I don't think that this has to be a FUD scenario. I think law enforcement has a job to do, and they get to use certain tools to do it. If one of those tools becomes ineffective, then they have more trouble doing their job. Then they will complain because they are still expected to do their jobs.
We can certainly look at it from the approach of seeing all of the ways that power can be abused, but we have to balance that by pretending that there is a non-corrupt cop out there who needs to build a case against someone who they legitimately believe to be guilty of a crime. What happens if pervasive encryption now permits that criminal to get away with something that could have been detected by a properly executed wiretap in the past?
I'm not saying that we take away encryption, but pointing out the problem and looking for a solution is not FUD, its a legitimate concern that needs discussion. You can't just tell the cops, "you can't tap us anymore? Too bad, so sad," unless you also accept the relative step down in their ability to prosecute certain crimes.
The Founding Fathers individually had different views.
John Adams and Thomas Jefferson would not have agreed on this, for instance.
The Bill of Rights was a compromise requirement attached to the initial Constitution. The original Constitution has no such rights in it, although the amendments were added so immediately afterward that the Constitution proper has no historical significance on its own except to show that not everyone in the Convention was as concerned about those rights as others were.
Sympathy for authorities, if something like that has ever happened, is an oscillation rather than something lost permanently.
This tends to change based on perceived need for more control to protect against threats. If we all feel in danger, we'll go along with, or even celebrate certain activities that might be considered to be unacceptable at some other time. If we feel safe, then the imposition of authority on people will chafe, because it is intrusive and there is no counteracting threat to make it necessary.
You can't reduce risk to zero. And I think that's the major problem with how we think of things. Instead of taking some common sense improvements incrementally these days, we go overboard. If the risk aversion outpaces our advancement in processes and tech, then we start suffering opportunity costs when we keep trying to remove risk.
If you can use a VPN to do your work, by all means, do it at home. If you're a garbage collector... the more time you can't work, the less you get done. And the more trash piles up. You want to protect those workers, but if you start becoming overprotective, shit starts piling up. Literally.
Only if you're talking about office drones. There are a lot of those in a city, to be sure, but many people in a service economy need to go to a workplace.
Fact is, there are a great deal of people who lose out when they aren't able to go to work. There are even IT types who need still need to visit data centers on occasion.
And perhaps compared to the past, we have fewer manufacturing jobs, but we still do have those too. Again, worked at by people who probably need the money.
I do understand the problem of a limited money supply, but I don't think they're seriously considering leaving the euro, so talking about an independent monetary policy is pointless. They need to bring in more money, and while they maintain the euro, they either need to borrow or somehow change monetary policy related to the euro to suit them. Borrowing still seems more likely than a change in Eurozone monetary policy.
That consideration is a factor, but governments tend to be long lasting entities, so they could certainly eventually pay off the debt, if they shrunk or even deferred payments for awhile. Something is usually better than nothing for a vendor, as long as the cost of administering the debt is less than what they bring in.
The best thing for Greece to do financially is to restore solvency. Austerity may not be the best solution, but it is certainly on the right track. Defaults or borrow and spend can work, but *only* if they take the short term windfall and do something useful with it. Otherwise, they've trashed their financial future.
Unfortunately, financial solvency doesn't provide for retirement for people directly, although for any realistic social insurance program, you need to have long term financial stability and capacity. That means that even though austerity may actually work, there is clearly not the will to see it through.
It may be a good idea for Greece to default and deal with it, but that will end their ability to get anything like good loans in the near future. And I don't think the extra money from no longer paying on the debt will fix the quality of life problems that the people in Greece have right now.
Don't really care what you think of HOAs. Not incredibly fond of them myself and I am on the board of one.
Point is, there are enforcement options that are more than just fines. They can work, if they apply the correct sort of pressure. Example being: I can't always force you to pay your dues, but I sure as heck don't have to let you use common area resources that those dues directly support. That might include a privilege you care about.
That is the crux of the issue. You can spend 1 trillion dollars on a campaign and that doesn't mean I'll vote for that candidate.
The real problem is that it *does* work for larger blocs of voters. But the money is only the means of taking advantage of that flaw, not actually a corruption of democracy or free speech.
Citizens United has zero impact on who I will vote for. In fact, it has zero impact on anyone who has a well formed political position that they have researched. However, we know that money means that people who get to vote, but who get their "facts" from TV ads, will be affected. This is unfortunate, but not the fault of free speech. It is a flaw of our democracy (and possibly every realistic democracy based in the current era).
You can't really say this isn't democracy, when the democracy is actually functioning more or less as designed.
Granted, there are different forms of democracy, but good luck finding one where someone isn't in power who doesn't represent the people exactly.
Democracy is useful only for legitimacy of government, not for coming up with right answers. If you want a *better* government, democracy may be some small part of it, but there is nothing about true democracy that prevents it from supporting an elected oligarchy. And that elected oligarchy, if the actual cheating and forced votes are kept to a minimum, is as much a democratic system as one that elects a great leadership team.
There is no system in existence that prevents the intelligent, the rich or the ambitious from obtaining power. There is only, perhaps, a system that is able to direct that influence to ends that are less bad than others.
Don't get me wrong. Borrowing and spending is a totally legitimate way of dealing with the issue... if you can do it without doing long term damage to your economy with it.
Economics comes down to hard and fast numbers for some things, but it is just as much based on the mood of the people and how and where they spend their money. If you can make them more optimistic, you can pull out of it, if your fundamentals are not completely devastated.
They are still required to act on it. There is usually an order to remedy the solution along with any fine. If they don't act they would face the same fines.
The real question is the second one you asked. If they can pay 5 mil a year and it costs 10 mil to fix the issues, then I'll take the fine every time.
If there was personal executive responsibility, then if I fail to execute the task, and then I get arrested for persisting... then 10 mil of Verizon's money is less important than staying out of jail. There is the other option that Verizon could be disqualified from things that give them the potential for much higher profits later. Otherwise, its all about the fines.
When someone doesn't pay their dues for our HOA, we don't just fine them or send them to collections. We revoke their visitor parking passes and their pool rights. We also slap liens on their property. Even that is usually not enough to get people to pay, but it may be enough to get them to increase the priority of who they pay first. Point being that there are things the FCC may or may not be able to do, but if they go to court they might be able to get other remedies.
Now, if the FCC does *not* have the ability to apply other remedies... then Verizon will just pay the bill and keep on keeping on.
Generating a different payment plan might be useful, although as you pointed out, nowhere near enough.
Unless they intend to get forgiveness... or default. I am not sure that Greece is "too big to fail" where they can do that.
Greece needs long term thinking. Austerity might well be a knee-jerk reaction, so hopefully they can reasonably do what you suggest, like changing certain parameters and becoming more efficient at collecting taxes. On the other hand, collecting taxes is not always so straightforward a solution.
Politically, the right solution is probably more obvious than it seems. What may be lacking is the will to execute on it. That's usually the case with politics.
I'm not going to judge based on what his last job was, if he's actually technically qualified to do this one.
I just wonder what their plan is. Austerity is not a happy thing, but it is definitely possible to make things worse. With their economy in its current state, the usual leftist option of borrowing and spending their way out of it may be very limited. Not to mention that it sort of got them there to begin with. And the people likely elected these guys because they want their benefits back, somehow. Sadly democracy does not always make for good economic policy.
It would be interesting if there was some clever model that could get them out of this mes.
Well, the scouting was the "fleshed out" part. You don't create an actual war plan without doing your homework, and scouting your next door neighbor is probably easier than scouting anyone else would be.
Creating plans to invade or defend against other countries, even (currently) friendly ones, is the job of a military staff. It provides options for leaders, and good plans can't wait until two weeks before you realize that you need to go to war. If you've waited that long, you're screwed. Modern militaries don't operate without advanced logistics support and mobilization plans.
More to the point, it's good practice for those whose job it is to plan things. Its not exactly friendly sounding, but every country's military does it. The UK even had a plan for war with the US before WWII, although even then, the plan was "try to get the US population to lose interest in the war by holding out long enough to not be blockaded into starvation".
Just think of it as the US playing a friendly game of Warhammer 40K with their best bud Canada.
I'm well aware that PC doesn't equal Windows and nothing I said indicated I believed that. The point is that PCs still exist, and Windows still dominates them for anything but servers.
I'm a sys admin who uses Linux every day. I've had Linux desktops running on machines and in VMs for years. I have a bunch of Linux desktop VMs at the moment. Its better for development, but I much prefer Linux as the VM and not as my actual workstation.
Linux has done a lot of things well, but creating a desktop worth using regularly is one thing that seems to elude it for some reason. For what it is worth Win XP was "okay", but Win7 was actually pretty good. Even Win 8.1 is decent, if you can ignore some of the irritations. But I have yet to see a Linux desktop that even really compares to XP, let alone later iterations of Windows.
Sure, Windows isn't all over mobile, but most people still have PCs. Including the one I am typing on right now. It is still quite relevant. Until you end the PC, somehow, it will continue to be, if nothing else changes.
It is still by far, the best OS for business workstation use. And I say this as a UNIX admin who has been waiting for a Linux desktop worth using for the last decade. And its not half bad for personal use either.
Windows has come a long way, although not without its share of missteps. I'm actually okay with it now. I might not switch to a Mac even if someone gave me one. Although that says more about what I think of Macs these days than it does of Windows. And mind you, my first three computers were Macs.
Thing is... nuclear war would bring serious climate change, and due to the massive amount of deaths and casualties, disease would probably kill as many, if not more, than the bombs themselves. This would be like the Black Death, with radiation.
However, people would almost certainly survive. Possibly a lot of them, but at least a few. Humanity has survived at least one supervolcanic eruption, which would be very comparable to the amount of dust you might get in a nuclear exchange.
Compared to what might happen after such an event, actual working martial law would be more "society" by far. It would actually be something of an achievement in that scenario, if it avoided breaking down into warlords and roving bands of killers.
Europe was tired out and broke after WWII. The US probably did some nudging, but the reality was that there was a new world after WWII and true empires of the 19th Century sort were no longer supportable, if they ever really were. Europe was a literal wreck, and the UK was broke.
In the end, they exhausted themselves and ended their own empires through their bad decisions.
It was a General Staff plan. It was just a fleshed out thought exercise. It could have been turned into action, if need be, but does not imply any sort of intent.
The various staffs of the armed services constantly run "what-if" scenarios like this. They are not evidence of any sort of intent, they're just thought exercises on how to carry out an attack on or defense against any particular opposing force. This is just war-gaming at a professional level which can be used to sharpen planning skills when they want to break out of planning yet another Middle East scenario.
The truth of matter is that most people are screwed in a big enough scenario. Indeed, even the leaders or the rich would not be guaranteed to get out of it. The government will do its best to keep things going, but the reason there is a succession plan is that even the most highly ranked individuals face their demise.
Yes, I'd feel better if this was not about opening a garage, but was used to open something like a drop box where it isn't part of your house, and the package is still safe.
Of course, you could just invent a dead drop box for this too.
I don't think letting people into my garage is a good idea.
I don't disagree with you too much. The new movies are fun, and I feel they resurrect a part of TOS that I think got lost in later Trek, but you're right, I think they tell the story in a way that says:
"You already know who all these people are, so let's ignore the part where we bother to fill the holes in the plot."
For instance, Kirk goes from cadet at the Academy to Captain of a starship. It was almost like he Riddicked the Enterprise and "kept what he killed" or whatever. I mean, sure... maybe he got to be temporary captain for that mission. That made a modicum of sense. But no, at the end, he's now the captain. Unlike "real" Kirk who was a youngish man, but still had a full military career before becoming captain.
Khan, of course, suffered from the "okay, we already know who he is because we saw Space Seed and The Wrath of Khan," except that, of course, James T Kirk in the new timeline had *not* seen those episodes and Old Spock pointing out that Khan was a really bad man, was probably not going to be enough to explain why Khan was now Sherlock.
I have to admit that I did have a bit of a subversive chuckle at the military style uniforms they used for Starfleet in "Into Darkness". For some reason, I'd have thought that would have had more people howling, because it made Starfleet look a lot more obviously military.
For all of that, though, I do sort of still get a TOS vibe from the new movies. I just hope if they do another one, that they do get a little more introspective, between explosions. But I still totally want explosions, and green Orion girls.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't think that this has to be a FUD scenario. I think law enforcement has a job to do, and they get to use certain tools to do it. If one of those tools becomes ineffective, then they have more trouble doing their job. Then they will complain because they are still expected to do their jobs.
We can certainly look at it from the approach of seeing all of the ways that power can be abused, but we have to balance that by pretending that there is a non-corrupt cop out there who needs to build a case against someone who they legitimately believe to be guilty of a crime. What happens if pervasive encryption now permits that criminal to get away with something that could have been detected by a properly executed wiretap in the past?
I'm not saying that we take away encryption, but pointing out the problem and looking for a solution is not FUD, its a legitimate concern that needs discussion. You can't just tell the cops, "you can't tap us anymore? Too bad, so sad," unless you also accept the relative step down in their ability to prosecute certain crimes.
The Founding Fathers individually had different views.
John Adams and Thomas Jefferson would not have agreed on this, for instance.
The Bill of Rights was a compromise requirement attached to the initial Constitution. The original Constitution has no such rights in it, although the amendments were added so immediately afterward that the Constitution proper has no historical significance on its own except to show that not everyone in the Convention was as concerned about those rights as others were.
Sympathy for authorities, if something like that has ever happened, is an oscillation rather than something lost permanently.
This tends to change based on perceived need for more control to protect against threats. If we all feel in danger, we'll go along with, or even celebrate certain activities that might be considered to be unacceptable at some other time. If we feel safe, then the imposition of authority on people will chafe, because it is intrusive and there is no counteracting threat to make it necessary.
You can't reduce risk to zero. And I think that's the major problem with how we think of things. Instead of taking some common sense improvements incrementally these days, we go overboard. If the risk aversion outpaces our advancement in processes and tech, then we start suffering opportunity costs when we keep trying to remove risk.
If you can use a VPN to do your work, by all means, do it at home. If you're a garbage collector... the more time you can't work, the less you get done. And the more trash piles up. You want to protect those workers, but if you start becoming overprotective, shit starts piling up. Literally.
Only if you're talking about office drones. There are a lot of those in a city, to be sure, but many people in a service economy need to go to a workplace.
Fact is, there are a great deal of people who lose out when they aren't able to go to work. There are even IT types who need still need to visit data centers on occasion.
And perhaps compared to the past, we have fewer manufacturing jobs, but we still do have those too. Again, worked at by people who probably need the money.
I do understand the problem of a limited money supply, but I don't think they're seriously considering leaving the euro, so talking about an independent monetary policy is pointless. They need to bring in more money, and while they maintain the euro, they either need to borrow or somehow change monetary policy related to the euro to suit them. Borrowing still seems more likely than a change in Eurozone monetary policy.
That consideration is a factor, but governments tend to be long lasting entities, so they could certainly eventually pay off the debt, if they shrunk or even deferred payments for awhile. Something is usually better than nothing for a vendor, as long as the cost of administering the debt is less than what they bring in.
The best thing for Greece to do financially is to restore solvency. Austerity may not be the best solution, but it is certainly on the right track. Defaults or borrow and spend can work, but *only* if they take the short term windfall and do something useful with it. Otherwise, they've trashed their financial future.
Unfortunately, financial solvency doesn't provide for retirement for people directly, although for any realistic social insurance program, you need to have long term financial stability and capacity. That means that even though austerity may actually work, there is clearly not the will to see it through.
It may be a good idea for Greece to default and deal with it, but that will end their ability to get anything like good loans in the near future. And I don't think the extra money from no longer paying on the debt will fix the quality of life problems that the people in Greece have right now.
Don't really care what you think of HOAs. Not incredibly fond of them myself and I am on the board of one.
Point is, there are enforcement options that are more than just fines. They can work, if they apply the correct sort of pressure. Example being: I can't always force you to pay your dues, but I sure as heck don't have to let you use common area resources that those dues directly support. That might include a privilege you care about.
Same goes for government and utilities.
That is the crux of the issue. You can spend 1 trillion dollars on a campaign and that doesn't mean I'll vote for that candidate.
The real problem is that it *does* work for larger blocs of voters. But the money is only the means of taking advantage of that flaw, not actually a corruption of democracy or free speech.
Citizens United has zero impact on who I will vote for. In fact, it has zero impact on anyone who has a well formed political position that they have researched. However, we know that money means that people who get to vote, but who get their "facts" from TV ads, will be affected. This is unfortunate, but not the fault of free speech. It is a flaw of our democracy (and possibly every realistic democracy based in the current era).
You can't really say this isn't democracy, when the democracy is actually functioning more or less as designed.
Granted, there are different forms of democracy, but good luck finding one where someone isn't in power who doesn't represent the people exactly.
Democracy is useful only for legitimacy of government, not for coming up with right answers. If you want a *better* government, democracy may be some small part of it, but there is nothing about true democracy that prevents it from supporting an elected oligarchy. And that elected oligarchy, if the actual cheating and forced votes are kept to a minimum, is as much a democratic system as one that elects a great leadership team.
There is no system in existence that prevents the intelligent, the rich or the ambitious from obtaining power. There is only, perhaps, a system that is able to direct that influence to ends that are less bad than others.
Don't get me wrong. Borrowing and spending is a totally legitimate way of dealing with the issue... if you can do it without doing long term damage to your economy with it.
Economics comes down to hard and fast numbers for some things, but it is just as much based on the mood of the people and how and where they spend their money. If you can make them more optimistic, you can pull out of it, if your fundamentals are not completely devastated.
They are still required to act on it. There is usually an order to remedy the solution along with any fine. If they don't act they would face the same fines.
The real question is the second one you asked. If they can pay 5 mil a year and it costs 10 mil to fix the issues, then I'll take the fine every time.
If there was personal executive responsibility, then if I fail to execute the task, and then I get arrested for persisting... then 10 mil of Verizon's money is less important than staying out of jail. There is the other option that Verizon could be disqualified from things that give them the potential for much higher profits later. Otherwise, its all about the fines.
When someone doesn't pay their dues for our HOA, we don't just fine them or send them to collections. We revoke their visitor parking passes and their pool rights. We also slap liens on their property. Even that is usually not enough to get people to pay, but it may be enough to get them to increase the priority of who they pay first. Point being that there are things the FCC may or may not be able to do, but if they go to court they might be able to get other remedies.
Now, if the FCC does *not* have the ability to apply other remedies... then Verizon will just pay the bill and keep on keeping on.
Generating a different payment plan might be useful, although as you pointed out, nowhere near enough.
Unless they intend to get forgiveness... or default. I am not sure that Greece is "too big to fail" where they can do that.
Greece needs long term thinking. Austerity might well be a knee-jerk reaction, so hopefully they can reasonably do what you suggest, like changing certain parameters and becoming more efficient at collecting taxes. On the other hand, collecting taxes is not always so straightforward a solution.
Politically, the right solution is probably more obvious than it seems. What may be lacking is the will to execute on it. That's usually the case with politics.
I'm not going to judge based on what his last job was, if he's actually technically qualified to do this one.
I just wonder what their plan is. Austerity is not a happy thing, but it is definitely possible to make things worse. With their economy in its current state, the usual leftist option of borrowing and spending their way out of it may be very limited. Not to mention that it sort of got them there to begin with. And the people likely elected these guys because they want their benefits back, somehow. Sadly democracy does not always make for good economic policy.
It would be interesting if there was some clever model that could get them out of this mes.
Well, the scouting was the "fleshed out" part. You don't create an actual war plan without doing your homework, and scouting your next door neighbor is probably easier than scouting anyone else would be.
Creating plans to invade or defend against other countries, even (currently) friendly ones, is the job of a military staff. It provides options for leaders, and good plans can't wait until two weeks before you realize that you need to go to war. If you've waited that long, you're screwed. Modern militaries don't operate without advanced logistics support and mobilization plans.
More to the point, it's good practice for those whose job it is to plan things. Its not exactly friendly sounding, but every country's military does it. The UK even had a plan for war with the US before WWII, although even then, the plan was "try to get the US population to lose interest in the war by holding out long enough to not be blockaded into starvation".
Just think of it as the US playing a friendly game of Warhammer 40K with their best bud Canada.
I'm well aware that PC doesn't equal Windows and nothing I said indicated I believed that. The point is that PCs still exist, and Windows still dominates them for anything but servers.
I'm a sys admin who uses Linux every day. I've had Linux desktops running on machines and in VMs for years. I have a bunch of Linux desktop VMs at the moment. Its better for development, but I much prefer Linux as the VM and not as my actual workstation.
Linux has done a lot of things well, but creating a desktop worth using regularly is one thing that seems to elude it for some reason. For what it is worth Win XP was "okay", but Win7 was actually pretty good. Even Win 8.1 is decent, if you can ignore some of the irritations. But I have yet to see a Linux desktop that even really compares to XP, let alone later iterations of Windows.
Aero is fine... if you can turn it off.
If you have the machine that can feasibly do all that fancy graphical shit, then why not? As long as they don't make you have to use it.
Sure, Windows isn't all over mobile, but most people still have PCs. Including the one I am typing on right now. It is still quite relevant. Until you end the PC, somehow, it will continue to be, if nothing else changes.
It is still by far, the best OS for business workstation use. And I say this as a UNIX admin who has been waiting for a Linux desktop worth using for the last decade. And its not half bad for personal use either.
Windows has come a long way, although not without its share of missteps. I'm actually okay with it now. I might not switch to a Mac even if someone gave me one. Although that says more about what I think of Macs these days than it does of Windows. And mind you, my first three computers were Macs.
Thing is... nuclear war would bring serious climate change, and due to the massive amount of deaths and casualties, disease would probably kill as many, if not more, than the bombs themselves. This would be like the Black Death, with radiation.
However, people would almost certainly survive. Possibly a lot of them, but at least a few. Humanity has survived at least one supervolcanic eruption, which would be very comparable to the amount of dust you might get in a nuclear exchange.
Compared to what might happen after such an event, actual working martial law would be more "society" by far. It would actually be something of an achievement in that scenario, if it avoided breaking down into warlords and roving bands of killers.
Europe was tired out and broke after WWII. The US probably did some nudging, but the reality was that there was a new world after WWII and true empires of the 19th Century sort were no longer supportable, if they ever really were. Europe was a literal wreck, and the UK was broke.
In the end, they exhausted themselves and ended their own empires through their bad decisions.
It was a General Staff plan. It was just a fleshed out thought exercise. It could have been turned into action, if need be, but does not imply any sort of intent.
The various staffs of the armed services constantly run "what-if" scenarios like this. They are not evidence of any sort of intent, they're just thought exercises on how to carry out an attack on or defense against any particular opposing force. This is just war-gaming at a professional level which can be used to sharpen planning skills when they want to break out of planning yet another Middle East scenario.
The truth of matter is that most people are screwed in a big enough scenario. Indeed, even the leaders or the rich would not be guaranteed to get out of it. The government will do its best to keep things going, but the reason there is a succession plan is that even the most highly ranked individuals face their demise.
Yes, I'd feel better if this was not about opening a garage, but was used to open something like a drop box where it isn't part of your house, and the package is still safe.
Of course, you could just invent a dead drop box for this too.
I don't think letting people into my garage is a good idea.
I don't disagree with you too much. The new movies are fun, and I feel they resurrect a part of TOS that I think got lost in later Trek, but you're right, I think they tell the story in a way that says:
"You already know who all these people are, so let's ignore the part where we bother to fill the holes in the plot."
For instance, Kirk goes from cadet at the Academy to Captain of a starship. It was almost like he Riddicked the Enterprise and "kept what he killed" or whatever. I mean, sure... maybe he got to be temporary captain for that mission. That made a modicum of sense. But no, at the end, he's now the captain. Unlike "real" Kirk who was a youngish man, but still had a full military career before becoming captain.
Khan, of course, suffered from the "okay, we already know who he is because we saw Space Seed and The Wrath of Khan," except that, of course, James T Kirk in the new timeline had *not* seen those episodes and Old Spock pointing out that Khan was a really bad man, was probably not going to be enough to explain why Khan was now Sherlock.
I have to admit that I did have a bit of a subversive chuckle at the military style uniforms they used for Starfleet in "Into Darkness". For some reason, I'd have thought that would have had more people howling, because it made Starfleet look a lot more obviously military.
For all of that, though, I do sort of still get a TOS vibe from the new movies. I just hope if they do another one, that they do get a little more introspective, between explosions. But I still totally want explosions, and green Orion girls.