Nope. It's called negotiating with hostage takers 101: you never, ever give them what they want while they're pointing a gun to someone's head. Otherwise, they'll just keep doing it for everything they want.
No shit, Sherlock. However, it also means that China has far less leverage than a lot of people think. And it is even smaller if you start to factor in that someone holding a lot of debt is actually more beholden to the debtor than vice versa. China might hold a big chunk of debt, but it will not be paid in Renminbi. As such, the debt is not worth much more than a gentleman's agreement.
And for some, Enron is one of the corporations that at least has ceased to exist. Your examples 4, 5, 6 on the other hand only undermine your argument by demonstrating that it is possible for a corporation and the vast majority of its officers to continue business as usual while a minority gets a jail sentence. Furthermore, Enron only ceased to exist because its business model was based on fraud, and only sustainable in the absence of any knowledge of that fraud. It had nothing to do with actually being put in jail.
I would hope that you aren't naive enough to think that the right to free speech means free as in beer, not free as in unfettered. It costs money to speak. That's what campaign contributions go towards for the most part. TV, radio, print ads. Speech.
You're deliberating conflating the act of communicating with the resources necessary to communicate. This then leads you to be unable to differentiate between resources directly necessary to communicate with identical resources only indirectly (and with quickly diminishing ties) related to the act of communicating. At the core, you need vocal chords to speak, or hands to sign or draw. Those require food and water to be powered. Is food and water now speech? When you build a radio to broadcast your speech, is electricity now speech? When you hire someone to write a speech, is the money you paid him suddenly speech? What if you hire someone to drive your speech writer around, is that money now suddenly speech? What if you build a place to house the act of speech, is that place now suddenly speech? What if you hire the contractor to build a different place who then pays a building company who then buys lumber from a lumber company who then uses that money to buy a thousand political pins from a candidate to distribute to its workers - is your money now suddenly speech because it in the end was used to distribute a political message?
Your blanket statement that money is speech leads to completely untenable situations. Most specifically, it legitimizes flat-out bribes. That money you gave to a politician wasn't a bribe, it was merely speech fostering the political message of that candidate. Never mind that the amount of money was enough to fully bankroll a candidate's run for office, thereby essentially buying a politician.
The entire point of the US system of government was to get away from the political elite being only accountable to the money elite. Equating money with speech means that that old system is in full swing again.
They get people elected by paying for SPEECH that convinces people to vote for their candidate.
And paying for analysts. And paying for speech writers. And for lunch for volunteers. And for drivers for candidates. And for props for rallies, for IT services, for image consultants, for polls, for jets and all kinds of other things that go into running a campaign and maintaining a political organization. For some reason, that never gets mentioned.
That speech requires money. Ergo, money is speech.
You assume the consequent, confuse necessary with sufficient, and generally fail to consider everything else that is necessary for speech. Speech requires food. It requires muscles powered by chemical energy. It requires sound and EM waves to propagate. Are you willing to call those things speech as well? I would love to see what happens when you try to follow that train of thought to its logical end.
In any "American people" lever pulling contest, the smaller states would be dictated to by the larger ones.
Instead, individuals in small states influence national politics more than those from large states. Explain why that is better than the other way around. If you even consider mentioning the tyranny of the majority, I'll raise you the tyranny of the minority, which is the status quo under anything other than a democracy.
What an amazingly idiotic idea this is. You want people who have no desire to be there making decisions on how to run a corporation as large the the US government.
Not nearly as idiotic as thinking that the government is a corporation. Nor as idiotic as thinking that the current crisis has nothing to do with people being there who have as one of their political platforms the destruction of government.
You'd pull people from productive lives doing what they want to do off to Washington DC dealing with things the
Most of the people living on welfare today made life choices that left them there. That's my fault?
Most? Citation needed. I'm just wondering what kind of tune you'd sing if you suddenly got leukemia.
NOTHING I did was the result of entitlement, family wealth, or favoritism. Certainly there was some luck, no doubt there.
But a lot of it had to do with other people being able to run a business in a stable environment, other people being able to go to school on public scholarships to pump money into the local economy, and having access to healthcare that allowed them to do preventive healthcare, instead of only showing up at the ER. THAT's what the real benefit of the social net is. You do not operate in a vacuum.
No, I don't agree that the unwashed masses have any entitled right to take MY money. I'd like very much to use MY hard-earned cash to improve MY kids' futures, not some poor kid. Crazy, right?
Yep. It's missing the point that you're not operating in a vacuum. Everyone you interact with has a life story that is probably far more similar to yours than you think. Furthermore, your kids' future is a lot of safer and stable in an environment where everyone has access to education, instead of only your kids being able to choose between a $20k/year school and one at $25k/year. If you're truly concerned about your kids future, you'd make sure that they not only have the basics covered, but that the large majority around them also have the basics covered. Otherwise, you're leaving it purely up to luck whether they succeed, or whether they get dragged back down.
unwashed masses
And there we have it. Damn dirty apes trying to take what's rightfully yours. But nobody better touch anything that you currently use that was developed with your and everyone else's taxes. After all, the only person that really matters is you. Your problems are the only real problems. Everything else is just people making stupid decisions. Especially things like getting sick.
But no, I don't accept your implication that somehow I'm a Bourbonesque lordling telling everyone else to eat cake
No - you're more like a junk-yard dog guarding his bone. Oblivious to everything beyond your turf; thinking only as far your current bone.
What exactly is the difference between the two systems?
The fact that a) it isn't the board of directors you are accountable to, but billionaires, b) merely having an unpopular political opinion doesn't get you incarcerated, and c) you don't get incarcerated for drinking alcohol at a party, holding hands with a woman who isn't your wife or sister or get otherwise intimidated by the moral police.
And real democracies like Sweden are light years ahead of the US in the less-corruption department. I'm not saying they're perfect, but you simply don't get the same kinds of comments about those governments as you do about the US, even from citizens of those countries.
And my point is that part of the reason that that is the case is that those citizens are capable of a more nuanced analysis of a political situation. Yes, they also have apathetic idiots there, but the number of apathetic idiots both in the voter pool and in the politician pool in the US is staggering and scary.
As opposed to what - business? The more I work in IT, the more I become intimately familiar with how badly most projects go. The difference is that not each failed IT project at a business gets national attention, which is what happens for every government project.
There is only one real difference between a corporate IT project and a business IT project: who controls the red tape. In business, that varies with size. In government, it is ultimately controlled by the voter, and how much insistence there is on covering your ass when a failure invariably becomes public.
Incidentally, this also points to another difference between government and IT: in business, you can actually fail. The vast majority of business failures are accepted as part of the process. Government is not allowed to fail, and failure in any area is a huge issue, requiring huge amounts of red tape to provide political cover.
Either accept that government, like business, can fail, or quit demanding an impossible and non-existent perfection from it.
but both are controlled by the same group of billionaires so they dont really represent normal people
Cynical ignorance being passed off as insightful commentary. This is even worse than partisan idiocy - at least the partisans are fighting for something.
its at least refreshing to see a government say, "well, yeah your vote is meaningless" as opposed to the United States, where people become upset if you dont believe voting is important
How privileged do you have to be that you think that an autocratic government is better and more refreshing than a dysfunctional democracy? Here's a suggestion: if you think Azerbaijan is such a breath of fresh air, why haven't you moved there? Oh, right, because despite of how bad things are in the US, it is still light years ahead of dictatorships like Azerbaijan.
I would however very much like to keep more of my income (that is, in small part, being used to subsidize other people's kids going to school) to pay for my own kids' education.
In other words: fuck you, I've got mine. Newsflash: your kids benefit far more from being in a society that is socially mobile than from being able to choose between a school that costs 20k a year and one that costs 25k a year.
More correct to say: "...Post-high-school education is becoming damn near unaffordable to the middle class, who are busily paying to educate the poor."
We've tried the approach of just ignoring the unwashed masses. It lead to a few revolutions, mass unrests and a general social instability that was far more costly than just installing a social safety and subsidizing education.
Did you miss the part where the Industrial Revolution created huge unrest that was finally quelled by acceding to the demands of the freshly minted labour unions, social philosophers and practical statesmen who were tired of constant revolutions by the terminally poor and exploited?
We're on our way to another one. We can either try to learn from the past and ease the transition, or just say fuck it and see if we can reproduce a few Dickens and Hugo novels.
The US' average education has been going downhill steadily in the last two decades or so. Post-high-school education is becoming damn near unaffordable to all but the wealthy, and even basic "participate in the world" type skills are getting worse.
Apple, Microsoft, Facebook, Google, etc., etc. are all American companies
Steve Jobs and Bill Gates had upper-class parents. Zuckerberg was able to afford going to Harvard, Brin was born in Russia and Page was the son to a famous computer scientist. All you're showing right now is that the upper echelons of American society are going to be fine, and 1st generation immigrants are doing well too.
the Internet was created in America, not to mention the personal computer, integrated circuits and transistors. Or GPS, or air travel, or (going back a bit) the light bulb and audio recording.
All of which happened at least 40 years ago.
Most of the things that make the world the way it is today come from America.
Not really. Most of what makes the world what it is today came from somewhere else. Paper, rockets, computing and sewers came from somewhere else. We've had a brief supremacy spell after WW2 until about the early nineties. After that, it's been steadily downhill. We're still ahead of everyone else, but this is exactly like a racer thinking he's going to win a race after losing a wheel: he might still be ahead now, but that's not going to last very long.
And I see this type of short-sighted - actually, less than short-sighted; it is nothing but a snapshot analysis - far too often from Americans. Gloating that their GDP is still tops, that their per capita income is still tops, that they still dominate certain industries... without realizing that the gap is shrinking fast, and that the fundamentals are all wrong.
Not at all. Submitting a budget that has no chance of passing means the president dropped the ball.
The question is about the budgetary process. You're again conflating the process with the content. Nice try, but still irrelevant. You also missed the part where it is the official mission of the House majority party to oppose and denigrate every action the president takes. Even if it is something they were advocating days earlier. At that point, blaming the president for his budget not getting approved is merely advocating that the House controls the executive. I'm sure you agree that that is bad news when your team doesn't control the House anymore.
Obama has decided again and again to push through decisions against Republican objection, with the justification that his win entitles him to that. Well, he is learning that that's not the way it works.
And the House majority is learning that trying to push through the repeal of Obamacare by not agreeing to fund it is understood by everyone do be an endrun around the legislative process.
Absolutely. Question: what's a sensible budget?... I'll settle for "a balanced budget."
A balanced budget without tax increases.
Says you. Furthermore, it again has nothing to do with the budget process.
No, only if the country ends up at the brink of default due to a breakdown in negotiations.
Negotiations require two parties. I'm just wondering why you think the current president needs to follow the wishes of a small faction in the majority party of the House of Representatives, whose reach doesn't even extend into the other chamber of Congress. That wouldn't happen to be because that small faction happens to be your home team, would it? No, I'm sure it's because you always oppose all tax increases. Including those that happened in the previous 2 decades.
And since Obama seems to have very particular ideas of what the budget should be like, it's his job to articulate them clearly
Sure.
and come up with a budget that satisfies both him and the House.
Impossible. The Republican-led has made the decision to obstruct and chastise the president for every decision made. If he would propose a budget that had been secretly worked on by the Heritage foundation, Republican leaders would still blame it for putting the US on the road to socialism. See only commentaries made by House leadership on his decisions to visit Germany and what to do with Libya. In both situations, Republican leaders displayed remarkable cases of amnesia about what they had asked him to do previously. Nifty because in the case of visits to Germany, he was chastised when he went, and then chastised when he didn't go. In the case of Libya, he was first chastised for not acting, then chastised for acting. It was hilarious to see McCain twist when told that he was criticizing the President for doing what McCain himself had asked the President to do just earlier.
Furthermore, when Obama was a senator, he himself considered getting a balanced and sensible budget the responsibility of the president. We should hold him to that now that he is president.
Absolutely. Question: what's a sensible budget? Trick question: the country is far too divided to come up with an answer that will please everybody. I'll settle for "a balanced budget."
Finally, I'm just wondering: do you judge every president by whether he has presented a timely budget? Feel free to check out this list here if you have trouble answering that question: http://www.fas.org/sgp/crs/misc/R43163.pdf
I think you two are missing each other's point. Yes, the universe doesn't care what some particular think tanks puts out. However, a certain subgroup of the Great Apes family cares a great deal.
You can't just put out propaganda - at some point, the universe is just going to shit stomp everything. You can't just put out our best understanding of the universe - at some point, a certain subset of great apes with a lot of reptilian brain matter left over are going to have to be moved to action.
Unfortunately, to actually advance - and in this case, save - civilization, you need to be both right and a great orator. I know few people who are (and don't count myself among them).
To some extent. They're going to disappear in small mom and pop shops, but they're going to grow in the service providers.
What you're seeing is a shift in the type of tools being maintained in companies, the types of skills needed to maintain them, and the companies where specific skills are needed. It's not going to be IT staff anymore, it's going to be tool admins and maintainers. It's not going to be IT helpdesk anymore, it's going to be department help desk. It's not going to be Woolworth IT anymore, it's going to be Google IT.
As always, if you're in IT, keep your skills up-to-date, stay up-to-date on business trends, and be ready to adapt at the drop of a hat. Or look for a job in a different field.
Furthermore, from your own link: "When newly elected President Richard Nixon began to refuse to spend funds that the Congress had allocated, Congress adopted a more formal means by which to challenge him. The Congressional Budget Act of 1974 created the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) and directed more control of the budget to it and away from the President's Office of Management and Budget (OMB). "
The submission by the president of a budget to Congress has become much less important than what Congress decides to do with the budget.
In the meantime, I'll take my own advice and shut the fuck up about the budget process until I've read more.
It used to be that it was blatantly obvious that Apple was making ridiculous profits on smartphones, and everyone else was trying to figure out how they do it. Don't mistake a point in time with a trend.
15 years of no warming despite CO2 emissions continuing
Convenient use of a record high as your starting point. Care to redo your calculations with any other window? Maybe, say, a 20 year window? Or even a 10 year window? What about a 12 year window?
greatly increased Arctic Ice coverage,
[Citation needed] and [Confusing a rebound from a historic low to slightly less historic lows with an increase over average].
increasing Antarctic ice thickness
[Confusing weather with climate] and [Lack of understanding of ice formation]
increasing Antarctic sea ice coverage
[Cherry-picking specific regional ice data points] and [Mistaking surface for volume].
I'm just the guy who has been making physical chemistry arguments that show that CO2 has no net effect on the heat capacity of the atmosphere for the last few years
... which has nothing to do with the problem of CO2 trapping IR, or with why the atmosphere is heating up.
arguing instead that what warming we saw was from increased water vapor emissions, which maintain a tight equilibria with their rate of emissions
Water vapor cannot drive long-term heating. A single cold-spell will remove water vapor from the air, which will reduce temperatures, which will remove more water from the air.... Water vapor is the result of warming, not a forcing.
thus the lost decade global growth lead to a lost decade of warming
The global economy was working in overdrive until 2000-2001, and again from 2005 to 2008. Your own data calls you a liar.
bringing AGW idiots to take because they are ignoring the real threat from CO2--ocean acidification and the collapse of already overstressed fisheries.
I'm glad you'll find that all kinds of scientists, but especially marine biologists and oceanographers would love your help in spreading message. Care to sign up maybe with an organization like NOAA or the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute?
But hey, let's all ignore physics
Says the guy who mistakes anecdotes for data, cherry-picks his time frames, misunderstands the overall and problem and thinks that he has a better understanding of physics than Physicists.
Tell you what, write a paper about your insights, and if you're right, the Nobel prize in a few areas is yours. How is that for an incentive to go show up all the AGW believers? You'll be right up there with Galileo, Kopernicus, Pasteur, and a few other up-enders of the consensus.
Holy crap - are you truly that ignorant? The president can never originate a budget. It HAS to come from the House. Yes, he can suggest budgets, but he can't actually submit them.
Seriously, if you can't be bothered to understand how the country you work functions, you have three options: 1) Shut the fuck up. 2) Shut the fuck up. 3) Leave.
And pretty much every poll that asks questions about provisions in Obamacare instead of just whether people like Obamacare shows that people love the provisions in Obamacare. Yes, people are that stupid.
Again, I'm not talking about basic call-center staff that isn't allowed to deviate from a script. I'm talking actual tech support, where people are supposed to have some technical expertise, some coding experience, and are able to follow reproduction steps. I don't know how much they make, but I'm fairly sure they make more than $300 an month . This is primarily based on the fact that if they made that little, they would get snapped up by any of the consulting gigs like Wipro and Tata.
Call center - no. But tech support - oh hell yes. 2-3 qualified people making about 2-3 times what the fresh off the street people in India make can resolve about 5 times the cases with better customer satisfaction. Not to mention all the money saved with the lack of escalations and hand-holding.
Slashdot Mirror
Nope. It's called negotiating with hostage takers 101: you never, ever give them what they want while they're pointing a gun to someone's head. Otherwise, they'll just keep doing it for everything they want.
No shit, Sherlock. However, it also means that China has far less leverage than a lot of people think. And it is even smaller if you start to factor in that someone holding a lot of debt is actually more beholden to the debtor than vice versa. China might hold a big chunk of debt, but it will not be paid in Renminbi. As such, the debt is not worth much more than a gentleman's agreement.
*Walks to the printing press in the back room, prints a 2 trillion dollar bill, and walks back*
Sure thing. You got change for this bill, or do you want a few containerships of singles?
And for some, Enron is one of the corporations that at least has ceased to exist. Your examples 4, 5, 6 on the other hand only undermine your argument by demonstrating that it is possible for a corporation and the vast majority of its officers to continue business as usual while a minority gets a jail sentence. Furthermore, Enron only ceased to exist because its business model was based on fraud, and only sustainable in the absence of any knowledge of that fraud. It had nothing to do with actually being put in jail.
I would hope that you aren't naive enough to think that the right to free speech means free as in beer, not free as in unfettered. It costs money to speak. That's what campaign contributions go towards for the most part. TV, radio, print ads. Speech.
You're deliberating conflating the act of communicating with the resources necessary to communicate. This then leads you to be unable to differentiate between resources directly necessary to communicate with identical resources only indirectly (and with quickly diminishing ties) related to the act of communicating. At the core, you need vocal chords to speak, or hands to sign or draw. Those require food and water to be powered. Is food and water now speech? When you build a radio to broadcast your speech, is electricity now speech? When you hire someone to write a speech, is the money you paid him suddenly speech? What if you hire someone to drive your speech writer around, is that money now suddenly speech? What if you build a place to house the act of speech, is that place now suddenly speech? What if you hire the contractor to build a different place who then pays a building company who then buys lumber from a lumber company who then uses that money to buy a thousand political pins from a candidate to distribute to its workers - is your money now suddenly speech because it in the end was used to distribute a political message?
Your blanket statement that money is speech leads to completely untenable situations. Most specifically, it legitimizes flat-out bribes. That money you gave to a politician wasn't a bribe, it was merely speech fostering the political message of that candidate. Never mind that the amount of money was enough to fully bankroll a candidate's run for office, thereby essentially buying a politician.
The entire point of the US system of government was to get away from the political elite being only accountable to the money elite. Equating money with speech means that that old system is in full swing again.
They get people elected by paying for SPEECH that convinces people to vote for their candidate.
And paying for analysts. And paying for speech writers. And for lunch for volunteers. And for drivers for candidates. And for props for rallies, for IT services, for image consultants, for polls, for jets and all kinds of other things that go into running a campaign and maintaining a political organization. For some reason, that never gets mentioned.
That speech requires money. Ergo, money is speech.
You assume the consequent, confuse necessary with sufficient, and generally fail to consider everything else that is necessary for speech. Speech requires food. It requires muscles powered by chemical energy. It requires sound and EM waves to propagate. Are you willing to call those things speech as well? I would love to see what happens when you try to follow that train of thought to its logical end.
In any "American people" lever pulling contest, the smaller states would be dictated to by the larger ones.
Instead, individuals in small states influence national politics more than those from large states. Explain why that is better than the other way around. If you even consider mentioning the tyranny of the majority, I'll raise you the tyranny of the minority, which is the status quo under anything other than a democracy.
What an amazingly idiotic idea this is. You want people who have no desire to be there making decisions on how to run a corporation as large the the US government.
Not nearly as idiotic as thinking that the government is a corporation. Nor as idiotic as thinking that the current crisis has nothing to do with people being there who have as one of their political platforms the destruction of government.
You'd pull people from productive lives doing what they want to do off to Washington DC dealing with things the
Most of the people living on welfare today made life choices that left them there. That's my fault?
Most? Citation needed. I'm just wondering what kind of tune you'd sing if you suddenly got leukemia.
NOTHING I did was the result of entitlement, family wealth, or favoritism. Certainly there was some luck, no doubt there.
But a lot of it had to do with other people being able to run a business in a stable environment, other people being able to go to school on public scholarships to pump money into the local economy, and having access to healthcare that allowed them to do preventive healthcare, instead of only showing up at the ER. THAT's what the real benefit of the social net is. You do not operate in a vacuum.
No, I don't agree that the unwashed masses have any entitled right to take MY money. I'd like very much to use MY hard-earned cash to improve MY kids' futures, not some poor kid. Crazy, right?
Yep. It's missing the point that you're not operating in a vacuum. Everyone you interact with has a life story that is probably far more similar to yours than you think. Furthermore, your kids' future is a lot of safer and stable in an environment where everyone has access to education, instead of only your kids being able to choose between a $20k/year school and one at $25k/year. If you're truly concerned about your kids future, you'd make sure that they not only have the basics covered, but that the large majority around them also have the basics covered. Otherwise, you're leaving it purely up to luck whether they succeed, or whether they get dragged back down.
unwashed masses
And there we have it. Damn dirty apes trying to take what's rightfully yours. But nobody better touch anything that you currently use that was developed with your and everyone else's taxes. After all, the only person that really matters is you. Your problems are the only real problems. Everything else is just people making stupid decisions. Especially things like getting sick.
But no, I don't accept your implication that somehow I'm a Bourbonesque lordling telling everyone else to eat cake
No - you're more like a junk-yard dog guarding his bone. Oblivious to everything beyond your turf; thinking only as far your current bone.
What exactly is the difference between the two systems?
The fact that a) it isn't the board of directors you are accountable to, but billionaires, b) merely having an unpopular political opinion doesn't get you incarcerated, and c) you don't get incarcerated for drinking alcohol at a party, holding hands with a woman who isn't your wife or sister or get otherwise intimidated by the moral police.
And real democracies like Sweden are light years ahead of the US in the less-corruption department. I'm not saying they're perfect, but you simply don't get the same kinds of comments about those governments as you do about the US, even from citizens of those countries.
And my point is that part of the reason that that is the case is that those citizens are capable of a more nuanced analysis of a political situation. Yes, they also have apathetic idiots there, but the number of apathetic idiots both in the voter pool and in the politician pool in the US is staggering and scary.
As opposed to what - business? The more I work in IT, the more I become intimately familiar with how badly most projects go. The difference is that not each failed IT project at a business gets national attention, which is what happens for every government project.
There is only one real difference between a corporate IT project and a business IT project: who controls the red tape. In business, that varies with size. In government, it is ultimately controlled by the voter, and how much insistence there is on covering your ass when a failure invariably becomes public.
Incidentally, this also points to another difference between government and IT: in business, you can actually fail. The vast majority of business failures are accepted as part of the process. Government is not allowed to fail, and failure in any area is a huge issue, requiring huge amounts of red tape to provide political cover.
Either accept that government, like business, can fail, or quit demanding an impossible and non-existent perfection from it.
but both are controlled by the same group of billionaires so they dont really represent normal people
Cynical ignorance being passed off as insightful commentary. This is even worse than partisan idiocy - at least the partisans are fighting for something.
its at least refreshing to see a government say, "well, yeah your vote is meaningless" as opposed to the United States, where people become upset if you dont believe voting is important
How privileged do you have to be that you think that an autocratic government is better and more refreshing than a dysfunctional democracy? Here's a suggestion: if you think Azerbaijan is such a breath of fresh air, why haven't you moved there? Oh, right, because despite of how bad things are in the US, it is still light years ahead of dictatorships like Azerbaijan.
I would however very much like to keep more of my income (that is, in small part, being used to subsidize other people's kids going to school) to pay for my own kids' education.
In other words: fuck you, I've got mine. Newsflash: your kids benefit far more from being in a society that is socially mobile than from being able to choose between a school that costs 20k a year and one that costs 25k a year.
More correct to say: "...Post-high-school education is becoming damn near unaffordable to the middle class, who are busily paying to educate the poor."
We've tried the approach of just ignoring the unwashed masses. It lead to a few revolutions, mass unrests and a general social instability that was far more costly than just installing a social safety and subsidizing education.
Did you miss the part where the Industrial Revolution created huge unrest that was finally quelled by acceding to the demands of the freshly minted labour unions, social philosophers and practical statesmen who were tired of constant revolutions by the terminally poor and exploited?
We're on our way to another one. We can either try to learn from the past and ease the transition, or just say fuck it and see if we can reproduce a few Dickens and Hugo novels.
The US' average education has been going downhill steadily in the last two decades or so. Post-high-school education is becoming damn near unaffordable to all but the wealthy, and even basic "participate in the world" type skills are getting worse.
Apple, Microsoft, Facebook, Google, etc., etc. are all American companies
Steve Jobs and Bill Gates had upper-class parents. Zuckerberg was able to afford going to Harvard, Brin was born in Russia and Page was the son to a famous computer scientist. All you're showing right now is that the upper echelons of American society are going to be fine, and 1st generation immigrants are doing well too.
the Internet was created in America, not to mention the personal computer, integrated circuits and transistors. Or GPS, or air travel, or (going back a bit) the light bulb and audio recording.
All of which happened at least 40 years ago.
Most of the things that make the world the way it is today come from America.
Not really. Most of what makes the world what it is today came from somewhere else. Paper, rockets, computing and sewers came from somewhere else. We've had a brief supremacy spell after WW2 until about the early nineties. After that, it's been steadily downhill. We're still ahead of everyone else, but this is exactly like a racer thinking he's going to win a race after losing a wheel: he might still be ahead now, but that's not going to last very long.
And I see this type of short-sighted - actually, less than short-sighted; it is nothing but a snapshot analysis - far too often from Americans. Gloating that their GDP is still tops, that their per capita income is still tops, that they still dominate certain industries... without realizing that the gap is shrinking fast, and that the fundamentals are all wrong.
Eye of the beholder, irrelevant to the question.
Not at all. Submitting a budget that has no chance of passing means the president dropped the ball.
The question is about the budgetary process. You're again conflating the process with the content. Nice try, but still irrelevant. You also missed the part where it is the official mission of the House majority party to oppose and denigrate every action the president takes. Even if it is something they were advocating days earlier. At that point, blaming the president for his budget not getting approved is merely advocating that the House controls the executive. I'm sure you agree that that is bad news when your team doesn't control the House anymore.
Obama has decided again and again to push through decisions against Republican objection, with the justification that his win entitles him to that. Well, he is learning that that's not the way it works.
And the House majority is learning that trying to push through the repeal of Obamacare by not agreeing to fund it is understood by everyone do be an endrun around the legislative process.
Absolutely. Question: what's a sensible budget? ... I'll settle for "a balanced budget."
A balanced budget without tax increases.
Says you. Furthermore, it again has nothing to do with the budget process.
No, only if the country ends up at the brink of default due to a breakdown in negotiations.
Negotiations require two parties. I'm just wondering why you think the current president needs to follow the wishes of a small faction in the majority party of the House of Representatives, whose reach doesn't even extend into the other chamber of Congress. That wouldn't happen to be because that small faction happens to be your home team, would it? No, I'm sure it's because you always oppose all tax increases. Including those that happened in the previous 2 decades.
Yes, they were late
Yep.
and were a joke at that
Eye of the beholder, irrelevant to the question.
And since Obama seems to have very particular ideas of what the budget should be like, it's his job to articulate them clearly
Sure.
and come up with a budget that satisfies both him and the House.
Impossible. The Republican-led has made the decision to obstruct and chastise the president for every decision made. If he would propose a budget that had been secretly worked on by the Heritage foundation, Republican leaders would still blame it for putting the US on the road to socialism. See only commentaries made by House leadership on his decisions to visit Germany and what to do with Libya. In both situations, Republican leaders displayed remarkable cases of amnesia about what they had asked him to do previously. Nifty because in the case of visits to Germany, he was chastised when he went, and then chastised when he didn't go. In the case of Libya, he was first chastised for not acting, then chastised for acting. It was hilarious to see McCain twist when told that he was criticizing the President for doing what McCain himself had asked the President to do just earlier.
Furthermore, when Obama was a senator, he himself considered getting a balanced and sensible budget the responsibility of the president. We should hold him to that now that he is president.
Absolutely. Question: what's a sensible budget? Trick question: the country is far too divided to come up with an answer that will please everybody. I'll settle for "a balanced budget."
Finally, I'm just wondering: do you judge every president by whether he has presented a timely budget? Feel free to check out this list here if you have trouble answering that question: http://www.fas.org/sgp/crs/misc/R43163.pdf
I think you two are missing each other's point. Yes, the universe doesn't care what some particular think tanks puts out. However, a certain subgroup of the Great Apes family cares a great deal.
You can't just put out propaganda - at some point, the universe is just going to shit stomp everything. You can't just put out our best understanding of the universe - at some point, a certain subset of great apes with a lot of reptilian brain matter left over are going to have to be moved to action.
Unfortunately, to actually advance - and in this case, save - civilization, you need to be both right and a great orator. I know few people who are (and don't count myself among them).
Let's just keep pushing all of our data to Google for the rest of the world to sift through.
You're confusing a paid business service with a free ad-supported personal service.
To some extent. They're going to disappear in small mom and pop shops, but they're going to grow in the service providers.
What you're seeing is a shift in the type of tools being maintained in companies, the types of skills needed to maintain them, and the companies where specific skills are needed. It's not going to be IT staff anymore, it's going to be tool admins and maintainers. It's not going to be IT helpdesk anymore, it's going to be department help desk. It's not going to be Woolworth IT anymore, it's going to be Google IT.
As always, if you're in IT, keep your skills up-to-date, stay up-to-date on business trends, and be ready to adapt at the drop of a hat. Or look for a job in a different field.
Dates of presidential budget submissions: http://www.bbg.gov/about-the-agency/research-reports/budget-submissions/
Furthermore, from your own link: "When newly elected President Richard Nixon began to refuse to spend funds that the Congress had allocated, Congress adopted a more formal means by which to challenge him. The Congressional Budget Act of 1974 created the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) and directed more control of the budget to it and away from the President's Office of Management and Budget (OMB). "
The submission by the president of a budget to Congress has become much less important than what Congress decides to do with the budget.
In the meantime, I'll take my own advice and shut the fuck up about the budget process until I've read more.
It used to be that it was blatantly obvious that Apple was making ridiculous profits on smartphones, and everyone else was trying to figure out how they do it. Don't mistake a point in time with a trend.
15 years of no warming despite CO2 emissions continuing
Convenient use of a record high as your starting point. Care to redo your calculations with any other window? Maybe, say, a 20 year window? Or even a 10 year window? What about a 12 year window?
greatly increased Arctic Ice coverage,
[Citation needed] and [Confusing a rebound from a historic low to slightly less historic lows with an increase over average].
increasing Antarctic ice thickness
[Confusing weather with climate] and [Lack of understanding of ice formation]
increasing Antarctic sea ice coverage
[Cherry-picking specific regional ice data points] and [Mistaking surface for volume].
no observed retreat in Himalayan glaciers
[More reading needed]. See also http://www.nature.com/ngeo/journal/v4/n3/abs/ngeo1068.html
I'm just the guy who has been making physical chemistry arguments that show that CO2 has no net effect on the heat capacity of the atmosphere for the last few years
... which has nothing to do with the problem of CO2 trapping IR, or with why the atmosphere is heating up.
arguing instead that what warming we saw was from increased water vapor emissions, which maintain a tight equilibria with their rate of emissions
Water vapor cannot drive long-term heating. A single cold-spell will remove water vapor from the air, which will reduce temperatures, which will remove more water from the air.... Water vapor is the result of warming, not a forcing.
thus the lost decade global growth lead to a lost decade of warming
The global economy was working in overdrive until 2000-2001, and again from 2005 to 2008. Your own data calls you a liar.
bringing AGW idiots to take because they are ignoring the real threat from CO2--ocean acidification and the collapse of already overstressed fisheries.
I'm glad you'll find that all kinds of scientists, but especially marine biologists and oceanographers would love your help in spreading message. Care to sign up maybe with an organization like NOAA or the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute?
But hey, let's all ignore physics
Says the guy who mistakes anecdotes for data, cherry-picks his time frames, misunderstands the overall and problem and thinks that he has a better understanding of physics than Physicists.
Tell you what, write a paper about your insights, and if you're right, the Nobel prize in a few areas is yours. How is that for an incentive to go show up all the AGW believers? You'll be right up there with Galileo, Kopernicus, Pasteur, and a few other up-enders of the consensus.
Holy crap - are you truly that ignorant? The president can never originate a budget. It HAS to come from the House. Yes, he can suggest budgets, but he can't actually submit them.
Seriously, if you can't be bothered to understand how the country you work functions, you have three options:
1) Shut the fuck up.
2) Shut the fuck up.
3) Leave.
And pretty much every poll that asks questions about provisions in Obamacare instead of just whether people like Obamacare shows that people love the provisions in Obamacare. Yes, people are that stupid.
You have absolutely no idea what happens when a budget doesn't get approved in time, do you? Here's some education for you: http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2013/09/30/absolutely-everything-you-need-to-know-about-how-the-government-shutdown-will-work/
Again, I'm not talking about basic call-center staff that isn't allowed to deviate from a script. I'm talking actual tech support, where people are supposed to have some technical expertise, some coding experience, and are able to follow reproduction steps. I don't know how much they make, but I'm fairly sure they make more than $300 an month . This is primarily based on the fact that if they made that little, they would get snapped up by any of the consulting gigs like Wipro and Tata.
Call center - no. But tech support - oh hell yes. 2-3 qualified people making about 2-3 times what the fresh off the street people in India make can resolve about 5 times the cases with better customer satisfaction. Not to mention all the money saved with the lack of escalations and hand-holding.