Oh, please. Do you really think that the obviously absurd expectations and low level of training exhibited by the campus cop(s) involved is an indication of what "police" (as in, "all police") do? Have you suddenly found that your local municipality's laws have changed? Have you suddenly stopped seeing the firing of cops caught doing this sort of thing? In a "police state," this is policy, not a much-yelled-about, firing/arresting event. Your question is no different than asking whether or not, since some airline pilot was caught heading to work under the influence, we're in a "drunk pilot state." There are also badly broken people in other professional roles... I'm sure you've heard some stories. Does that mean we're in a "rapist dentist state?"
What we are in is a "hyper extrapolation state," where the incorrect actions of 1/100,000,000 people is discussed here as if congress had just passed some new statute about how we'll be treating all students that refuse to show ID in an area where you have to show ID. I'd be interested how this discussion would go if instead we were talking about someone having captured video of a person (without ID) who got into a secured part of the campus and assaulted a student. All we'd hear about would be the absent security, and how we're in an "assault society," blah blah. These guys weren't trained right, and should have better known how to handle someone making a stink about carrying the ID needed to use the facility. They blew it, and they get to lose their jobs. In your imaginary, rhetorical "police state," you wouldn't be having this conversation.
3. Have said government or government agency spend untold hours trying to get the truth out. Usually this operation fails.
At for this audience here, you must add:
3(b). Complain that the government has propoganda machine set up to "get out the truth" and straighten out toxic spin-FUD spread by idiots, because obviously any office run by a government agency specifically to "correct" wrong-headed or outright BS notions circulating in the news or blogosphere is obviously Evil.
At least, that always seems to be the groupthink take on it. Unless of course it's NASA doing the correcting, I'm guessing. If the FCC or DoD do exactly the same thing, then The Evil goes without saying. *sigh*
A couple of cleansing asteroids actually would not hurt getting rid of those little pests walking upright and haven't learned yet how to use their enlarged brains
Well, then, what have you done today to lower the population? Oops! Silly me. You can't read this, because you've killed yourself. I hope you at least did it while taking out some of the religious zealots that want to turn Iraq into the next Taliban stomping ground. Because that would actually help. But if you just plain killed yourself, that would be constructive, also. I mean, based your theory, anyway. Oh wait: you just want other people to die. Silly me!
So, we're talking about four people working for ACORN, and ACORN themselves turned them in. And I still haven't seen any references to previous problems with ACORN
No, they didn't "turn them in." They fired those people after their registration-stuffing was shown to ACORN by the St. Louis board of elections. Prior to that, the chairwoman of the Kansas City Board of Elections brought the information to the FBI when it became apparent that 40% of the 35,000 submissions from Acorn looked suspect. The ACORN chapter that was so industriously filling in voter registration cards by copying out of the phone book (how original!) of course fired those people - they were already being indicted! ACORN doesn't have much shame, but even they know a losing PR battle when they see one.
Hell, the group had a $1.1million dollar AmeriCorps grant revoked several years ago when it became apparent that they were using the grant money to pay political activists. But just in the wake of this most recent election, we now Pennsylvania and Maryland also launching probes into ACORN-related registration practices.
80% of the vote was counted by two firms, Diebold and ES&S. They're run by two brothers. There is no need to postulate a massive team of conspirators operating invisibly -- the system is centralized, it's suceptible to centralized attacks (not to mention internal corruption).
The system is not centralized. The equipment is programmed and operated and the votes tallied by the individual election commissions that purchase and deploy the equipment. They set up their own smart card collection routines, use their own networks to round of the results from each machine, etc. There is no evil Castle Diebold through which every municipality's voting data is passed on its way to the state capital or county office building where the information is consolidated for a given jurisdiction. Once that hardware is rolled out to the end using districts, they (the election board staffers in each area) deal with programming their particular slate of candidates, and collecting the results. This is why incompetant poll workers make a mess, but doesn't explain why people who witness just such nonsense (like, no one remembered to bring the master smart card to the polling place, etc) say, "it's the people at Diebold messing with our election!"
The licensing requirements are steep, so it only shows up on one site only. Stifling? Oh yes. Legal? Very much so. They are so deep in the trees that they can't see how much Myspace can help smaller bands, and artist discovery.
But the bands can certainly choose not to release their material in a way that restricts distribution. If you're a garage band looking for attention, you've got every mechanism in the world to put that music out there in a way that will not, cannot, get anyone in trouble for spreading it around.
Sounds like ancient history to me, have you got some evidence of something like this happening in the last decade or two?
This year. This election. Here's a more-or-less random from the first page of Google results, but it shows the way to the local news coverage. Thousands of questionable registrations. The people involved were doing it systematically, but the group for which they were working ("ACORN") has been confronted over this stuff for the past several elections. Needless to say, they were shocked - SHOCKED! - that it would be happening, again, as they work to sign up more voters in dem-friendly urban areas. Shocked!
You mean it might show up as a widespread pattern of exit poll discrepancies?
Gee, do you think that maybe the long-standing tradition of ambushing people as they leave polling places and finding the willing ones with time on their hands that will answer the polls may not be keeping up with the hyper-focused to-the-household campaigning, the huge shift to absentee balloting, and a more divisive than ever media-fueled distortion of reported opinions? Or that perhaps the exit polling consortium, which is funded collectively by a handful of media outlets, may be conducting their questioning with workers that tend to reflect the biases shown over and over to be present in the media companies they represent?
If that's not what you mean, how else would it stick out like a "sore thumb"?
Oh, I don't know... like maybe a shred of evidence, perhaps? Do you have any idea the number of people and the scope of the conspiracy that would be required to introduce millions of phantom votes in a general election? Millions? That would involve thousands of poll workers, election board staffers, re-count workers, and so on. They'd have to run a tighter ship than the people that got thousands of NASA employees to fake the moon landing without a single person spilling the beans, right? I mean, you do also think that was faked, right?
It was more the ability to turn out the right voters that helped them, rather than an overall increase in turnout.
Which is what it always means, everywhere. These things are all local, or at least never more than state-wide, in terms of their importance to an election.
magically creating millions of votes out of nowhere
Really! Millions. Do tell! (as opposed to just making stuff up, now)
a lot of the voter fraud exploits the Republicans were using in 2004 involved trying to disenfanchise the downtrodden (e.g. ex-convicts, black people, etc).
If, by "ex-cons" you mean "felons," then you should understand that allowing them to vote is election fraud. Until the law changes in most places, activists trying to get felons somehow into a voting booth are the ones committing the crime.
And, "black people?" By what mechansism are you finding voter registration to be tied to race? If that's your focus, how would you explain the (primarily dem) activists who just got busted for producing thousands and thousands of completely fictional registrations in predominantly urban areas like Kansas City and St. Louis? The same people registered multiple times, dead people registered, and completely fictional people with fake SSNs, etc? All registered in districts aimed at boosting votes against more conservative candidates. "Millions" of fraudulant votes? Come on. That would stick out like a sore thumb, which isn't the same as being a sore loser.
Like "free" healthcare, including batteries of medical tests using equipment and services that costs thousands per patient, per event to operate/provide... while in the same breath demanding subsidized college tuition, tax credits for everything under the sun... all of that nice have your cake and eat it too type stuff.
Like, freedom from violent fanatics without any inconvenient actual action that might be required to actually deal with such people.
Like magical minimum wages provided to employees of small businesses without the necessary consequence of the small business hiring fewer people or raising the prices of what they provide.
Like demands that Wal-Mart be somehow less damaging to higher-priced local businesses, without actually running Wal-Mart out of town, because gee, it's sure nice to be able to go in there for lower prices.
Like demands that students not be "socially promoted" through public education without basic education skills while also demanding that substandard teachers and administrators not be let go, and students not be expected to comprehensively read and write.
Like demanding that when choosing to live below sea level in the direct path of recurring hurricanes, that the government take care of the costs of the inevitable messes without expecting the residents to recognize that they've chosen (for as long as they can get the government to keep bailing them out) to lead a more expensive life on other taxpayers' pockets.
You said "honesty." So, yeah, honesty would be calling that sort of stuff like it actually is.
Um, exept in the previous election (here, I'm referring to the US), when it was the Republicans' ability to create a high turnout that was credited with much of their election success. Your statement assumes a steady state of context, which is nonsense.
Taxpayers pay the US Treasury, they don't pay NASA. Politicians decide whether any money comes out of the Treasury, not the taxpayers. NASA doesn't have to pander to the public, it has to pander to politicians. Seriously, when was the last time an astronaut called your house asking for money, or you saw a NASA billboard asking for donations?
Oh, come now. We ELECT those politicians, and they have excruciatingly precise ways to gauge how their constituents feel about stuff like that. I personally can't stand either of my state's senators for a range of reasons, but one of them (Barbara Mikulski) does do a lot of pounding around on capital hill to increase funding for NASA. Of course, that agency's Goddard center is in her turf, and employs a lot of people and contractors. And I've had more than a few polls, taken by her people, that ask me to chime in on one thing or another (including NASA funding). If NASA's mission pissed off her constituents, her continuing and very vocal support for it would cost her votes.
If, by "college students," we mean "most college students," just like we mean "most people" when we ask, "are people techno idiots?"
Honestly, answers to a question like that, in this venue, are going to be so distorted by the abnormal slashdot nerd density as to be meaningless when talking about a wider demographic. My personal experience with most college students is that they are just as much in the "it's just magic, and it works" (as well as the "my computer is so slow! it won't even run the new free stuff I download any more!") camp as the average non-college-student person.
The "technical" stuff with which they're comfortable (as in, feel mastery thereof) are the dedicated-purpose devices that don't really let you hose them up (phones, cameras, simple MP3 players, etc). But they don't know how or why any of it works any more than they know how or why their car, their democracy, their adrenal glands, or the free WiFi at Panera works. And I'm not just talking about the liberal arts majors.
Actually, the military in general does a pretty good job of PR, in terms of making itself a focus of national pride. NASA could take some pointers from them.
Yup. And just look at how the NRO was quick to point out how the tsunami and Katrina responses were aided by their orbital goodies. That was getting coverage in plain old newspapers. NASA contributes all sorts of science in similar arenas, but it's usually conveyed (if at all) to the public in such incredibly dry, academic terms that causes narcolepsy.
Yeah, it's hard to justify on a funding level because it's not immediately spectacular, but it's still the right thing to do.
I maintain that these thing are not mutually exclusive. Doing science with a bit of flair is scarcely more expensive than doing it without. You may not like spending money on projects that don't expressly pursue the areas of inquiries that you're passionate about, but I think you're really missing how hard it is to get 400+ congress-creatures to write a check for 21cm radiation research when their constituents are thinking more about their local pothole problem, whether or not their congressional representative has $90k of cash in their freezer, whether or not North Korea is about to step off of some cliff, or whatever else wanders across their television that day. When NASA wanders across their television in a compelling way, it improves the prospects for everything that NASA wants to do. Bigger picture, here. You will never make those subtle cosmological studies interesting enough for a wide enough audience to appreciate (with their wallets). That sense of adventure, when coupled with at least one of the research areas being pursued, is a vital part of the overall mission.
It's so great NASA has the right goal: entertaining the masses.
"The masses" would be the people that pay for what NASA does. I mean, I know I pay a lot of taxes. And the whole purpose of missions like this is to find activities that do benefit their program (more experience in different circumstances) while also stimulating an interest, in the taxpayers, to continuing to fund this stuff. Making sure that some of the testing and learning also happens to be interesting to watch is simply smart. We're a long way from stomping around Mars and looking under rocks, but we can do some very good CEV testing and some other very cool science near one of those interesting big rocks. And it will look great in HD.
I think instead of buying into the propaganda you have bought into, I will think for myself.
I haven't bought into anything. I personally know cops, and have dealt with many, many of them in a lot of scenarios. I have never come across a whiff of the rampant corruption that you insinuate. Which doesn't mean there aren't crooked cops, because of course there are. Just like there are narcotics-dealing doctors, patient-raping dentists, child-abusing teachers, and very crooked computer programmers.
However: your experience sounds way, way more like a local/cultural problem. Why your local elected officials don't have the backbone to hire a police command structure that doesn't put up with what you're describing is the far better question. Please do think for yourself, of course, and I'll continue to speak from decades of my own experience.
I'll bet UPS didn't build their system in one go though. And they probably didn't outsource it, either.
Actually, they do work with the consultants employed by a lot of their system vedndors... but I'll bet that, regardless, they never lost $12 BILLION in the process. And that system is probably quite a bit more substantial than they UK's medical IT needs. They manifest billions of packages on hundreds of thousands of trucks and aircraft, with interfaces through thousands of offices and millions of user desktops and direct plumbing into 3rd party systems of all sizes... it's quite the thing, really, and a larger beast than most government IT systems. My point is simply that it's doable, and they simply can't afford to lose the way that government projects can (since career government IT people and the managers that budget and run their projects are essentially unfireable).
So, while I don't know if Verizon is bundling the service to consumers, Verizon is certainly bundling the services to the Counties, since Verizon already has whatever permissions it needs for internet and voice services.
My Mom (in Montgomery County) has FIOS up to her house for data. It's fast. She's using Comcast for cable TV. She called Verizon about switching over to them for 'cable' service so she could bundle that, and her copper land line all together. They said "Sure! we'll have someone out to talk to you about that tomorrow morning!" She asked me to stop by just in case there were going to be "any of those techie issues."
Well, there was. The "issue" was that Verizon's cable service was actually an affiliate sale of DishNetwork (or was it DirecTV?), and there on the lawn was a guy ready to bolt a dish to the side of her house. And it was a 2-year commitment! I'll allow for 10% of Mom not knowing what she was doing on the phone with Verizon, and 90% Extremely Sleazy Customer Service Tactics. Incredible. So, with the guy standing there, screwgun in hand, I called Verizon, who told be that it was "too late" to cancel the "order" but that in 24 months, we could switch over to FIOS TV, which would surely be available by then. We told them that it was also too late for the lawyer's phone to stop ringing, and presto the installer (who spoke no English!) was getting a cell call, and he had the dish packed back up and in his van before we got into our second cup of coffee. Beware the cable/FIOS state of flux in Maryland, especially Montgomery County. Of course, you also have RCN as another option.
Remember, too, that most companies are nowhere near the size of a big government ministry because they don't have the huge customer interface: millions of customers, and millions of different types of contacts
Hence my citation of UPS (www.ups.com). They DO have millions of customers and hundreds of integration schemes, and it has to work, around the clock. They're a great example of doing it right (as is FedEx). You're right that the really spectacular failures put private businesses OUT of business... but that's part of why government projects are so horrific. Those fail, and there's no conesequences (except to the taxpayers). So, they just do it all over again.
The behind-the-scenes IT operations for UPS (well, and the public-facing stuff) completely eclipses something like this, and it runs more or less like clockwork... substitute merchants for doctors, integrated warehouse operations for pharmacies, and half the civilized world tracking shipments in the second half of December... and then COMPETE with FedEx or DHL, and you get: success. Socialized stuff like this chokes because it involves people who don't quite have the fire lit under their asses the way that they would in a more competitive setting.
Except you know, and I know, that in the context in which police are typically discusssed in this forum, it all comes down to whether and to what degree police bully, harass, abuse their authority, capriciously hand out citations just for fun, and the whole littany of other things that people trot out when they say they don't trust the police. Of course people change their tune when they want (or need) help. The question is: when your house is NOT on fire, but a police officer asks you to do something that you don't immediately see as being relevent or connected to how you're perceiving the situation you're in, do you trust them?
They're NOT just another person to whom common, but not specialized, courtesy is a reasonable position. They're someone who has been through training, and has been continually (every day) measured by the people the work for and are scrutinized by for their suitability in dealing with the whole range of safety, crime, and other issues... and sometimes the things that they think need to happen aren't going to fit within the "same courtesy I'd show any presumed-decent person I see walking down the street model."
The uniform is your first clue that the person should get more of your credence than a typical person you'd encounter. Your position is that they don't get that, but rather that you'd give them exactly the same social weight (and influence over your actions) that you might give me, if we met on the street. That doesn't work, if a copy is to be expected to do their job in sometimes difficult circumstances. The "I respect everybody equally" position doesn't make sense to me. You should be more ready to respond to a cop's direction, requests, and queries more readily than you ever should mine, should we pass on the street. You can't possibly mean that the uniform doesn't buy that respect because you don't know if the person wearing it is actually an officer, or because you've heard there are bad cops in the world and you're assuming that each one you see may be one of the ones you see on bad TV shows.
It is, on balance, a safe assumption that a uniformed officer can have the benefit of the doubt, and significantly more latitude than you'd lend to any other average person.
I'll repeat once more, just in case: The OP is saying something different than "cops don't deserve jack-shit". Ok, you got it then? Good. That's the only point I'm trying to make.
Sorry, but I'm taking him at his word, and in his context. He's suggesting that they don't deserve anything until they've demonstrated that they're the type he likes/trusts. Whether or not he says he can/does like some or even most cops, the nuance here is that just because someone he sees is a cop, he owes them nothing, simply because they are a cop. I contend that he's got an unworkable (or really counter-productive) take on this. If you have to have a cop's worth demonstrated before they graduate from not deserving anything to deserving your respect, then there is no presumption of decency implied. He wants to wait until he's sure, and my point is that it's usually too late at that point, given the way that most interaction with cops and other emergency people operate and the circumstances under which you'll most often encounter them and risk friction. Your take (and mine)... the presumption of decency... is the only way to operate.
There is no other way to interpret the entirety of the post in question except that he likes and respects cops - but not until he's seen their worth demonstrated. I trust you can appreciate the difference, because it's the difference between you and him, subtle as it is in this context, but heavy duty as it is in the real world when you're being approached by someone wearing the uniform. You expect and presume decency, he hopes for it, but is expecting the opposite - and that sets the tone for your interaction with the very person in question... and his posture contributes to the very problem he's complaining about (distrust).
Slashdot Mirror
are we a police state yet?
Oh, please. Do you really think that the obviously absurd expectations and low level of training exhibited by the campus cop(s) involved is an indication of what "police" (as in, "all police") do? Have you suddenly found that your local municipality's laws have changed? Have you suddenly stopped seeing the firing of cops caught doing this sort of thing? In a "police state," this is policy, not a much-yelled-about, firing/arresting event. Your question is no different than asking whether or not, since some airline pilot was caught heading to work under the influence, we're in a "drunk pilot state." There are also badly broken people in other professional roles... I'm sure you've heard some stories. Does that mean we're in a "rapist dentist state?"
What we are in is a "hyper extrapolation state," where the incorrect actions of 1/100,000,000 people is discussed here as if congress had just passed some new statute about how we'll be treating all students that refuse to show ID in an area where you have to show ID. I'd be interested how this discussion would go if instead we were talking about someone having captured video of a person (without ID) who got into a secured part of the campus and assaulted a student. All we'd hear about would be the absent security, and how we're in an "assault society," blah blah. These guys weren't trained right, and should have better known how to handle someone making a stink about carrying the ID needed to use the facility. They blew it, and they get to lose their jobs. In your imaginary, rhetorical "police state," you wouldn't be having this conversation.
3. Have said government or government agency spend untold hours trying to get the truth out. Usually this operation fails.
At for this audience here, you must add:
3(b). Complain that the government has propoganda machine set up to "get out the truth" and straighten out toxic spin-FUD spread by idiots, because obviously any office run by a government agency specifically to "correct" wrong-headed or outright BS notions circulating in the news or blogosphere is obviously Evil.
At least, that always seems to be the groupthink take on it. Unless of course it's NASA doing the correcting, I'm guessing. If the FCC or DoD do exactly the same thing, then The Evil goes without saying. *sigh*
A couple of cleansing asteroids actually would not hurt getting rid of those little pests walking upright and haven't learned yet how to use their enlarged brains
Well, then, what have you done today to lower the population? Oops! Silly me. You can't read this, because you've killed yourself. I hope you at least did it while taking out some of the religious zealots that want to turn Iraq into the next Taliban stomping ground. Because that would actually help. But if you just plain killed yourself, that would be constructive, also. I mean, based your theory, anyway. Oh wait: you just want other people to die. Silly me!
So, we're talking about four people working for ACORN, and ACORN themselves turned them in. And I still haven't seen any references to previous problems with ACORN
No, they didn't "turn them in." They fired those people after their registration-stuffing was shown to ACORN by the St. Louis board of elections. Prior to that, the chairwoman of the Kansas City Board of Elections brought the information to the FBI when it became apparent that 40% of the 35,000 submissions from Acorn looked suspect. The ACORN chapter that was so industriously filling in voter registration cards by copying out of the phone book (how original!) of course fired those people - they were already being indicted! ACORN doesn't have much shame, but even they know a losing PR battle when they see one.
Hell, the group had a $1.1million dollar AmeriCorps grant revoked several years ago when it became apparent that they were using the grant money to pay political activists. But just in the wake of this most recent election, we now Pennsylvania and Maryland also launching probes into ACORN-related registration practices.
80% of the vote was counted by two firms, Diebold and ES&S. They're run by two brothers. There is no need to postulate a massive team of conspirators operating invisibly -- the system is centralized, it's suceptible to centralized attacks (not to mention internal corruption).
The system is not centralized. The equipment is programmed and operated and the votes tallied by the individual election commissions that purchase and deploy the equipment. They set up their own smart card collection routines, use their own networks to round of the results from each machine, etc. There is no evil Castle Diebold through which every municipality's voting data is passed on its way to the state capital or county office building where the information is consolidated for a given jurisdiction. Once that hardware is rolled out to the end using districts, they (the election board staffers in each area) deal with programming their particular slate of candidates, and collecting the results. This is why incompetant poll workers make a mess, but doesn't explain why people who witness just such nonsense (like, no one remembered to bring the master smart card to the polling place, etc) say, "it's the people at Diebold messing with our election!"
The licensing requirements are steep, so it only shows up on one site only. Stifling? Oh yes. Legal? Very much so. They are so deep in the trees that they can't see how much Myspace can help smaller bands, and artist discovery.
But the bands can certainly choose not to release their material in a way that restricts distribution. If you're a garage band looking for attention, you've got every mechanism in the world to put that music out there in a way that will not, cannot, get anyone in trouble for spreading it around.
Sounds like ancient history to me, have you got some evidence of something like this happening in the last decade or two?
This year. This election. Here's a more-or-less random from the first page of Google results, but it shows the way to the local news coverage. Thousands of questionable registrations. The people involved were doing it systematically, but the group for which they were working ("ACORN") has been confronted over this stuff for the past several elections. Needless to say, they were shocked - SHOCKED! - that it would be happening, again, as they work to sign up more voters in dem-friendly urban areas. Shocked!
You mean it might show up as a widespread pattern of exit poll discrepancies?
Gee, do you think that maybe the long-standing tradition of ambushing people as they leave polling places and finding the willing ones with time on their hands that will answer the polls may not be keeping up with the hyper-focused to-the-household campaigning, the huge shift to absentee balloting, and a more divisive than ever media-fueled distortion of reported opinions? Or that perhaps the exit polling consortium, which is funded collectively by a handful of media outlets, may be conducting their questioning with workers that tend to reflect the biases shown over and over to be present in the media companies they represent?
If that's not what you mean, how else would it stick out like a "sore thumb"?
Oh, I don't know... like maybe a shred of evidence, perhaps? Do you have any idea the number of people and the scope of the conspiracy that would be required to introduce millions of phantom votes in a general election? Millions? That would involve thousands of poll workers, election board staffers, re-count workers, and so on. They'd have to run a tighter ship than the people that got thousands of NASA employees to fake the moon landing without a single person spilling the beans, right? I mean, you do also think that was faked, right?
It was more the ability to turn out the right voters that helped them, rather than an overall increase in turnout.
Which is what it always means, everywhere. These things are all local, or at least never more than state-wide, in terms of their importance to an election.
magically creating millions of votes out of nowhere
Really! Millions. Do tell! (as opposed to just making stuff up, now)
a lot of the voter fraud exploits the Republicans were using in 2004 involved trying to disenfanchise the downtrodden (e.g. ex-convicts, black people, etc).
If, by "ex-cons" you mean "felons," then you should understand that allowing them to vote is election fraud. Until the law changes in most places, activists trying to get felons somehow into a voting booth are the ones committing the crime.
And, "black people?" By what mechansism are you finding voter registration to be tied to race? If that's your focus, how would you explain the (primarily dem) activists who just got busted for producing thousands and thousands of completely fictional registrations in predominantly urban areas like Kansas City and St. Louis? The same people registered multiple times, dead people registered, and completely fictional people with fake SSNs, etc? All registered in districts aimed at boosting votes against more conservative candidates. "Millions" of fraudulant votes? Come on. That would stick out like a sore thumb, which isn't the same as being a sore loser.
Incommensurate demands? Like what?
Like "free" healthcare, including batteries of medical tests using equipment and services that costs thousands per patient, per event to operate/provide... while in the same breath demanding subsidized college tuition, tax credits for everything under the sun... all of that nice have your cake and eat it too type stuff.
Like, freedom from violent fanatics without any inconvenient actual action that might be required to actually deal with such people.
Like magical minimum wages provided to employees of small businesses without the necessary consequence of the small business hiring fewer people or raising the prices of what they provide.
Like demands that Wal-Mart be somehow less damaging to higher-priced local businesses, without actually running Wal-Mart out of town, because gee, it's sure nice to be able to go in there for lower prices.
Like demands that students not be "socially promoted" through public education without basic education skills while also demanding that substandard teachers and administrators not be let go, and students not be expected to comprehensively read and write.
Like demanding that when choosing to live below sea level in the direct path of recurring hurricanes, that the government take care of the costs of the inevitable messes without expecting the residents to recognize that they've chosen (for as long as they can get the government to keep bailing them out) to lead a more expensive life on other taxpayers' pockets.
You said "honesty." So, yeah, honesty would be calling that sort of stuff like it actually is.
High turnout is bad for the right wing.
Um, exept in the previous election (here, I'm referring to the US), when it was the Republicans' ability to create a high turnout that was credited with much of their election success. Your statement assumes a steady state of context, which is nonsense.
Taxpayers pay the US Treasury, they don't pay NASA. Politicians decide whether any money comes out of the Treasury, not the taxpayers. NASA doesn't have to pander to the public, it has to pander to politicians. Seriously, when was the last time an astronaut called your house asking for money, or you saw a NASA billboard asking for donations?
Oh, come now. We ELECT those politicians, and they have excruciatingly precise ways to gauge how their constituents feel about stuff like that. I personally can't stand either of my state's senators for a range of reasons, but one of them (Barbara Mikulski) does do a lot of pounding around on capital hill to increase funding for NASA. Of course, that agency's Goddard center is in her turf, and employs a lot of people and contractors. And I've had more than a few polls, taken by her people, that ask me to chime in on one thing or another (including NASA funding). If NASA's mission pissed off her constituents, her continuing and very vocal support for it would cost her votes.
Are College Students Techno Idiots?
If, by "college students," we mean "most college students," just like we mean "most people" when we ask, "are people techno idiots?"
Honestly, answers to a question like that, in this venue, are going to be so distorted by the abnormal slashdot nerd density as to be meaningless when talking about a wider demographic. My personal experience with most college students is that they are just as much in the "it's just magic, and it works" (as well as the "my computer is so slow! it won't even run the new free stuff I download any more!") camp as the average non-college-student person.
The "technical" stuff with which they're comfortable (as in, feel mastery thereof) are the dedicated-purpose devices that don't really let you hose them up (phones, cameras, simple MP3 players, etc). But they don't know how or why any of it works any more than they know how or why their car, their democracy, their adrenal glands, or the free WiFi at Panera works. And I'm not just talking about the liberal arts majors.
or there was a little bias exhibitted by the editors
Is that like being a little pregnant?
Actually, the military in general does a pretty good job of PR, in terms of making itself a focus of national pride. NASA could take some pointers from them.
Yup. And just look at how the NRO was quick to point out how the tsunami and Katrina responses were aided by their orbital goodies. That was getting coverage in plain old newspapers. NASA contributes all sorts of science in similar arenas, but it's usually conveyed (if at all) to the public in such incredibly dry, academic terms that causes narcolepsy.
Yeah, it's hard to justify on a funding level because it's not immediately spectacular, but it's still the right thing to do.
I maintain that these thing are not mutually exclusive. Doing science with a bit of flair is scarcely more expensive than doing it without. You may not like spending money on projects that don't expressly pursue the areas of inquiries that you're passionate about, but I think you're really missing how hard it is to get 400+ congress-creatures to write a check for 21cm radiation research when their constituents are thinking more about their local pothole problem, whether or not their congressional representative has $90k of cash in their freezer, whether or not North Korea is about to step off of some cliff, or whatever else wanders across their television that day. When NASA wanders across their television in a compelling way, it improves the prospects for everything that NASA wants to do. Bigger picture, here. You will never make those subtle cosmological studies interesting enough for a wide enough audience to appreciate (with their wallets). That sense of adventure, when coupled with at least one of the research areas being pursued, is a vital part of the overall mission.
It's so great NASA has the right goal: entertaining the masses.
"The masses" would be the people that pay for what NASA does. I mean, I know I pay a lot of taxes. And the whole purpose of missions like this is to find activities that do benefit their program (more experience in different circumstances) while also stimulating an interest, in the taxpayers, to continuing to fund this stuff. Making sure that some of the testing and learning also happens to be interesting to watch is simply smart. We're a long way from stomping around Mars and looking under rocks, but we can do some very good CEV testing and some other very cool science near one of those interesting big rocks. And it will look great in HD.
I think instead of buying into the propaganda you have bought into, I will think for myself.
I haven't bought into anything. I personally know cops, and have dealt with many, many of them in a lot of scenarios. I have never come across a whiff of the rampant corruption that you insinuate. Which doesn't mean there aren't crooked cops, because of course there are. Just like there are narcotics-dealing doctors, patient-raping dentists, child-abusing teachers, and very crooked computer programmers.
However: your experience sounds way, way more like a local/cultural problem. Why your local elected officials don't have the backbone to hire a police command structure that doesn't put up with what you're describing is the far better question. Please do think for yourself, of course, and I'll continue to speak from decades of my own experience.
I'll bet UPS didn't build their system in one go though. And they probably didn't outsource it, either.
Actually, they do work with the consultants employed by a lot of their system vedndors... but I'll bet that, regardless, they never lost $12 BILLION in the process. And that system is probably quite a bit more substantial than they UK's medical IT needs. They manifest billions of packages on hundreds of thousands of trucks and aircraft, with interfaces through thousands of offices and millions of user desktops and direct plumbing into 3rd party systems of all sizes... it's quite the thing, really, and a larger beast than most government IT systems. My point is simply that it's doable, and they simply can't afford to lose the way that government projects can (since career government IT people and the managers that budget and run their projects are essentially unfireable).
So, while I don't know if Verizon is bundling the service to consumers, Verizon is certainly bundling the services to the Counties, since Verizon already has whatever permissions it needs for internet and voice services.
My Mom (in Montgomery County) has FIOS up to her house for data. It's fast. She's using Comcast for cable TV. She called Verizon about switching over to them for 'cable' service so she could bundle that, and her copper land line all together. They said "Sure! we'll have someone out to talk to you about that tomorrow morning!" She asked me to stop by just in case there were going to be "any of those techie issues."
Well, there was. The "issue" was that Verizon's cable service was actually an affiliate sale of DishNetwork (or was it DirecTV?), and there on the lawn was a guy ready to bolt a dish to the side of her house. And it was a 2-year commitment! I'll allow for 10% of Mom not knowing what she was doing on the phone with Verizon, and 90% Extremely Sleazy Customer Service Tactics. Incredible. So, with the guy standing there, screwgun in hand, I called Verizon, who told be that it was "too late" to cancel the "order" but that in 24 months, we could switch over to FIOS TV, which would surely be available by then. We told them that it was also too late for the lawyer's phone to stop ringing, and presto the installer (who spoke no English!) was getting a cell call, and he had the dish packed back up and in his van before we got into our second cup of coffee. Beware the cable/FIOS state of flux in Maryland, especially Montgomery County. Of course, you also have RCN as another option.
Remember, too, that most companies are nowhere near the size of a big government ministry because they don't have the huge customer interface: millions of customers, and millions of different types of contacts
Hence my citation of UPS (www.ups.com). They DO have millions of customers and hundreds of integration schemes, and it has to work, around the clock. They're a great example of doing it right (as is FedEx). You're right that the really spectacular failures put private businesses OUT of business... but that's part of why government projects are so horrific. Those fail, and there's no conesequences (except to the taxpayers). So, they just do it all over again.
The behind-the-scenes IT operations for UPS (well, and the public-facing stuff) completely eclipses something like this, and it runs more or less like clockwork... substitute merchants for doctors, integrated warehouse operations for pharmacies, and half the civilized world tracking shipments in the second half of December... and then COMPETE with FedEx or DHL, and you get: success. Socialized stuff like this chokes because it involves people who don't quite have the fire lit under their asses the way that they would in a more competitive setting.
I thought you said these things were supposed to be bad for humans... if that's the case sign me up, I'll take one for the team here.
OK, Dr. Von Doom.
Ah ha!
Except you know, and I know, that in the context in which police are typically discusssed in this forum, it all comes down to whether and to what degree police bully, harass, abuse their authority, capriciously hand out citations just for fun, and the whole littany of other things that people trot out when they say they don't trust the police. Of course people change their tune when they want (or need) help. The question is: when your house is NOT on fire, but a police officer asks you to do something that you don't immediately see as being relevent or connected to how you're perceiving the situation you're in, do you trust them?
They're NOT just another person to whom common, but not specialized, courtesy is a reasonable position. They're someone who has been through training, and has been continually (every day) measured by the people the work for and are scrutinized by for their suitability in dealing with the whole range of safety, crime, and other issues... and sometimes the things that they think need to happen aren't going to fit within the "same courtesy I'd show any presumed-decent person I see walking down the street model."
The uniform is your first clue that the person should get more of your credence than a typical person you'd encounter. Your position is that they don't get that, but rather that you'd give them exactly the same social weight (and influence over your actions) that you might give me, if we met on the street. That doesn't work, if a copy is to be expected to do their job in sometimes difficult circumstances. The "I respect everybody equally" position doesn't make sense to me. You should be more ready to respond to a cop's direction, requests, and queries more readily than you ever should mine, should we pass on the street. You can't possibly mean that the uniform doesn't buy that respect because you don't know if the person wearing it is actually an officer, or because you've heard there are bad cops in the world and you're assuming that each one you see may be one of the ones you see on bad TV shows.
It is, on balance, a safe assumption that a uniformed officer can have the benefit of the doubt, and significantly more latitude than you'd lend to any other average person.
I'll repeat once more, just in case: The OP is saying something different than "cops don't deserve jack-shit". Ok, you got it then? Good. That's the only point I'm trying to make.
... the presumption of decency ... is the only way to operate.
Sorry, but I'm taking him at his word, and in his context. He's suggesting that they don't deserve anything until they've demonstrated that they're the type he likes/trusts. Whether or not he says he can/does like some or even most cops, the nuance here is that just because someone he sees is a cop, he owes them nothing, simply because they are a cop. I contend that he's got an unworkable (or really counter-productive) take on this. If you have to have a cop's worth demonstrated before they graduate from not deserving anything to deserving your respect, then there is no presumption of decency implied. He wants to wait until he's sure, and my point is that it's usually too late at that point, given the way that most interaction with cops and other emergency people operate and the circumstances under which you'll most often encounter them and risk friction. Your take (and mine)
There is no other way to interpret the entirety of the post in question except that he likes and respects cops - but not until he's seen their worth demonstrated. I trust you can appreciate the difference, because it's the difference between you and him, subtle as it is in this context, but heavy duty as it is in the real world when you're being approached by someone wearing the uniform. You expect and presume decency, he hopes for it, but is expecting the opposite - and that sets the tone for your interaction with the very person in question... and his posture contributes to the very problem he's complaining about (distrust).