Look, there are only two options here. As a society...
We can accommodate and adapt to the surveillance and intrusions of our employers into our private lives,
We can choose to confront and reject these intrusions
You and me both know where the first road takes us. And that's why we're both obligated to take the second. So, no, our free citizens do not need to learn how to adapt to "threats." Rather we need to learn solidarity and how to defend each other.
Right. You're not saying that you explicitly support institutional surveillance and intrusion into every aspect of one's personal life (ie: totalitarianism); you're just saying that people should accept that such totalitarianism exists and the prudent thing to do is to accommodate it.
I would point out to you that when you advance these opinions you are not merely "describing reality". You are also creating reality. You are normalizing and thereby legitimizing these intrusive acts by saying they are just part of our daily panorama that we must accept. Well, no, we don't have to accept this. We can choose to make our society however we want.
In point of fact, we have a moral duty to reject these intrusions and to insist that we are governed by some standards of decency that allows for basic freedoms exercised. Among those freedoms is the freedom to legally express one's own personality on one's own time without having one's livelihood threatened.
We have an obligation to defend these freedoms. We have an obligation to confront the institutions who threaten us. We have an obligation to defend the victims of these intrusions, not to abandon our fellow citizens, or condemn them as "stupid" because they chose to make a joke during their own private time.
I think that your logic is true on one level, but it's also very naive and dangerous because it ignores the real mechanisms by which freedom are eroded. You may think that when you alert people to the risks of expressing one's thought, that you are simply describing the objective landscape of America. In fact you are doing something far worse: You are reinforcing the underlying authoritarian message: people should be afraid and therefore unquestioningly obedient.
The more we internalize these fears, the more leeway the myriad opponents of freedom have to control and suppress. If one can't make a joke about drugs without risking one's livelihood, then what will protect another's right to make a joke about sex or religion? Soon the expression of all meaningful human experience is compromised. Our real freedom is forfeited by the simple calculation that the invasive and controlling behavior of our employers is "just the way things are".
The only moral course of action for proponents of freedom is to confront and condemn the actions of her employers, and not make petty excuses and blame the victims for being so "stupid". We need to have some solidarity and insist upon our freedom.
Exactly. You're not saying that what she did merited being raped. You're just saying that it was stupid for her to be walking around in those tight sexy clothes, showing off her big ol' titties.
People need to learn that there are risks to exercising their freedoms, and that is why its smarter to never do or say anything remotely controversial ever, even in a venue explicitly designated for the conduct of one's personal life.
The nice thing about EVE is that it's not grindy like WoW and other MMOs. The only thing that affects your rate of skill point acquisition in EVE is which skills you decide to train. You don't have to hunt for XP to level up. Somebody that "grinds" all the time in EVE has no skill advantage over the casual player.
I've seen this again and again. Too many young women are just bad at life. They might be attractive, fit, and successful at their jobs, but outside of that there is isolation and void and fear. And much like their cars and their computers, they want to dump their unhappiness on Mr. Man for him to fix it. I don't mind reinstalling Windows every now and then, but I am not a spiritual healer and if my loving doesn't take away the pain, I don't know what will.
No. No. No. None of this "Experiences vary from college to college" crap. You said that 60% of college professors are Marxists who support "Gov't forced re-distribution" and similar policies. And now you're changing your story. I went to an elite university for both undergrad and grad, so by your estimates I would have been encountering "Marxism" left and right. You should just admit that your estimates for the prevalence of Marxism are totally baseless.
I think you're missing the point. The point isn't that there's any real equivalency between embracing the hysterical superstitions of the rapture and rejecting those superstitions. The point is that saying there is an equivalency makes superstitious Evangelicals feel better about themselves. If Evangelicals had to accept that people trended towards atheism when they went to college because at college students asked hard questions and decided religious were baseless, then that would present a serious dilemma. Honest Evangelicals would be forced to concede that their answers to those questions are specious.
It's much easier to believe that students reject religion at college because their "Marxist" engineering professors are the agents of Satan and brainwashing everybody.
I worry about sending too many kids to college because I doubt it will actually improve their critical faculties. Republicans are worried about sending too many kids to college because they worry that it might improve their critical faculties.
The "college marxist" phenomenon might have had some basis in the culture of 60s radicalism, but today it's completely exaggerated. There are a few aging hippies of the "Ward Churchill" genus but younger professors do not have the luxury of engaging in politics.
In my time at college, I can only recall one time when a professor espouse a leftist political viewpoint. During an English class discussion I claimed that "there's never been a female dominant society." The ardently Feminist professor suggested (wrongly) that I was ignorant, but refused to provide a counter-example.
And that's it. That's all the "Marxism" I endured in my 4 year degree. It wasn't even enough to even sharpen my critical faculties. I should really write a letter complaining about what a limited exposure to different ideas I had in college. And given that I also had to endure lots of discredited right-wing propaganda in college, such as the "Laffer curve" and other falsehoods from my Econ professors, I think that on balance my college education basically just served to squelch all my political instincts and turn me and my fellow students into bland careerist rats.
During Graduate School I was living in the hood My neighbors were disadvantaged urban youth and I talked to them about their about their future. They were being pushed towards college and considering engineering. But they just didn't have the basic skills to succeed in a college engineering program. Their senior level math was going to algebra/geometry. They weren't ready to fore-go the prime of their life to play academic catch-up. They didn't even know what tools they lacked. Sending these kids to college is setting them up to fail. It's horribly cruel: colleges with lenient admissions standards just take their student loans, and then kick them out when, predictably, they cannot independently function in an academic environment. The schools keep all the money, and the students are labeled failures for life.
Like so many other things, higher education in the hood is just a scam. It's a much better idea to just get certified as a mechanic or a electrician or a nurse. If you are a mediocre student, those are probably the best ways to enter the middle class. Instead we keep repeating "You must have a college education to succeed" which only encourages unqualified youth to saddle themselves with an enormous debt.
The problem doesn't stem from giving kids nutritional guidelines. When I was growing up we learned about the food groups, etc, and nobody got disciplined for eating junk food.
What we're seeing is the inevitable result of that process, where effective discipline has simply given way entirely to arbitrary enforcement of state power. But the process didn't begin when they started talking about the four food groups. The process started when we decided we needed to "get tough on crime" and we culturally embraced zero-tolerance. The problem started when politicians started to convince people that law enforcement was the best answer for all our social ills.
Obviously there's a conflict-of-interest here, but that doesn't mean the guy is necessarily wrong. It just means you should exercise skepticism and independent judgment.
In my independent judgment, I happen to agree with the guy. Clockspeeds have been stalled at ~ 3Ghz for nearly a decade now. There are only so many ways of getting more per clock cycle and radical parallelization is a good answer. Many research communities, such as fluid dynamics, are already performing real computational work on the GPU, and the entire industry is shifting towards a GPGPU paradigm. Programming languages are also being written to further take advantage of parallelization. In my humble opinion, we're approaching the where every computation that can be processed in parallel will be. For what's it's worth, I actually think both Intel and AMD/ATI are doing a much better job at this than Nvidia.
The relevant excerpt of the Arizona law is as follows:
20 B. FOR ANY LAWFUL CONTACT MADE BY A LAW ENFORCEMENT OFFICIAL OR AGENCY
21 OF THIS STATE OR A COUNTY, CITY, TOWN OR OTHER POLITICAL SUBDIVISION OF THIS
22 STATE WHERE REASONABLE SUSPICION EXISTS THAT THE PERSON IS AN ALIEN WHO IS
23 UNLAWFULLY PRESENT IN THE UNITED STATES, A REASONABLE ATTEMPT SHALL BE MADE,
24 WHEN PRACTICABLE, TO DETERMINE THE IMMIGRATION STATUS OF THE PERSON. THE
25 PERSON'S IMMIGRATION STATUS SHALL BE VERIFIED WITH THE FEDERAL GOVERNMENT
26 PURSUANT TO 8 UNITED STATES CODE SECTION 1373(c).
As you can see, the law is quite sweeping in its demand that each"lawful contact" be subjected to scrutiny about immigration status. What constitutes "reasonable suspicion?" The law doesn't define it. In practice, racial profiling is likely to be a significant factor. That is exactly what happened when this shit was passed in Prince William county, Virginia. Even if you reject the idea that racial hysteria motivated the bill, the outcome of this legislation served to empower and legitimize bigotry. The law gave tremendous power to a minority of officers who couldn't wait to abuse their power.
I would like to address the issue of illegal immigration, but not by hassling innocent people who look sufficiently Latin, or by jailing tourists and foreign exchange students, or by putting some poor kid's Chinese grandma in the slammer because her English is shitty.
I don't understand why the break-even time on solar has to be on the order of a handful of years for it to be economically feasible.
The break-even time for nuclear is over a decade, and it's pretty long for hydro projects too. So why do we insist that solar has to turn a profit Real Quick Now?
Part of the the reason people seek a short break-even time is, incredibly enough, the success of solar research.
The rapid advancement of any technology always gives an incentive to hold off; I know people who refused to upgrade their computers for several years because price drops or performance increases were always just a few months around the corner. In isolation it may be economically viable to place solar panels on your roof, but the cost per watt of solar power just keeps dropping. It's potentially cheaper, and certainly less risky, to hold off on buying solar panels until the next batch of innovations hit the shelves. One way to mitigate that risk is for solar to turn a faster profit.
I think you're absolutely right about the scale of the problem. But we need to evolve the profession, not subsidize a dying profit model. We need to create a market mechanism for journalists to get paid.
I can only speculate about what such a incentive system might look like. Perhaps like-minded blogs could band together and fund their own news agencies. Or maybe newspapers will follow Salon's online subscription model. Personally I would much prefer a new profit model if it meant news organizations got their revenue from subscribers rather than advertisers.
We are still in the middle of a technological revolution so nobody can predict what the solution is going to be, but I think it's likely that the market will find a solution for this issue.
Did you read the summary? Any paper that adopts non-profit status will not be allowed to have a partisan editorial viewpoint.
The rules said that newspapers won't be allowed to make endorsements. They will still be able to dictate the focus of their news coverage, slant articles, and publish partisan editorials and opinion pieces. They just can't explicitly make a list of candidates telling people how to vote.
Presumably the goal is to preserve newspapers as a necessary source of information gathering. The idea is that in the age of the internet, we face a free-rider problem and fundamental news gathering is less profitable. Ostensibly journalists are performing a public service.
But how well this proposed solution will address the real problem? There are lots of right-wing newspapers that are not profitable but they have dedicated corporate sponsors so they keep operating. Consider the Washington Times, or the Pittsburgh Tribune. If we let newspapers be non-profits we are giving a huge tax-break to Richard Mellon Scaife, and Rupert Murdoch, and Sun Myung Moon. All of the money these guy pump into their right-wing propaganda machines will be tax-deductible.
I want to save newspapers too, but this proposal will incentivize more propaganda than it will actual news.
"Her assertion should not be misread to infer that she never broke school rules," the district said of Ms. Redding in a brief, "only that she was never caught."
Their attitude wasn't "Guilty until proven Innocent." It was "Guilty despite being proven Innocent" or simply "Guilty".
I agree that our society is prone to hysteria about sex-offenders. However, if you think that's a basis for letting these administrators off the hook then you are entirely missing the point:
Situation 1: A school administrator strip-searches a 13 year old honor student upon the flimsiest pretext. The student is forced to show her vagina and spread her legs.
Outcome: The defiant school district defends its administrators all the way to the Supreme Court. School officials and prosecutors solemnly testify about the incalculable harm created by drugs and the necessity of a zero-tolerance policy.
Situation 2: A 13 year old girl uses her cell phone to take a scandalous photo of herself and sends it to her boyfriend. The school discovers this after confiscating the boy's cellphone when it rings in class.
Outcome: Both kids are criminally prosecuted for trafficking child pornography. School officials and prosecutors solemnly testify about the incalculable harm created by 'sexting' and the necessity of a zero-tolerance policy.
Obviously the real issue is not the sanctity of our children's bodies. The real issue is that some of our school administrators are using every possible pretext to expand and consolidate their power over students. By crassly exploiting the "think of the children" sentiment, schools institute ever more invasive and authoritarian policies. We are turning our schools into a police state. Instead of teaching our kids how to be responsible citizens, we are priming them for a totalitarian society.
The current drug debate isn't whether or not you should be legally able to smoke up and drive at the same time, the debate is whether or not its fair to sentence somebody to be brutalized and raped in America's prison system for enjoying a harmless substance in the privacy of their own home.
1) A budget surplus does not imply that the debt is decreasing. Read a book.
2) Even by your own chart you can see that the Clinton was the only fiscally responsible President in recent history. Furthermore, he improved every year he was in office. So what's your point? That Clinton doesn't deserve any credit for being fiscally prudent because he wasn't marginally more prudent where he actually achieved a surplus that exceeded the interest on the debt? Because that's a very dumb point.
Well you're obviously lying because by your own "Perot" charts I can see that military spending is the majority of discretionary spending. Considering that this doesn't even include the budget for the State Department (CIA), the Department of Energy (nuclear weapons), or our two ongoing wars, it's obvious that defense spending is the place in the budget where you can trim a lot of the fat.
Dollars. And if you didn't even know that then you should consider keeping quiet because you're only going to embarrass yourself.
Something will have to give.
The government can't pay off the bonds by printing money without crashing the $.
Or presumably the government could just pay off the debt as was done under the Clinton administration.
But the recent market crash has caused a run on treasuries and the only major international holder of treasuries selling into this market is Brazil.
Treasuries are the one asset class that is shining in this godawful market. Everybody went into the treasuries which is why the yield on the t-bill is so low. It's even been negative, that's how much in demand those t-bills are.
Which is very strange behavior unless you assume that China, Japan and the Arabs decision makers actually believe they HAVE TO support western currencies and economies. Granting on a level they do have to, but that just can't last forever and bailing out of, whatever the fuck that economic pacts name was, has to be better then waiting for the treasury/dollar bubble to pop and wind up with change for your years of exports.
I'm astonished when I encounter this aggressive ignorance on slashdot. I wouldn't expect somebody to start mouthing off about circuit design if they had never studied EE, but for some reason when it comes to Economics every slashdotter imagines himself to be an authority not matter how ignorant of the basic facts he is.
The government does not "appropriate" money from Social Security. The Social Security Administration uses their surplus revenue to buy government bonds. Those bonds are part of the government's general obligation. Paying those bonds and the interest on those bonds isn't optional. Just as the Federal Government must pay back China, it must pay back Social Security.
Social Security isn't going to implode in 2017. The SSA's government bonds give it solvency all the way out until 2045 by conservative projections and even after that it's projected to be able to pay out 75% of the current benefit.
Slashdot Mirror
You and me both know where the first road takes us. And that's why we're both obligated to take the second. So, no, our free citizens do not need to learn how to adapt to "threats." Rather we need to learn solidarity and how to defend each other.
Right. You're not saying that you explicitly support institutional surveillance and intrusion into every aspect of one's personal life (ie: totalitarianism); you're just saying that people should accept that such totalitarianism exists and the prudent thing to do is to accommodate it.
I would point out to you that when you advance these opinions you are not merely "describing reality". You are also creating reality. You are normalizing and thereby legitimizing these intrusive acts by saying they are just part of our daily panorama that we must accept. Well, no, we don't have to accept this. We can choose to make our society however we want.
In point of fact, we have a moral duty to reject these intrusions and to insist that we are governed by some standards of decency that allows for basic freedoms exercised. Among those freedoms is the freedom to legally express one's own personality on one's own time without having one's livelihood threatened.
We have an obligation to defend these freedoms. We have an obligation to confront the institutions who threaten us. We have an obligation to defend the victims of these intrusions, not to abandon our fellow citizens, or condemn them as "stupid" because they chose to make a joke during their own private time.
I think that your logic is true on one level, but it's also very naive and dangerous because it ignores the real mechanisms by which freedom are eroded. You may think that when you alert people to the risks of expressing one's thought, that you are simply describing the objective landscape of America. In fact you are doing something far worse: You are reinforcing the underlying authoritarian message: people should be afraid and therefore unquestioningly obedient.
The more we internalize these fears, the more leeway the myriad opponents of freedom have to control and suppress. If one can't make a joke about drugs without risking one's livelihood, then what will protect another's right to make a joke about sex or religion? Soon the expression of all meaningful human experience is compromised. Our real freedom is forfeited by the simple calculation that the invasive and controlling behavior of our employers is "just the way things are".
The only moral course of action for proponents of freedom is to confront and condemn the actions of her employers, and not make petty excuses and blame the victims for being so "stupid". We need to have some solidarity and insist upon our freedom.
Exactly. You're not saying that what she did merited being raped. You're just saying that it was stupid for her to be walking around in those tight sexy clothes, showing off her big ol' titties.
People need to learn that there are risks to exercising their freedoms, and that is why its smarter to never do or say anything remotely controversial ever, even in a venue explicitly designated for the conduct of one's personal life.
The nice thing about EVE is that it's not grindy like WoW and other MMOs. The only thing that affects your rate of skill point acquisition in EVE is which skills you decide to train. You don't have to hunt for XP to level up. Somebody that "grinds" all the time in EVE has no skill advantage over the casual player.
I've seen this again and again. Too many young women are just bad at life. They might be attractive, fit, and successful at their jobs, but outside of that there is isolation and void and fear. And much like their cars and their computers, they want to dump their unhappiness on Mr. Man for him to fix it. I don't mind reinstalling Windows every now and then, but I am not a spiritual healer and if my loving doesn't take away the pain, I don't know what will.
No. No. No. None of this "Experiences vary from college to college" crap. You said that 60% of college professors are Marxists who support "Gov't forced re-distribution" and similar policies. And now you're changing your story. I went to an elite university for both undergrad and grad, so by your estimates I would have been encountering "Marxism" left and right. You should just admit that your estimates for the prevalence of Marxism are totally baseless.
I think you're missing the point. The point isn't that there's any real equivalency between embracing the hysterical superstitions of the rapture and rejecting those superstitions. The point is that saying there is an equivalency makes superstitious Evangelicals feel better about themselves. If Evangelicals had to accept that people trended towards atheism when they went to college because at college students asked hard questions and decided religious were baseless, then that would present a serious dilemma. Honest Evangelicals would be forced to concede that their answers to those questions are specious.
It's much easier to believe that students reject religion at college because their "Marxist" engineering professors are the agents of Satan and brainwashing everybody.
I worry about sending too many kids to college because I doubt it will actually improve their critical faculties. Republicans are worried about sending too many kids to college because they worry that it might improve their critical faculties.
The "college marxist" phenomenon might have had some basis in the culture of 60s radicalism, but today it's completely exaggerated. There are a few aging hippies of the "Ward Churchill" genus but younger professors do not have the luxury of engaging in politics.
In my time at college, I can only recall one time when a professor espouse a leftist political viewpoint. During an English class discussion I claimed that "there's never been a female dominant society." The ardently Feminist professor suggested (wrongly) that I was ignorant, but refused to provide a counter-example.
And that's it. That's all the "Marxism" I endured in my 4 year degree. It wasn't even enough to even sharpen my critical faculties. I should really write a letter complaining about what a limited exposure to different ideas I had in college. And given that I also had to endure lots of discredited right-wing propaganda in college, such as the "Laffer curve" and other falsehoods from my Econ professors, I think that on balance my college education basically just served to squelch all my political instincts and turn me and my fellow students into bland careerist rats.
During Graduate School I was living in the hood My neighbors were disadvantaged urban youth and I talked to them about their about their future. They were being pushed towards college and considering engineering. But they just didn't have the basic skills to succeed in a college engineering program. Their senior level math was going to algebra/geometry. They weren't ready to fore-go the prime of their life to play academic catch-up. They didn't even know what tools they lacked. Sending these kids to college is setting them up to fail. It's horribly cruel: colleges with lenient admissions standards just take their student loans, and then kick them out when, predictably, they cannot independently function in an academic environment. The schools keep all the money, and the students are labeled failures for life.
Like so many other things, higher education in the hood is just a scam. It's a much better idea to just get certified as a mechanic or a electrician or a nurse. If you are a mediocre student, those are probably the best ways to enter the middle class. Instead we keep repeating "You must have a college education to succeed" which only encourages unqualified youth to saddle themselves with an enormous debt.
The problem doesn't stem from giving kids nutritional guidelines. When I was growing up we learned about the food groups, etc, and nobody got disciplined for eating junk food.
The problem stems from an unchecked authoritarian mindset among school administrators. Since the 80s, the easy solution to social problems has been to criminalize bad behavior and institute harsh penalties across the board. Now when a child brings utensils for his lunch, he gets hit with weapons violations. A girl rumored to posses OTC medication is strip searched by the principal and could have faced expulsion for drug charges. Some kid gets a cell phone picture from a partially undressed peer, and he's hit with child pornography. These are just a few examples. We routinely classify innocuous behavior as the most extreme and vile crimes. So now are public schools are microchasms of a police state, with TSA security screenings, strip searches, a huge police presence, and criminal sentences for routine disciplinary problems. Institutionally, we see our children as equally capable of evil as Al Queda.
What we're seeing is the inevitable result of that process, where effective discipline has simply given way entirely to arbitrary enforcement of state power. But the process didn't begin when they started talking about the four food groups. The process started when we decided we needed to "get tough on crime" and we culturally embraced zero-tolerance. The problem started when politicians started to convince people that law enforcement was the best answer for all our social ills.
Obviously there's a conflict-of-interest here, but that doesn't mean the guy is necessarily wrong. It just means you should exercise skepticism and independent judgment.
In my independent judgment, I happen to agree with the guy. Clockspeeds have been stalled at ~ 3Ghz for nearly a decade now. There are only so many ways of getting more per clock cycle and radical parallelization is a good answer. Many research communities, such as fluid dynamics, are already performing real computational work on the GPU, and the entire industry is shifting towards a GPGPU paradigm. Programming languages are also being written to further take advantage of parallelization. In my humble opinion, we're approaching the where every computation that can be processed in parallel will be. For what's it's worth, I actually think both Intel and AMD/ATI are doing a much better job at this than Nvidia.
The relevant excerpt of the Arizona law is as follows:
As you can see, the law is quite sweeping in its demand that each"lawful contact" be subjected to scrutiny about immigration status. What constitutes "reasonable suspicion?" The law doesn't define it. In practice, racial profiling is likely to be a significant factor. That is exactly what happened when this shit was passed in Prince William county, Virginia. Even if you reject the idea that racial hysteria motivated the bill, the outcome of this legislation served to empower and legitimize bigotry. The law gave tremendous power to a minority of officers who couldn't wait to abuse their power.
I would like to address the issue of illegal immigration, but not by hassling innocent people who look sufficiently Latin, or by jailing tourists and foreign exchange students, or by putting some poor kid's Chinese grandma in the slammer because her English is shitty.
I don't understand why the break-even time on solar has to be on the order of a handful of years for it to be economically feasible.
The break-even time for nuclear is over a decade, and it's pretty long for hydro projects too. So why do we insist that solar has to turn a profit Real Quick Now?
Part of the the reason people seek a short break-even time is, incredibly enough, the success of solar research.
The rapid advancement of any technology always gives an incentive to hold off; I know people who refused to upgrade their computers for several years because price drops or performance increases were always just a few months around the corner. In isolation it may be economically viable to place solar panels on your roof, but the cost per watt of solar power just keeps dropping. It's potentially cheaper, and certainly less risky, to hold off on buying solar panels until the next batch of innovations hit the shelves. One way to mitigate that risk is for solar to turn a faster profit.
I think you're absolutely right about the scale of the problem. But we need to evolve the profession, not subsidize a dying profit model. We need to create a market mechanism for journalists to get paid.
I can only speculate about what such a incentive system might look like. Perhaps like-minded blogs could band together and fund their own news agencies. Or maybe newspapers will follow Salon's online subscription model. Personally I would much prefer a new profit model if it meant news organizations got their revenue from subscribers rather than advertisers.
We are still in the middle of a technological revolution so nobody can predict what the solution is going to be, but I think it's likely that the market will find a solution for this issue.
The rules said that newspapers won't be allowed to make endorsements. They will still be able to dictate the focus of their news coverage, slant articles, and publish partisan editorials and opinion pieces. They just can't explicitly make a list of candidates telling people how to vote.
Presumably the goal is to preserve newspapers as a necessary source of information gathering. The idea is that in the age of the internet, we face a free-rider problem and fundamental news gathering is less profitable. Ostensibly journalists are performing a public service.
But how well this proposed solution will address the real problem? There are lots of right-wing newspapers that are not profitable but they have dedicated corporate sponsors so they keep operating. Consider the Washington Times, or the Pittsburgh Tribune. If we let newspapers be non-profits we are giving a huge tax-break to Richard Mellon Scaife, and Rupert Murdoch, and Sun Myung Moon. All of the money these guy pump into their right-wing propaganda machines will be tax-deductible.
I want to save newspapers too, but this proposal will incentivize more propaganda than it will actual news.
Their attitude wasn't "Guilty until proven Innocent." It was "Guilty despite being proven Innocent" or simply "Guilty".
I agree that our society is prone to hysteria about sex-offenders. However, if you think that's a basis for letting these administrators off the hook then you are entirely missing the point:
Situation 1: A school administrator strip-searches a 13 year old honor student upon the flimsiest pretext. The student is forced to show her vagina and spread her legs.
Outcome: The defiant school district defends its administrators all the way to the Supreme Court. School officials and prosecutors solemnly testify about the incalculable harm created by drugs and the necessity of a zero-tolerance policy.
Situation 2: A 13 year old girl uses her cell phone to take a scandalous photo of herself and sends it to her boyfriend. The school discovers this after confiscating the boy's cellphone when it rings in class.
Outcome: Both kids are criminally prosecuted for trafficking child pornography. School officials and prosecutors solemnly testify about the incalculable harm created by 'sexting' and the necessity of a zero-tolerance policy.
Obviously the real issue is not the sanctity of our children's bodies. The real issue is that some of our school administrators are using every possible pretext to expand and consolidate their power over students. By crassly exploiting the "think of the children" sentiment, schools institute ever more invasive and authoritarian policies. We are turning our schools into a police state. Instead of teaching our kids how to be responsible citizens, we are priming them for a totalitarian society.
The current drug debate isn't whether or not you should be legally able to smoke up and drive at the same time, the debate is whether or not its fair to sentence somebody to be brutalized and raped in America's prison system for enjoying a harmless substance in the privacy of their own home.
1) A budget surplus does not imply that the debt is decreasing. Read a book.
2) Even by your own chart you can see that the Clinton was the only fiscally responsible President in recent history. Furthermore, he improved every year he was in office. So what's your point? That Clinton doesn't deserve any credit for being fiscally prudent because he wasn't marginally more prudent where he actually achieved a surplus that exceeded the interest on the debt? Because that's a very dumb point.
Well you're obviously lying because by your own "Perot" charts I can see that military spending is the majority of discretionary spending. Considering that this doesn't even include the budget for the State Department (CIA), the Department of Energy (nuclear weapons), or our two ongoing wars, it's obvious that defense spending is the place in the budget where you can trim a lot of the fat.
Dollars. And if you didn't even know that then you should consider keeping quiet because you're only going to embarrass yourself.
Or presumably the government could just pay off the debt as was done under the Clinton administration.
Treasuries are the one asset class that is shining in this godawful market. Everybody went into the treasuries which is why the yield on the t-bill is so low. It's even been negative, that's how much in demand those t-bills are.
I'm astonished when I encounter this aggressive ignorance on slashdot. I wouldn't expect somebody to start mouthing off about circuit design if they had never studied EE, but for some reason when it comes to Economics every slashdotter imagines himself to be an authority not matter how ignorant of the basic facts he is.
The government does not "appropriate" money from Social Security. The Social Security Administration uses their surplus revenue to buy government bonds. Those bonds are part of the government's general obligation. Paying those bonds and the interest on those bonds isn't optional. Just as the Federal Government must pay back China, it must pay back Social Security.
Social Security isn't going to implode in 2017. The SSA's government bonds give it solvency all the way out until 2045 by conservative projections and even after that it's projected to be able to pay out 75% of the current benefit.