu of others, etc). We're talking about dictates from religious dictators that carry with them the force of law. That, and using a snarky name for a product while in the middle of some political back-and-forth with another country over policy, are worlds apart.
Clearly you have never visited the bible belt.
More to the point, clearly you never have. Because you aren't going to be able to point out where the people there stone rape victims to death, dish out lashings to women not covering their heads, or throw people in prison (and worse) for being the wrong flavor of Christian. Get a grip.
And that's different from the U.S. how?
You mean other than the fact that you don't run the risk of having the religious police give you trouble over your beard length, that you don't get locked up in prison for being insufficiently Muslim? That you can still say the word "pizza," which has been banned in that country for being too western? That little details like being sent to prison or even killed for having been raped tend to stand out? Or charming features of Iran's foreign policy such as backing the annihilation of a specific country on religious grounds, or the steady support of some of the worst medieval-minded terrorist groups in the world because they are such?
Never mind your completely spurious and disingenuous comparison of the school systems, or the fact that you just sitting here talking about it openly would - there - put in at risk of death in prison.
Woops! Here I am feeding a troll. Never mind.
This
No. I'm saying that once they are in a position to demand anything, they're going to demand that the government become less involved in dictating their day to day lives. They can't demand anything now, because the government they have imposes upon them, by force, the entire relationship. This isn't complicated!