Direct campaign financing in the US would quickly turn into a Welfare program. I bet I can get the government to supply me with enough funds to maintain a decent standard of living as long as I keep running for office. Any office. I can run for President every four years, but every two years run for something else. And in the odd off years, I'll bet there are state and local elections that I can get supported to run for.
See, if you take the view that everyone is in it for the best possible outcome for everyone you can easily be deluded into thinking something like direct campaign financing is a good idea. However, if you look at from the standpoint of everyone is in it for as much as they can grab for themselves, you discover that paying people to run for office ensures you get an even worse set of candidates than you have now. And, because they are paid-for up front, their loyalty is clearly for sale right from the beginning.
I really like the idea that legislators need to pay for legislation. If they are so convinced that we need some new law, they can pay to have it enacted themselves. No salary for congresspeople - they must depend on donations. And the maximum donation should be $100 from any single source so if they aren't popular they better be rich or they are going to starve. Would this fix things? No, but it would be a lot clearer to people what they can expect from government. Zealots and fanatics.
I refer you to Red Mars by Kim Stanley Robinson. The story has the explorers on Mars building an soil-sheltered habitat in a story dating from 1992.
The one problem is the needing a "bulldozer" as there would be a lot of dirt to move around. But in this story they were using inflatable tubes which would be far lighter than anything else - and would probably leave enough weight for something like a bulldozer.
Unfortunately, the model for aid to countries with starving people has been to deny them any semblance of security. The US (and other countries) ship in massive amounts of food in a generally inedible form - raw grains, etc. This is then given to various bodies within the country with starving people. Some of this ends up being sold for the enrichment of people that weren't starving to begin with. Some of it ends up being dumped along the road because it is too much trouble for them to actually distribute.
The truely awful scenario is the family found dead of starvation sitting around with a bag of raw wheat grain sitting there at their feet. Without a flour mill the raw grain is pretty much useless except as an animal feed, and all the animals were eaten last week.
We is the US sending bags of grain to warlords hoping they will distribute this to their "subjects" that they desperately want to keep in total subjugation? Why is the US sending bags of grain to the government of a country that has historically totally neglected their rural population? Why is the US sending bags of grain in the first place? Oh, because we have a surplus of it and it doesn't really cost anything to ship the surplus overseas.
The end result of this is the people still starve. Even if they get the food aid, it doesn't help solve the problems of why they are starving in the first place. Nor does it teach the people anything about getting out of their predicament. Food aid has been a curse to Africa since day one and nobody on either side seems to be learning anything from the history of failure.
Intrinsically, people are inconvenienced by change, change of this magnitude is inconvenient enough that people will go to war over it.
Sorry, but change is inevitable. There is no such thing for a living organism or even a planet as "the status quo" for very long. Things change, either for the better or the worse. There is no way to stop the change, although it may be possible to change the direction.
Offhand, I would say global warming/climate change that is evidenced by a gradual warming trend is far, far better than a gradual cooling trend ending in an ice age. Humans made it through the last ice age, but just barely. You would find that today's population is about as well prepared and our technology just about as useful as it was back then.
Many large companies have very simple policies about this for this very reason: ABSOLUTELY NO DEVICES NOT COMPANY SUPPLIED ON THE NETWORK. If the company is counting on trade-secret status for things like customer lists of course this is going to be in jeopardy once the customer list is loaded onto a non-corporate-owned device. It is at least going to open the door sufficiently that it is going to be very expensive to litigate in the future.
You can easily envision the employee with the customer list on their personally-owned phone walking into their new employer with what they feel is a leg up on all the other sales people. It's on their phone, it is their list of contacts that they have been dealing with for years and now they can offer them new stuff from their new employer. Why not, right? Well, if you do it with paper you are going to get sued. My guess is that if you do it with your phone it is going to be a lot more complicated than it would have been before.
A large part of the problem is that some companies simply do not understand the ramifications of having their supposedly private, secret information scattered about. They plug in a wireless router on the internal network without thinking it through, perhaps comforted by the knowedge that they used the best 26-character WEP password they could think up.The president brings in a iPad into a completely Windows-centric environment and wants to be able to use it with company data - not knowing that the application makes a static copy of the entire database on the device.
Yes, there are some nice nifty devices out there that the company hasn't seen fit to buy yet. That doesn't mean they should be on the network. And the whole question of user-owned devices being securely within the trade-secret umbrella or not is one that will only be resolved through a lot of court cases. And some people would do very well to remember that it isn't the successful business that gets to be one of the "first" in litigation.
There is no reason that textbooks should cost anywhere near what they do... except you assume that a textbook and a Stephen King novel go through the same process at the publishing house.
You can find "textbooks" that have a single author, no peer review process, no technical editing, no educational review and no state board approvals and they are much cheaper. Nobody uses them, but they are much cheaper. The problem is all of the reviewing and editing costs a lot of money and the publishing house gets to front all of it. So they want to be paid. The alternative is to drop all the reviewing and such - but then you end up with something that isn't used.
One place where this does work fairly well is with computer course books. There are classes that use the Foley & Van Damm book as a textbook and that works out quite well. It doesn't fit the model of any textbook at all - it isn't an educational book. I suspect there are other very technically oriented books that are used as a textbook for a class without it being a textbook of the usual sort. Works fine at the college level.
In elementary school there is almost no way a non-peer reviewed book would be used, nor in most places would a book be considered if it wasn't also reviewed by educators. And approved. And then filtered through a bunch of state level committees. Finally, the school district gets a list of five different books they can choose from that are the result of a lot of different committees and such. It isn't a great process, but considering what some school districts have done in the past, there are actual reasons why the state level approval processes are in place. Just as an example, the class that was the subject of the Scopes Monkey Trial wasn't using a state-approved textbook.
Bypassing the state review process would open things up to non-textbook books being used and books that didn't have the complex, expensive review process. It would also open the doors to some school district in Indiana deciding to use the Bible as the textbook in a biology class.
You have mistakenly missed the point of the origin of record labels. It was never so much about producing and distributing records but promoting them. Today's music business is all about promotion still with a very minor role occupied by producing and distributing the music.
Without promotion, nobody knows it is there. Sure, you can pretend that you are hearing about something "through the Internet" or "by word of mouth" and "peer reviews" but what is happening is the power of the Internet, social media and other media (think about television shows like E!) magnifying the promotional power of the PR firm. Your friend tells you about a band - where did HE hear about it? Sooner or later, it comes down to something that someone paid to put into someone's hand or head.
Getting rid of the music business means the end of promotion. With it a whole lot of other things go as well. There are literally hundreds of magazines published where the entire cost of the publication is subsidized by music promotion in one way or another. Most music-playing radio stations have their playlist nearly dictated by music promotion. You didn't think it was simply that they are all owned by one company that they are all playing the same thing did you?
Take music promotion out and FM radio is dead air. The stations will not invest the time to figure out what they ought to be playing when nobody is supporting them in this decision. Local businesses will not pay to run their ads on a station that isn't playing what people want to hear, and if nobody is telling the station what people want to here (or, more accurately, what they should want to hear), advertisers aren't going to pay. The same problem is going to exist with music and media magazines. Music PR is expensive and one reason is they are funding so much stuff out there.
So now we are back to "discovering" a new band because someone hears them in a local club.
While I suspect it isn't widely disseminated, Google certainly collects enourmous amounts of valuable marketing data. They would be passing up a huge opportunity if they did not make this available, certainly on an aggregated basis.
For example, I suspect if I had plenty of money that I could find out which appeared more frequently in GMail communications traffic: iPhone or Android. It might make a huge difference in spending for allocating development dollars, enough that spending $100K with Google might be worth it. They have this information on hand and part of the deal with GMail is your email will be examined for such things.
Google recently noticed that they collected the MAC addresses of every router all over the world. If I was in the router building (or router selling) business it might be interesting to know how many D-Link routers there are in affluent zip codes vs. Belkin. Google has this information and I gotta believe they are willing to sell it.
Search trend data is already pretty publicly available, so I don't think that counts. However, could you get it broken down by zip code? How accurate might that zip code really be? It would be enourmously interesting if they had a better geolocation for a user than could be obtained from the ISP-provided IP address.
You aren't going to be able to get any sort of "Internet restraining order". Sorry, but there isn't any such thing. Anyone can post anything anywhere and there is really nothing that can be done about it.. They are not causing you physical harm or threatening to do so in any real way, so you aren't going to get any sort of physical restraining order against them.
In some cases you might get the hosting site to take down really offensive comments - but some places actually do have a policy against that. It actually cuts down on the offensive email the adminstrators of the site have to deal with if the policy is just "NO". It can also get very, very subjective as to trying to decide who is right and who is wrong - simpler to just leave it all there and let Google sort it out.
You aren't going to get money from anyone without showing damages. Real monetary damages. No, your hurt feelings don't count and aren't worth a dime in court. So they didn't cost you any money? Well, even small claims court is going to throw that one out. Now, a secret here that not too many people know is most of the time something like this would never make someone show up in court - they would just laugh. Well, laugh on because when the other side doesn't show up in small claims court you just have to make it sound reasonable and you get your judgement. Of course, then you have the problems (and expense) of actually trying to find out where they have money to execute the judgement against.
Now I suppose you could sue for slander and defamation. Good luck with that. Even in the US, which is incredibly friendly towards slander suits, you are going to have a tough road. And expensive because there are no "discount slander" attorneys. Nobody is going to take the case for a piece of what you might get in the end either. If this person isn't incredibly well off, you aren't going to get anything that comes close to matching your legal fees - but you would have a judgement against them. This can be used to make their life hell if you want. But it will not result in money.
Come on folks, this is the Internet and the real world all mixed together. The stuff on the Internet doesn't work like the real world and the legal system has NOT caught up to the Internet in any way.
Average time a US homeowner owns their house? Somewhere around 7 years. So putting something in with a return in 17 years means two or three owners down the line will see the benefit.
Very few people are willing to bet with $30K that they are going to be in the same house in 17, much less 25 years.
You could perhaps get companies to change from the flexibility of trucking to the far-less-flexible nature of rail freight, but the only practical way to do it would be to make trucking obscenely expensive through taxes.
Passenger rail? Sorry, we tore up those tracks. There is almost no passenger rail left in the US - most of the remaining passenger trains are on freight rails and freight has priority. This means your passenger train can sit on a siding for hours while waiting for the freight train to go by. You didn't think passenger rail was extremely unpopular for no reason at all, did you?
So the only way rail would be electrified in the US would be if the freight rail companies thought it was worth spending the money on it. In the US there are tens of thousands of miles of freight rail lines, so it would be very, very expensive to do. Again, about the only way to force this would be to make diesel fuel really, really expensive and electricity free. I don't think anyone is going to do that.
Rail in the US is dead. It died around 1972 and we have been pulling up rails and taking them to the scrapyard ever since.
The only way someone gets bankrupted is if they didn't validate the cards properly.
Now validation costs money to do properly, but failing to validate can cost a lot more. It is like $0.30 plus staff time to do proper validation vs. $25 or $35 to deal with a chargeback.
See, validation makes sense, especially if you are subject to lots of fraud. Anytime a credit card number is taken on the Internet you can assume at least 20% of the entries are fraudulent and you better handle that - because if you submit more than 1-2% fraudulent transactions you aren't going to be submitting any more.
Banks? There are no "banks" involved with chargeback fees.
When you sign up for a merchant account , you are contracting with a "merchant services provider". They are the ones that are handling the credit card transaction processing. When you get paid, they put money into the transfer account as per your agreement - then a bank is involved. Until the, you are dealing with a reseller (probably) and some place like First Data which is not in any respect "a bank".
You might be able to get your merchant services provider to back off on some massive fraud and not charge you the full $25 for each and every single chargeback. However, a lot of this is dictated not by your merchant services provider and not even by First Data but relates to the fact that people get involved at both the bank (where your money got put) and also with the customer card accounts themselves. When First Data processes a charge in error and it shows up on some poor customer's statement, they likely have to pay a service fee to the customer's credit card processing company to get the charge taken off. Now that might be a bank.
So the likelyhood of getting the charges waived is pretty low. It costs real money to screw with credit cards and if you aren't properly valididating the transactions - before submitting them - you are going to run up some big bills. Did these charities do proper validation and find out they were being scammed? Hope so, because then it would not have cost them anything. If they ran the charges through, they are likely going to have to pay.
What you are complaining about is the advantage that Apple brings to the average consumer. The average consumer really wants a device they do not have to administer and a device that is not subject to malware. Conversely, the wide-open development and "take a chance, download it" Windows model isn't working for them.
Maybe it works for you. Great. Understand that the average user isn't interested in your programming freedom because they aren't programmers. If Apple can keep malware off their hardware - something they are about 98% successful in doing - Joe Sixpack thinks this is a huge advantage. This is one big reason why Apple is as successful as it is.
Today, you have the parents actively working against the schools. They aren't telling their children they have to do their homework. They aren't helping. They are telling the children they are "special" and above all this. And this attitude comes right back at the school - how dare the schoold administration do anything that might damage their child's ego.
The "it takes a village" philosophy is part of the problem. You seem to have some grasp that the problem is the parents and an anti-school culture but at the same time you want to remove responsibility from the parents and put it on the schools. If the school teaches "do you homework" and the parents say "come on, let's watch the game!" who is going to win out in the end? We have seen 50+ years of it and let me tell you, it isn't the child that wins.
The parents do not have to know the material thatt their children are being taught, although if they think about it they probably do somewhere in the dark recesses. This isn't the parents of the 60s not coping well with experimental "new math" programs. Today's parents aren't just not helping their children with homework - they are telling them to blow it off. They are saying in words and by example "look at me, I didn't get good grades in school and I'm doing just fine." This only leads in one direction and for the most part it is something only society and parents can fix.
Of course, there is the "other" approach. Read Brave New World - no, not the movie actually read the book. At least the beginning. See that in the 1930s the idea of moving the children into a total immersion educational environment outside of any sort of home life was actually thought about and considered one possible way of the future. Understand that it is certainly one way out of this mess.
We are certainly looking at maybe one or two more generations of students that are mostly anti-learning. There will be a few that persevere in spite of cultural influences and they will go on to be all we have in science and engineering. Where do we go then? I don't know, but we certainly will not have people with the talents to go to the Moon or Mars ever again.
Today in inner-city schools in the US the majority of the students would be moved to a boot-camp like school in your view. That is unrealistic.
Out in the suburbs it is almost as bad with many of the students not being distruptive or violent but just not caring about what is going on. They are going through the motions, pretending to be involved. End result is they are going to go nowhere but their expectation is that they would go nowhere anyway.
We have created a culture that views education as a waste of time, teachers as enforcers of authoritarians bent on subugation of the children and that the future for most is rather bleak. The only escape from this is luck - like winning the lottery - or some slim chance of success in a very rarified environment. Success in life can be had by the lucky criminals that stay out of prison, by million-dollar sports figures and just about nobody else. Nothing is gained by education or hard work - it is all the luck of the draw. We have spent the last 50 years or so promoting this view of life in the Western world and it has certainly taken root.
Popular culture in the 1950s showed very clearly the value of education - you got good grades, got a good job and were successful. In the late 1960s and 1970s the popular culture turned and hasn't turned back. Today the idea of getting good grades in school marks you as a "nerd" and a social outcast. The value of education today is far, far lower than it was 60 years ago and the estimation of that value is purely from popular culture.
It doesn't matter how much is spent on educating children if the children view the entire process as a waste of their time. They want to get out and play video games and chat on the Internet. You might think that textual communication would reinforce good grammer and spelling - but no, modern text communication eschews all grammer and spelling in favor of "new rules". The end result is that if they can string some words together it is good enough.
The other problem is that to a certain extent the children today are right. There are no high paying jobs waiting for them all if they get good grades. They have college to look forward to at either a massively overcrowded state school that is simply interested in processing them in and out or a private school where they (or their parents) will likely never pay off the massive loans. If they are accepted, which isn't a given. The state schools are still tossing out 25-35% of the student body during the first year because they can't function in a college environment. There is no sure guarantee of employment even if you are successful in college.
But the worse tragedy is the students that get suckered into the "knowledge economy" when they are mentally incapable of dealing with high levels of abstraction. You know that somewhere around 40-50% of people really do require something to hold in their hands, right? That for them trying to deal with abstract concepts is the same as most Westerners trying to learn Chinese. We used to have good paying factory jobs and skilled tradesmen. Today there are few factories and the idea of someone trying to learn to be a sheet metal worker, a plumber or an electrician is almost a cruel joke. Schools aren't set up to teach these people, even the US President thinks everyone should go to college and be a "knowledge worker", and where there were programs for leaning to be a skilled tradesman today there is... nothing.
We have tried to remake society in an image that is a false reflection of where we want to be. Sorry, but people aren't wired that way. We are clearly headed for a major shift. Maybe everything will collapse in 2012 and we won't have to worry about it anymore.
I have an iPad and an a Samsung Galaxy S II. The iPad user interface is polished, the Apple applications are equally polished and complete. The Galaxy is populated with buy-more-now applications, the user interface is barely usable and the applications obviously unfinished.
Email applications - of course, thie phone has two. One for Exchange email and a separate one for Gmail. No integration possible there for the user. The two email applications have entirely different user interfaces and different defaults - one prompts for confirmation of every delete, the other doesn't. I'm sure it is a setting somewhere, but this is how it comes out of the box. This isn't some poor amateur developer doing this, both applications are from Google directly, part of the Android base. How could they not finish this stuff off? Oh, probably because it is free and nobody is interested the email parts.
The hardware interface is almost as bad. You want to type on an iPad, you need to make contact with the "key" spots. You want to type on the Galaxy? Just moving your finger over the screen closely is enough - easy to get seven or eight keypresses without trying. Way, way too sensitive. Is there a setting for this? Sure, somewhere. But this is how it comes out of the box. Would it have been that much trouble to actually try this out and see it had usability problems?
Android may have some cheap hardware coming along, but it is going to take a huge amount of focus and effort on the part of Google to actually "finish" Android off. And no, I don't think ICS is going to be a big change in this respect. I think it will be more of the same forever unless there is something drastic that happens to the whole Android ecosystem.
It is fairly obvious to anyone schooled in human nature that in the late 1700s there were some people that actually knew a thing or two about how people work. The US government is designed to do nothing. Nothing at all. Oh, on rare occasions there is actually enough motivation to overcome the inertia that is inherent in the system and pass a bill or two. But the reason everything has to be debated twice is to make sure that very little, if anything, gets done.
People who would like an efficient government that "got things done" do not understand the foundation and reasons for why the US government is structured the way it is. Also, think about the proliferation of laws, regulations and such that the US government is able to put out even structured the way it is. Think what an "efficient" government would be like where, for example a majority of a committee was able to pass laws within the scope of the committee's duties and where such committees were staffed with members from a single party. Now that would be efficient!
The people that founded the Federal Government knew what they wanted and designed a government to do absolutely as little as possible. It is incredibly difficult to get anything done and that is by design.
What you have to understand is that the "stealing" part comes into play when things like TARP get voted on by Congress to take over the ownership of millions of "underwater" home mortgages and then it is decided to just give the money to the banks instead. There are many, many examples where the government has decided to do something clearly in the interest of a small number of people rather than the majority and to pay for this with tax money, usually in large quantites.
Sure, it is really nice that the military, air traffic control and such are paid for with tax money. It isn't so nice that the TSA is spending billions on irradiating people without so much as a dime spent on figuring out the real health effects of doing so, or actually having Congress debate if it is really something that should be done.
Another theft of tax money is the silly programs like HAMP which are being used as cover by lenders to foreclose on people's houses. You want your mortgage adjusted? Fine, you have to be in default first. After months of dithering about the forms it is discovered that you are in default. Ooops, now we have to foreclose on you and take a big tax writeoff. This is happening every day and even after the previously mentioned funds have been given out to banks and such.
There are some services the government is providing, but nowhere near the level to the actual Joe Sixpack where he says things are great. Sure, I want stuff from the government but I'm not eligible for lots of reasons that it takes a lawyer to understand. No, there isn't any more credit for small businesses - just large banks and foreign governments. And most of this is from government policies that are in place and supported by our taxes.
So can you blame people for thinking that their taxes are going for stuff they aren't seeing, are going for things that no average American wants and are contributing to a huge government that is making decisions contrary to the interests of nearly every American? If the government can be changed so everyone starts getting $50,000 a year from the government great - I am all for it. But taking the $50,000 times the number of citizens and giving it to Greece or big banks isn't what any of us signed up for. We are being lied to and stolen from and the taxes we are paying are going right into the pockets of people who do not really need it while people who do need it aren't getting it.
We have seen nothing happen in the US since 2001 and it is extremely unclear why. It certainly isn't from a lack of motivation. The answers are out there, but US policy is to not disclose anything. Very unfortunate as the general public has no idea what is going on, if anything has been prevented or not.
So the real question is are the "terrorists" as impotent as they seem? Or, is the US government (and others) successfully blocking their attempts earlier than before? We don't know, and may never know.
One reason Obama did a rather abrupt about-face on matters after around August 2008 might be that he got briefed on what the situation really is. Or, it could be that actually got bought off and decided he better stay bought off. Again, hard to say without any real facts, and we aren't likely to be getting any of those.
I do know that the insurance companies might have a thing or two to say about the future response to terrorism. Unless they can use the out of it being an "act of war" they aren't going to like letting any possibility of an attack come through if they have to compensate the surviving relatives. I don't think United had to pay a dime for the all the people lost on their two planes, or American either. I don't know about people in the World Trade Center - there might have been some insurance payout. If there is insurance coverage (or really anyone's liability) for future attacks, there will never be enough security theater in place.
What you are referring to are not the products anyone should be interested in from Google. You are not the customer Google is interested in.
The products Google sells are information, marketing data and advertising. They likely have a near monopoly on the breadth and depth of information and marketing data they offer. They own advertising on Android phones.
Search, email, etc. are meaningless tokens they are passing out to the public to distract them from the real products they offer behind the scenes. And, these are the vehicles they use to collect information and marketing data and offer advertising.
Are you nuts? Do you really believe that Google is offering free services to the masses as their primary product?
No, their product is information, marketing data and advertising. And virtually nobody has any idea beyond AdWords how this is actually being done.
For example, they decided to collect MAC addresses from every wireless router on the planet. It cost them a little engineering time to do this and nothing more since they are already driving around for other purposes. How much do you think it is worth to D-Link to know how many of their products are in Springfield, IL vs. those of other router manufacturers? Plenty, as this information is invaluable for deciding how to sell their products in Springfield, IL. And everywhere else in the country. And Google could supply this information at almost no cost to themselves.
How much do web advertisers pay to have Google peek at Gmail, web searches and every other interaction with Google? Plenty, because it gives them a leg up on their competition.
Who else has this kind of access to information? Today, nobody else. It is a monopoly and information is the product being sold. If you think this is about the search business, you are sadly misinformed about Google and their pervasive hooks into many aspects of your life.
Google isn't so much about search today. They have a far higher market share in the personal information business.
Today you get an email from a co-worker about getting a Christmas gift for the boss. 10 minutes later you are on a web site that has ads for "suitable gifts for a boss". You don't even notice the connection.
Your Android phone is consistently broadcasting your position to both the cell towers (for communication) and to Google (for marketing). It isn't viewed as a valuable marketing opportunity yet, but soon you will be getting SMS messages (at $0.10 each) from stores you are about to walk by telling you about what they have that is on the grocery list your spouse sent you 30 minutes ago.
Not using GMail? So, you read the email on an Google-supported phone, right? Well, they have it then. Oh, it never leaves Google with any personally identifiable information - Google is handling all of that from the data mining to the sending of the ad. For a fee.
Now multiply the fee of $1 by everyone with a Google-supported phone in their pocket and multiply that by the days in a month. Are you starting to understand how Google is a multi-billion dollar company when they apparently give everything away for free?
Look, I, like most people, would be perfectly happy with a system where I and everyone else paid in a pittance and got all sorts of services and benefits. The problem is that today at best 53% of the people are paying in to the system and many of those 53% are doing everything in their power to minimize what they are paying in, sometimes quite successfully. Under these terms the system cannot work, or at least is cannot work fairly for all.
I would truely like to believe that the answer to poverty is government handouts. I would truely like to believe that the answer for low-cost effective medical care was the government. I would like to believe that I could be adequately supported by the government if I could not or decided not to work. Unfortunately both here in the US and other places on the planet have spent a couple of hundred years proving that what I would like it an utter fantasy with no basis in reality. No, the government cannot end poverty through handouts - the poor will continue to mismanage whatever they have or are given. No, the government cannot be trusted to run health care without running it into the ground in one way or another. And government support of the people has a history back to the "dole bread" of the Roman empire and it hasn't worked out very well, ever.
Could it be made to work? Maybe, but there are a lot of alternatives to the government, especially a government that is supposed to represent all but seemingly always ends up representing a few. By far the biggest problem in the US today is the people with money do not feel it is their obligation to fund government fat cats to dispense money how they and their cohorts see fit to do so. And quite often, those fat cats are dispensing money into their own pockets and those of their friends. What do you call a charity that uses 95% of the money it collects for "expenses"? Contrast this with a charity that uses only 5% of the money for expenses? If the US government was treated as a charity you were forced to contribute to, which end of the spectrum do you think it would land in? Well, call me when it isn't spending as much on expenses and actually delivering goods and services to the people that need them. I don't see that happening anytime soon, as the government has a 200+ year history of not doing so good in that respect.
I'm fine with a government that finds ways to collect money and appear they are doing something useful with it. Is it really useful? As long as the amounts aren't in the hundreds of billions of dollars, it probably doesn't matter. Unfortunately, the government has been collecting far and away too much - enough so that the "war" in Libya didn't need the support of every American citizen digging into their wallet to finance it - the government could do it with lunch money, comparatively speaking. That pretty much means that the next "war" can be run on the same basis without anyone having to decide to support it or not - after all, it's just lunch money.
Slashdot Mirror
Direct campaign financing in the US would quickly turn into a Welfare program. I bet I can get the government to supply me with enough funds to maintain a decent standard of living as long as I keep running for office. Any office. I can run for President every four years, but every two years run for something else. And in the odd off years, I'll bet there are state and local elections that I can get supported to run for.
See, if you take the view that everyone is in it for the best possible outcome for everyone you can easily be deluded into thinking something like direct campaign financing is a good idea. However, if you look at from the standpoint of everyone is in it for as much as they can grab for themselves, you discover that paying people to run for office ensures you get an even worse set of candidates than you have now. And, because they are paid-for up front, their loyalty is clearly for sale right from the beginning.
I really like the idea that legislators need to pay for legislation. If they are so convinced that we need some new law, they can pay to have it enacted themselves. No salary for congresspeople - they must depend on donations. And the maximum donation should be $100 from any single source so if they aren't popular they better be rich or they are going to starve. Would this fix things? No, but it would be a lot clearer to people what they can expect from government. Zealots and fanatics.
I refer you to Red Mars by Kim Stanley Robinson. The story has the explorers on Mars building an soil-sheltered habitat in a story dating from 1992.
The one problem is the needing a "bulldozer" as there would be a lot of dirt to move around. But in this story they were using inflatable tubes which would be far lighter than anything else - and would probably leave enough weight for something like a bulldozer.
Unfortunately, the model for aid to countries with starving people has been to deny them any semblance of security. The US (and other countries) ship in massive amounts of food in a generally inedible form - raw grains, etc. This is then given to various bodies within the country with starving people. Some of this ends up being sold for the enrichment of people that weren't starving to begin with. Some of it ends up being dumped along the road because it is too much trouble for them to actually distribute.
The truely awful scenario is the family found dead of starvation sitting around with a bag of raw wheat grain sitting there at their feet. Without a flour mill the raw grain is pretty much useless except as an animal feed, and all the animals were eaten last week.
We is the US sending bags of grain to warlords hoping they will distribute this to their "subjects" that they desperately want to keep in total subjugation? Why is the US sending bags of grain to the government of a country that has historically totally neglected their rural population? Why is the US sending bags of grain in the first place? Oh, because we have a surplus of it and it doesn't really cost anything to ship the surplus overseas.
The end result of this is the people still starve. Even if they get the food aid, it doesn't help solve the problems of why they are starving in the first place. Nor does it teach the people anything about getting out of their predicament. Food aid has been a curse to Africa since day one and nobody on either side seems to be learning anything from the history of failure.
Intrinsically, people are inconvenienced by change, change of this magnitude is inconvenient enough that people will go to war over it.
Sorry, but change is inevitable. There is no such thing for a living organism or even a planet as "the status quo" for very long. Things change, either for the better or the worse. There is no way to stop the change, although it may be possible to change the direction.
Offhand, I would say global warming/climate change that is evidenced by a gradual warming trend is far, far better than a gradual cooling trend ending in an ice age. Humans made it through the last ice age, but just barely. You would find that today's population is about as well prepared and our technology just about as useful as it was back then.
Many large companies have very simple policies about this for this very reason: ABSOLUTELY NO DEVICES NOT COMPANY SUPPLIED ON THE NETWORK. If the company is counting on trade-secret status for things like customer lists of course this is going to be in jeopardy once the customer list is loaded onto a non-corporate-owned device. It is at least going to open the door sufficiently that it is going to be very expensive to litigate in the future.
You can easily envision the employee with the customer list on their personally-owned phone walking into their new employer with what they feel is a leg up on all the other sales people. It's on their phone, it is their list of contacts that they have been dealing with for years and now they can offer them new stuff from their new employer. Why not, right? Well, if you do it with paper you are going to get sued. My guess is that if you do it with your phone it is going to be a lot more complicated than it would have been before.
A large part of the problem is that some companies simply do not understand the ramifications of having their supposedly private, secret information scattered about. They plug in a wireless router on the internal network without thinking it through, perhaps comforted by the knowedge that they used the best 26-character WEP password they could think up.The president brings in a iPad into a completely Windows-centric environment and wants to be able to use it with company data - not knowing that the application makes a static copy of the entire database on the device.
Yes, there are some nice nifty devices out there that the company hasn't seen fit to buy yet. That doesn't mean they should be on the network. And the whole question of user-owned devices being securely within the trade-secret umbrella or not is one that will only be resolved through a lot of court cases. And some people would do very well to remember that it isn't the successful business that gets to be one of the "first" in litigation.
There is no reason that textbooks should cost anywhere near what they do... except you assume that a textbook and a Stephen King novel go through the same process at the publishing house.
You can find "textbooks" that have a single author, no peer review process, no technical editing, no educational review and no state board approvals and they are much cheaper. Nobody uses them, but they are much cheaper. The problem is all of the reviewing and editing costs a lot of money and the publishing house gets to front all of it. So they want to be paid. The alternative is to drop all the reviewing and such - but then you end up with something that isn't used.
One place where this does work fairly well is with computer course books. There are classes that use the Foley & Van Damm book as a textbook and that works out quite well. It doesn't fit the model of any textbook at all - it isn't an educational book. I suspect there are other very technically oriented books that are used as a textbook for a class without it being a textbook of the usual sort. Works fine at the college level.
In elementary school there is almost no way a non-peer reviewed book would be used, nor in most places would a book be considered if it wasn't also reviewed by educators. And approved. And then filtered through a bunch of state level committees. Finally, the school district gets a list of five different books they can choose from that are the result of a lot of different committees and such. It isn't a great process, but considering what some school districts have done in the past, there are actual reasons why the state level approval processes are in place. Just as an example, the class that was the subject of the Scopes Monkey Trial wasn't using a state-approved textbook.
Bypassing the state review process would open things up to non-textbook books being used and books that didn't have the complex, expensive review process. It would also open the doors to some school district in Indiana deciding to use the Bible as the textbook in a biology class.
You have mistakenly missed the point of the origin of record labels. It was never so much about producing and distributing records but promoting them. Today's music business is all about promotion still with a very minor role occupied by producing and distributing the music.
Without promotion, nobody knows it is there. Sure, you can pretend that you are hearing about something "through the Internet" or "by word of mouth" and "peer reviews" but what is happening is the power of the Internet, social media and other media (think about television shows like E!) magnifying the promotional power of the PR firm. Your friend tells you about a band - where did HE hear about it? Sooner or later, it comes down to something that someone paid to put into someone's hand or head.
Getting rid of the music business means the end of promotion. With it a whole lot of other things go as well. There are literally hundreds of magazines published where the entire cost of the publication is subsidized by music promotion in one way or another. Most music-playing radio stations have their playlist nearly dictated by music promotion. You didn't think it was simply that they are all owned by one company that they are all playing the same thing did you?
Take music promotion out and FM radio is dead air. The stations will not invest the time to figure out what they ought to be playing when nobody is supporting them in this decision. Local businesses will not pay to run their ads on a station that isn't playing what people want to hear, and if nobody is telling the station what people want to here (or, more accurately, what they should want to hear), advertisers aren't going to pay. The same problem is going to exist with music and media magazines. Music PR is expensive and one reason is they are funding so much stuff out there.
So now we are back to "discovering" a new band because someone hears them in a local club.
While I suspect it isn't widely disseminated, Google certainly collects enourmous amounts of valuable marketing data. They would be passing up a huge opportunity if they did not make this available, certainly on an aggregated basis.
For example, I suspect if I had plenty of money that I could find out which appeared more frequently in GMail communications traffic: iPhone or Android. It might make a huge difference in spending for allocating development dollars, enough that spending $100K with Google might be worth it. They have this information on hand and part of the deal with GMail is your email will be examined for such things.
Google recently noticed that they collected the MAC addresses of every router all over the world. If I was in the router building (or router selling) business it might be interesting to know how many D-Link routers there are in affluent zip codes vs. Belkin. Google has this information and I gotta believe they are willing to sell it.
Search trend data is already pretty publicly available, so I don't think that counts. However, could you get it broken down by zip code? How accurate might that zip code really be? It would be enourmously interesting if they had a better geolocation for a user than could be obtained from the ISP-provided IP address.
You aren't going to be able to get any sort of "Internet restraining order". Sorry, but there isn't any such thing. Anyone can post anything anywhere and there is really nothing that can be done about it.. They are not causing you physical harm or threatening to do so in any real way, so you aren't going to get any sort of physical restraining order against them.
In some cases you might get the hosting site to take down really offensive comments - but some places actually do have a policy against that. It actually cuts down on the offensive email the adminstrators of the site have to deal with if the policy is just "NO". It can also get very, very subjective as to trying to decide who is right and who is wrong - simpler to just leave it all there and let Google sort it out.
You aren't going to get money from anyone without showing damages. Real monetary damages. No, your hurt feelings don't count and aren't worth a dime in court. So they didn't cost you any money? Well, even small claims court is going to throw that one out. Now, a secret here that not too many people know is most of the time something like this would never make someone show up in court - they would just laugh. Well, laugh on because when the other side doesn't show up in small claims court you just have to make it sound reasonable and you get your judgement. Of course, then you have the problems (and expense) of actually trying to find out where they have money to execute the judgement against.
Now I suppose you could sue for slander and defamation. Good luck with that. Even in the US, which is incredibly friendly towards slander suits, you are going to have a tough road. And expensive because there are no "discount slander" attorneys. Nobody is going to take the case for a piece of what you might get in the end either. If this person isn't incredibly well off, you aren't going to get anything that comes close to matching your legal fees - but you would have a judgement against them. This can be used to make their life hell if you want. But it will not result in money.
Come on folks, this is the Internet and the real world all mixed together. The stuff on the Internet doesn't work like the real world and the legal system has NOT caught up to the Internet in any way.
Average time a US homeowner owns their house? Somewhere around 7 years. So putting something in with a return in 17 years means two or three owners down the line will see the benefit.
Very few people are willing to bet with $30K that they are going to be in the same house in 17, much less 25 years.
Not really in the US.
You could perhaps get companies to change from the flexibility of trucking to the far-less-flexible nature of rail freight, but the only practical way to do it would be to make trucking obscenely expensive through taxes.
Passenger rail? Sorry, we tore up those tracks. There is almost no passenger rail left in the US - most of the remaining passenger trains are on freight rails and freight has priority. This means your passenger train can sit on a siding for hours while waiting for the freight train to go by. You didn't think passenger rail was extremely unpopular for no reason at all, did you?
So the only way rail would be electrified in the US would be if the freight rail companies thought it was worth spending the money on it. In the US there are tens of thousands of miles of freight rail lines, so it would be very, very expensive to do. Again, about the only way to force this would be to make diesel fuel really, really expensive and electricity free. I don't think anyone is going to do that.
Rail in the US is dead. It died around 1972 and we have been pulling up rails and taking them to the scrapyard ever since.
The only way someone gets bankrupted is if they didn't validate the cards properly.
Now validation costs money to do properly, but failing to validate can cost a lot more. It is like $0.30 plus staff time to do proper validation vs. $25 or $35 to deal with a chargeback.
See, validation makes sense, especially if you are subject to lots of fraud. Anytime a credit card number is taken on the Internet you can assume at least 20% of the entries are fraudulent and you better handle that - because if you submit more than 1-2% fraudulent transactions you aren't going to be submitting any more.
Banks? There are no "banks" involved with chargeback fees.
When you sign up for a merchant account , you are contracting with a "merchant services provider". They are the ones that are handling the credit card transaction processing. When you get paid, they put money into the transfer account as per your agreement - then a bank is involved. Until the, you are dealing with a reseller (probably) and some place like First Data which is not in any respect "a bank".
You might be able to get your merchant services provider to back off on some massive fraud and not charge you the full $25 for each and every single chargeback. However, a lot of this is dictated not by your merchant services provider and not even by First Data but relates to the fact that people get involved at both the bank (where your money got put) and also with the customer card accounts themselves. When First Data processes a charge in error and it shows up on some poor customer's statement, they likely have to pay a service fee to the customer's credit card processing company to get the charge taken off. Now that might be a bank.
So the likelyhood of getting the charges waived is pretty low. It costs real money to screw with credit cards and if you aren't properly valididating the transactions - before submitting them - you are going to run up some big bills. Did these charities do proper validation and find out they were being scammed? Hope so, because then it would not have cost them anything. If they ran the charges through, they are likely going to have to pay.
What you are complaining about is the advantage that Apple brings to the average consumer. The average consumer really wants a device they do not have to administer and a device that is not subject to malware. Conversely, the wide-open development and "take a chance, download it" Windows model isn't working for them.
Maybe it works for you. Great. Understand that the average user isn't interested in your programming freedom because they aren't programmers. If Apple can keep malware off their hardware - something they are about 98% successful in doing - Joe Sixpack thinks this is a huge advantage. This is one big reason why Apple is as successful as it is.
Today, you have the parents actively working against the schools. They aren't telling their children they have to do their homework. They aren't helping. They are telling the children they are "special" and above all this. And this attitude comes right back at the school - how dare the schoold administration do anything that might damage their child's ego.
The "it takes a village" philosophy is part of the problem. You seem to have some grasp that the problem is the parents and an anti-school culture but at the same time you want to remove responsibility from the parents and put it on the schools. If the school teaches "do you homework" and the parents say "come on, let's watch the game!" who is going to win out in the end? We have seen 50+ years of it and let me tell you, it isn't the child that wins.
The parents do not have to know the material thatt their children are being taught, although if they think about it they probably do somewhere in the dark recesses. This isn't the parents of the 60s not coping well with experimental "new math" programs. Today's parents aren't just not helping their children with homework - they are telling them to blow it off. They are saying in words and by example "look at me, I didn't get good grades in school and I'm doing just fine." This only leads in one direction and for the most part it is something only society and parents can fix.
Of course, there is the "other" approach. Read Brave New World - no, not the movie actually read the book. At least the beginning. See that in the 1930s the idea of moving the children into a total immersion educational environment outside of any sort of home life was actually thought about and considered one possible way of the future. Understand that it is certainly one way out of this mess.
We are certainly looking at maybe one or two more generations of students that are mostly anti-learning. There will be a few that persevere in spite of cultural influences and they will go on to be all we have in science and engineering. Where do we go then? I don't know, but we certainly will not have people with the talents to go to the Moon or Mars ever again.
Today in inner-city schools in the US the majority of the students would be moved to a boot-camp like school in your view. That is unrealistic.
Out in the suburbs it is almost as bad with many of the students not being distruptive or violent but just not caring about what is going on. They are going through the motions, pretending to be involved. End result is they are going to go nowhere but their expectation is that they would go nowhere anyway.
We have created a culture that views education as a waste of time, teachers as enforcers of authoritarians bent on subugation of the children and that the future for most is rather bleak. The only escape from this is luck - like winning the lottery - or some slim chance of success in a very rarified environment. Success in life can be had by the lucky criminals that stay out of prison, by million-dollar sports figures and just about nobody else. Nothing is gained by education or hard work - it is all the luck of the draw. We have spent the last 50 years or so promoting this view of life in the Western world and it has certainly taken root.
Popular culture in the 1950s showed very clearly the value of education - you got good grades, got a good job and were successful. In the late 1960s and 1970s the popular culture turned and hasn't turned back. Today the idea of getting good grades in school marks you as a "nerd" and a social outcast. The value of education today is far, far lower than it was 60 years ago and the estimation of that value is purely from popular culture.
It doesn't matter how much is spent on educating children if the children view the entire process as a waste of their time. They want to get out and play video games and chat on the Internet. You might think that textual communication would reinforce good grammer and spelling - but no, modern text communication eschews all grammer and spelling in favor of "new rules". The end result is that if they can string some words together it is good enough.
The other problem is that to a certain extent the children today are right. There are no high paying jobs waiting for them all if they get good grades. They have college to look forward to at either a massively overcrowded state school that is simply interested in processing them in and out or a private school where they (or their parents) will likely never pay off the massive loans. If they are accepted, which isn't a given. The state schools are still tossing out 25-35% of the student body during the first year because they can't function in a college environment. There is no sure guarantee of employment even if you are successful in college.
But the worse tragedy is the students that get suckered into the "knowledge economy" when they are mentally incapable of dealing with high levels of abstraction. You know that somewhere around 40-50% of people really do require something to hold in their hands, right? That for them trying to deal with abstract concepts is the same as most Westerners trying to learn Chinese. We used to have good paying factory jobs and skilled tradesmen. Today there are few factories and the idea of someone trying to learn to be a sheet metal worker, a plumber or an electrician is almost a cruel joke. Schools aren't set up to teach these people, even the US President thinks everyone should go to college and be a "knowledge worker", and where there were programs for leaning to be a skilled tradesman today there is ... nothing.
We have tried to remake society in an image that is a false reflection of where we want to be. Sorry, but people aren't wired that way. We are clearly headed for a major shift. Maybe everything will collapse in 2012 and we won't have to worry about it anymore.
I have an iPad and an a Samsung Galaxy S II. The iPad user interface is polished, the Apple applications are equally polished and complete. The Galaxy is populated with buy-more-now applications, the user interface is barely usable and the applications obviously unfinished.
Email applications - of course, thie phone has two. One for Exchange email and a separate one for Gmail. No integration possible there for the user. The two email applications have entirely different user interfaces and different defaults - one prompts for confirmation of every delete, the other doesn't. I'm sure it is a setting somewhere, but this is how it comes out of the box. This isn't some poor amateur developer doing this, both applications are from Google directly, part of the Android base. How could they not finish this stuff off? Oh, probably because it is free and nobody is interested the email parts.
The hardware interface is almost as bad. You want to type on an iPad, you need to make contact with the "key" spots. You want to type on the Galaxy? Just moving your finger over the screen closely is enough - easy to get seven or eight keypresses without trying. Way, way too sensitive. Is there a setting for this? Sure, somewhere. But this is how it comes out of the box. Would it have been that much trouble to actually try this out and see it had usability problems?
Android may have some cheap hardware coming along, but it is going to take a huge amount of focus and effort on the part of Google to actually "finish" Android off. And no, I don't think ICS is going to be a big change in this respect. I think it will be more of the same forever unless there is something drastic that happens to the whole Android ecosystem.
It is fairly obvious to anyone schooled in human nature that in the late 1700s there were some people that actually knew a thing or two about how people work. The US government is designed to do nothing. Nothing at all. Oh, on rare occasions there is actually enough motivation to overcome the inertia that is inherent in the system and pass a bill or two. But the reason everything has to be debated twice is to make sure that very little, if anything, gets done.
People who would like an efficient government that "got things done" do not understand the foundation and reasons for why the US government is structured the way it is. Also, think about the proliferation of laws, regulations and such that the US government is able to put out even structured the way it is. Think what an "efficient" government would be like where, for example a majority of a committee was able to pass laws within the scope of the committee's duties and where such committees were staffed with members from a single party. Now that would be efficient!
The people that founded the Federal Government knew what they wanted and designed a government to do absolutely as little as possible. It is incredibly difficult to get anything done and that is by design.
What you have to understand is that the "stealing" part comes into play when things like TARP get voted on by Congress to take over the ownership of millions of "underwater" home mortgages and then it is decided to just give the money to the banks instead. There are many, many examples where the government has decided to do something clearly in the interest of a small number of people rather than the majority and to pay for this with tax money, usually in large quantites.
Sure, it is really nice that the military, air traffic control and such are paid for with tax money. It isn't so nice that the TSA is spending billions on irradiating people without so much as a dime spent on figuring out the real health effects of doing so, or actually having Congress debate if it is really something that should be done.
Another theft of tax money is the silly programs like HAMP which are being used as cover by lenders to foreclose on people's houses. You want your mortgage adjusted? Fine, you have to be in default first. After months of dithering about the forms it is discovered that you are in default. Ooops, now we have to foreclose on you and take a big tax writeoff. This is happening every day and even after the previously mentioned funds have been given out to banks and such.
There are some services the government is providing, but nowhere near the level to the actual Joe Sixpack where he says things are great. Sure, I want stuff from the government but I'm not eligible for lots of reasons that it takes a lawyer to understand. No, there isn't any more credit for small businesses - just large banks and foreign governments. And most of this is from government policies that are in place and supported by our taxes.
So can you blame people for thinking that their taxes are going for stuff they aren't seeing, are going for things that no average American wants and are contributing to a huge government that is making decisions contrary to the interests of nearly every American? If the government can be changed so everyone starts getting $50,000 a year from the government great - I am all for it. But taking the $50,000 times the number of citizens and giving it to Greece or big banks isn't what any of us signed up for. We are being lied to and stolen from and the taxes we are paying are going right into the pockets of people who do not really need it while people who do need it aren't getting it.
We have seen nothing happen in the US since 2001 and it is extremely unclear why. It certainly isn't from a lack of motivation. The answers are out there, but US policy is to not disclose anything. Very unfortunate as the general public has no idea what is going on, if anything has been prevented or not.
So the real question is are the "terrorists" as impotent as they seem? Or, is the US government (and others) successfully blocking their attempts earlier than before? We don't know, and may never know.
One reason Obama did a rather abrupt about-face on matters after around August 2008 might be that he got briefed on what the situation really is. Or, it could be that actually got bought off and decided he better stay bought off. Again, hard to say without any real facts, and we aren't likely to be getting any of those.
I do know that the insurance companies might have a thing or two to say about the future response to terrorism. Unless they can use the out of it being an "act of war" they aren't going to like letting any possibility of an attack come through if they have to compensate the surviving relatives. I don't think United had to pay a dime for the all the people lost on their two planes, or American either. I don't know about people in the World Trade Center - there might have been some insurance payout. If there is insurance coverage (or really anyone's liability) for future attacks, there will never be enough security theater in place.
What you are referring to are not the products anyone should be interested in from Google. You are not the customer Google is interested in.
The products Google sells are information, marketing data and advertising. They likely have a near monopoly on the breadth and depth of information and marketing data they offer. They own advertising on Android phones.
Search, email, etc. are meaningless tokens they are passing out to the public to distract them from the real products they offer behind the scenes. And, these are the vehicles they use to collect information and marketing data and offer advertising.
Are you nuts? Do you really believe that Google is offering free services to the masses as their primary product?
No, their product is information, marketing data and advertising. And virtually nobody has any idea beyond AdWords how this is actually being done.
For example, they decided to collect MAC addresses from every wireless router on the planet. It cost them a little engineering time to do this and nothing more since they are already driving around for other purposes. How much do you think it is worth to D-Link to know how many of their products are in Springfield, IL vs. those of other router manufacturers? Plenty, as this information is invaluable for deciding how to sell their products in Springfield, IL. And everywhere else in the country. And Google could supply this information at almost no cost to themselves.
How much do web advertisers pay to have Google peek at Gmail, web searches and every other interaction with Google? Plenty, because it gives them a leg up on their competition.
Who else has this kind of access to information? Today, nobody else. It is a monopoly and information is the product being sold. If you think this is about the search business, you are sadly misinformed about Google and their pervasive hooks into many aspects of your life.
Google isn't so much about search today. They have a far higher market share in the personal information business.
Today you get an email from a co-worker about getting a Christmas gift for the boss. 10 minutes later you are on a web site that has ads for "suitable gifts for a boss". You don't even notice the connection.
Your Android phone is consistently broadcasting your position to both the cell towers (for communication) and to Google (for marketing). It isn't viewed as a valuable marketing opportunity yet, but soon you will be getting SMS messages (at $0.10 each) from stores you are about to walk by telling you about what they have that is on the grocery list your spouse sent you 30 minutes ago.
Not using GMail? So, you read the email on an Google-supported phone, right? Well, they have it then. Oh, it never leaves Google with any personally identifiable information - Google is handling all of that from the data mining to the sending of the ad. For a fee.
Now multiply the fee of $1 by everyone with a Google-supported phone in their pocket and multiply that by the days in a month. Are you starting to understand how Google is a multi-billion dollar company when they apparently give everything away for free?
Look, I, like most people, would be perfectly happy with a system where I and everyone else paid in a pittance and got all sorts of services and benefits. The problem is that today at best 53% of the people are paying in to the system and many of those 53% are doing everything in their power to minimize what they are paying in, sometimes quite successfully. Under these terms the system cannot work, or at least is cannot work fairly for all.
I would truely like to believe that the answer to poverty is government handouts. I would truely like to believe that the answer for low-cost effective medical care was the government. I would like to believe that I could be adequately supported by the government if I could not or decided not to work. Unfortunately both here in the US and other places on the planet have spent a couple of hundred years proving that what I would like it an utter fantasy with no basis in reality. No, the government cannot end poverty through handouts - the poor will continue to mismanage whatever they have or are given. No, the government cannot be trusted to run health care without running it into the ground in one way or another. And government support of the people has a history back to the "dole bread" of the Roman empire and it hasn't worked out very well, ever.
Could it be made to work? Maybe, but there are a lot of alternatives to the government, especially a government that is supposed to represent all but seemingly always ends up representing a few. By far the biggest problem in the US today is the people with money do not feel it is their obligation to fund government fat cats to dispense money how they and their cohorts see fit to do so. And quite often, those fat cats are dispensing money into their own pockets and those of their friends. What do you call a charity that uses 95% of the money it collects for "expenses"? Contrast this with a charity that uses only 5% of the money for expenses? If the US government was treated as a charity you were forced to contribute to, which end of the spectrum do you think it would land in? Well, call me when it isn't spending as much on expenses and actually delivering goods and services to the people that need them. I don't see that happening anytime soon, as the government has a 200+ year history of not doing so good in that respect.
I'm fine with a government that finds ways to collect money and appear they are doing something useful with it. Is it really useful? As long as the amounts aren't in the hundreds of billions of dollars, it probably doesn't matter. Unfortunately, the government has been collecting far and away too much - enough so that the "war" in Libya didn't need the support of every American citizen digging into their wallet to finance it - the government could do it with lunch money, comparatively speaking. That pretty much means that the next "war" can be run on the same basis without anyone having to decide to support it or not - after all, it's just lunch money.