He was close, but a little off the mark: it is not to provide for the "welfare of a state," (or the people who live in a single state), but to provide instead for the "general welfare of the United States" - the country, as a whole, not individual states receiving preference to certain others. You're right, in that it does apply to the people of the United States, but the spending and taxation must, in general, be applied evenly - you can't just say, for example, "Ohio has to pay 75% income tax, and California pays nothing," or "everybody has to pay 10% of their income, and we're going to use that money only to build roads in Florida, but nowhere else."
If Congress can argue that it promotes the "general welfare," it's fair game according to established precedent, unless it directly conflicts with a power explicitly prohibited to Congress. In the current interpretation, the General Welfare + Necessary & Proper Clause + Commerce Clause = "The Federal government can lay taxes and spend federal money on almost anything it wants to, as long as they say they're doing it to help 'everybody'."
The problem with this is that the government loses sight of the fact that having the ability to exercise a power doesn't mean it must be exercised constantly.
Not quite - the grant is to provide the general welfare of "The United States" - meaning, the country as a whole, without prejudice against any particular state or region. If it benefits the "whole country," it can be said to promote the general welfare.
Two different interpretations existed for the clause - one, put forth by James Madison, was that it was intended ONLY to provide for spending on the "general welfare" for the items specifically listed in Section 8 of the Constitution after this clause; Alexander Hamilton put forth the opposing viewpoint that "promoting the general welfare" gave Congress a wide latitude to decide on how to tax & spend federal money.
One of the first (and few) cases to test the interpretation of this clause, US v Butler, 1936, declared a federal agriculture program unconstitutional because it violated the Tenth Amendment; at the same time, the court affirmed the Hamiltonian interpretation, declaring that congress had wide latitude to tax and spend to promote the general welfare, so long as it is, in fact, the "general welfare of the US," and not intended to, for instance, benefit California at the expense of Ohio, or vice versa.
They don't need to use the clause to pass social programs, because it's been challenged and decided by the courts already, and yes, Congress has expanded the meaning of the commerce clause over time, too.
1. Honest question: Iraq, but not Afghanistan, I presume? Or do you include Afghanistan here, because the 9/11 attacks were not official actions of the Afghani government? Let's assume that reducing our involvement to 1 country would cut the cost (projected at $172 billion for this year) in half, so we've saved 90 billion.
2. 2nd engine program for the F35 multinational fighter. Savings: ~ $500 million. (Note, this is not "the entire F35 fighter program" that they don't want - it's simply the funding for an additional engine option for the jet.)
3. Base closures: a big expenditure, certainly - but I suspect even this is not as clear-cut as we might think. We have joint-defense treaty obligations to our allies overseas, and it may actually be more cost-effective to meet them with people stationed abroad than it would be to be constantly shipping men and material by cargo transports. I don't think we can simply say "close every base everywhere in Europe and Asia," both because of those treaty obligations (and the joint-training requirements they create), and because of the simple fact that projection of military power abroad - say to the areas of the Middle East like Afghanistan, where there is a legitimate need to provide air support for missions there are a lot cheaper than buying a bunch of new aircraft carriers or shipping everything from US bases every time we need to do something. (Consider things like humanitarian relief missions, as well - those foreign bases provide a very real staging point for shipping relief supplies.)
http://www.commondreams.org/views04/0115-08.htm (certainly not a "right wing" publication) reports that the Pentagon names the cost-to-replace our foreign bases at 115 billion, with a total cost-to-replace of all facilities at nearly 600 billion. So rough numbers, let's say 1/5 of the facilities budget of the DoD would go to supporting those overseas bases, as well. According to this data, the projected expenditures are 685 billion, including Afghanistan & Iraq - let's assume 510 Billion for our "non-afghan/iraq" budget. Assuming the money is spent proportionally, 20% of that (~102 Billion) could be cut if we closed *every base we currently operate on foreign soil*.
So... we can cut $200 billion or so from the budget, by terminating our involvement in Iraq and closing all our foreign bases. Of course, not every foreign base meets the criteria you set forth - in nations friendly to us, without hostile neighbors, so the number would be still lower - let's ballpark it at 175 billion dollars saved.
Overall, I'll agree, that's a significant sum of money. But the Defense spending is far from the only reason we're in trillions of dollars of debt, either. Cutting defense spending is not a sufficient measure to close our 1+ trillion dollar annual budget deficits - we are living beyond our means, and even if we cut the entire Defense Department tomorrow, we wouldn't close that budget gap.
About the only thing a netbook would be useful for is backing up my photographs in the evening.
And let's be honest, with a bit of fiddling, you could probably do that with an Android phone and an online service like flickr, facebook... hell, even dropbox would probably work fine for simple backup.
They make SD card readers for the iPad and iPhone, I have to imagine that you could do the same thing with an Android phone as well, then just upload the images through a wifi/3g connection.
I'm sure there's a lot of fat that could be cut out of the defense budget.
Such as? Which specific programs and expenditures that should be eliminated? It's real easy to go "Holy shit, we spend a lot on the DoD," much less clear what programs are specifically unnecessary and should be ended.
Yeah, problem is that the preamble of the Constitution has never been interpreted as a substantive source of legal authority for the federal government. Hint: It's the contents of the document, not the "introductory summary of what the document is about" that is where the powers are granted.
The General Welfare clause is in Section 8, where it grants Congress: "The Congress shall have Power To lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises, to pay the Debts and provide for the common Defence and general Welfare of the United States; but all Duties, Imposts and Excises shall be uniform throughout the United States;"
"General Welfare" is a highly subjective term, and open to a broad range of interpretations. I'd suggest being very careful - and very small-c-conservative - about granting powers using *that* clause, because if Democrats want to use it to grant Congress the authority to create a single-payer healthcare system (with all of the broad powers that such regulation would grant the federal government), when the conservatives get in power, they can then claim that it's promoting the "general welfare" to push through their pet programs.
If you care about personal liberty, then you must be very careful with broad sanction for "General welfare" legislation & spending. Once you start broadening that definition because "I think it's better for everybody," then anybody else can do anything else they want with that same justification, once they're in power. It is in your own best interests to limit the power and reach of the government, and one of the best ways of doing that is by limiting its granted powers to the specifically enumerated programs called for, rather than using "general welfare" as a catch-all justification for every program you think would be fun to implement.
No, your original comment was this: "Well the risk of leaking the names of contributors would be the right-wing nutcases in our government who want those people executed for treason. If a contributor even has a hint that their name might get out there they are more likely to shut up completely." -- in essence, that the "right wing" would deter contributors if leakers' anonymity wasn't guaranteed properly.
If you don't think that "life in prison, no parole" would be a pretty fucking effective deterrent to leaking, then you're kidding yourself.
There's already functionality built into iOS allowing ipads, ipod touches, and iPhones to be used as remotes for an Apple TV, all over a wireless network.
You can't think of any way this type of technology could be easily used to create custom input devices for iOS apps running on an Apple TV? Because I sure can.
First: Your point assumes that only right-wing nutcases are capable of killing people in return for revealing some secret that is damaging or embarrassing to someone in power. This is demonstrably false, as even a cursory examination of history will show.
Second: You assume that the only people a leaker would have to fear are right-wing people, as if liberals and left-wingers never have secrets they want to keep that others might want to know about. This too is demonstrably false, as even a cursory examination of history will show.
Third: As far as the death penalty in this situation, a Republican legislator from Michigan doesn't have the authority to do anything *except* make public statements about his opinions. In fact, it's a Democratic appointee (Eric Holder, the US Attorney General) who must oversee the Justice Department's efforts to build a case against Mr. Assange. All reports indicate that he's doing so, and most reports say that charges could include "espionage" - which can carry a death penalty sentence. If it was only the right-wing who was interested in prosecuting, he wouldn't be wasting time with trying to build a case, since I doubt very much that John Boehner and Eric Cantor have a lot of leeway to order Mr. Holder around.
Fourth: The Democratic senators who are chiming in with their support have specifically used the term "espionage" - are you suggesting that they're completely unaware that - under current law - it can carry a death sentence as a penalty? Or are you suggesting that since they object to the death penalty, a life sentence would somehow be a "good" alternative for a leaker to be facing? "Right wingers want to kill you, left wingers want to lock you in a 10x10 concrete box for the rest of your life." "But what about not going to jail or dying?" "Sorry, that's not in the cards."
In summary: Leakers embarrass authority. It is a natural reaction to react strongly to being publicly embarrassed, and that has nothing to do with being "right wing" or "left wing" - it has to do with "I'm in charge, and you just made me look bad."
Yes, that's right, it's only right wing nutcases like John Kerry, Diane Feinstein, and Clair McCaskill who believe that an organization like WIkileaks is a danger. And let's not forget Atty General Eric Holder, appointed by President Obama, who is expending a great deal of effort to build a case against Assange and Wikileaks.
My god, it's just a bunch of neocons after him, it MUST be a right-wing conspiracy!
Yeah, the minimum hardware spec is completely unreasonable! -- Capacitive, 4-point multi-touch screen with WVGA (800x480) resolution -- 1 GHz ARM v7 "Cortex/Scorpion" or better processor -- DirectX9 rendering-capable GPU -- 256 MB of RAM with at least 8 GB of Flash memory -- Accelerometer with compass, ambient light sensor, proximity sensor and Assisted GPS -- 5-megapixel camera with an LED flash -- FM radio tuner -- 6 dedicated hardware buttons - back, Start, search, camera, power/sleep and Volume Up and Down.
That pretty much defines a baseline "state of the art" for new smart phones these days. And they're minimum requirements - not detailed specifications for what must be in the phone, no more, no less.
What's the big issue? Other than a few thousand people who are seeing their wet dreams of a "fully open" hacker-friendly handset evaporate... do you think most people buying Nokia phones give a shit whether their phone runs MeeGo or Symbian or WP7? They want it to work, and they want it to have rough feature parity with the other phones on the market. (I.e., don't give me a flip-phone without touchscreen, GPS, data plan, browser, etc., and call it a "smart phone"). Nokia has hundreds of millions of customers. A fraction of a single percent of those customers actually care what operating system their phone runs. The rest think in terms of "can I browse the web?" "Can I read my email?" "Can I listen to some music?" "Can I make a phone call?"
It's not about the OS, it's about the functions. The OS enables functions, but nobody other than people who enjoy tinkering is going to care which OS is enabling those functions.
/Openmoko was a joke compared to what I'm talking about here....
Openmoko is a joke, full stop. And yet, it's *exactly* what you're predicting will happen when all these tens of techs around the world get SO FED UP that rather than buy a phone that's hacker friendly, they decide to build an entire piece of hardware from the ground up to make something that's "hacker friendly" only inasmuch as you need to be a hacker to get the thing to work at all.
An aside - who says it needs to be backed by business?
If you need to have hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars in manufacturing equipment to produce a piece of "open hardware," it's gonna be pretty hard to get there without having a business backing you - the market for "open source wooden spoons" ("Whittled by inmates on death row from virgin balsa wood!") is probably pretty small.
I'm all for it. Can we start building some very efficient and very safe nuclear power plants instead?
I ask because a lot of people who want alternative energy sources seem strangely unwilling to accept any alternatives involving anything except sunlight, wind, and perhaps tide power on the coasts.
But there are a few nice-to-use alternatives now. Nice to use, as well as better featured.
Sure, I'll even say that Android has some decent-to-use alternatives available, and some Android phones have more features. That's not the point I'm making. The point I'm making is that, even for that, the Android phones don't seem to be generating the enthusiastic response that the iOS devices and, in my experience, WebOS do. And what that means is that people need very little reason to go looking for something else.
Your link falls far short of establishing a trend, however. How many people buy third-party insurance on their phones? My guess is that they represent a very small portion of the overall iPhone purchases to date, so a "large % increase" in claims doesn't necessarily mean this is something that represents a larger movement of the market. Nor is there any comparison with other types of phones, to see if this is representative of "people who insure phones" more than "people who own iPhones."
As you correctly note, wanting the "new shiny" is human nature. And it's only intensified by knowing that it's a new version of something *you already really like.*
And again, that's the entire point, in response to the person who declared WebOS devices DOA above: Android doesn't seem to be generating a lot of enthusiasm outside of Slashdot and Google employees. WebOS, if the software & hardware is done well (and frankly, what I saw in the demo looked pretty promising), and backed by a company with HP's marketing clout, could turn out to have much longer legs than anybody expects today. Five years ago, people probably wouldn't have predicted a time that Nokia's profits were collapsing and RIM's market share was eroding as quickly as it is today. But here we sit, with a dramatically different landscape.
If people truly love their iPhones, why is everyone always so desperate to upgrade to the latest hardware and software revision? [ . . . ] something as basic as 3G or multitasking, that had been in other devices for years?
Leaving aside your overly general assertions, I'll point out the simple fact that's implied by your own statement: iPhone users, for *whatever* reason you wish to ascribe it to, are by and large happy with their platform, and not switching *away* from the iPhone - even if they buy a new phone, they're (very often) buying a new iPhone. If other phones have all of these features and have had them for years, why *are* people buying (and then staying loyal) to the iOS platform?
I know the popular view around here is "because they're uneducated sheep who don't know any better." But I think that answer falls far short of explaining the situation.
Oh, I know this scenario happened in Spain - it's just lucky for the Spanish people that the TSA isn't a Spanish government agency. But here in the US, we're learning to never underestimate the lengths a federal agency will go to increase their annual budget and cop a quick feel at the same time.:)
Sure. My question to you would be: how much is $53 billion compared to other federally-funded transit projects?
And I maintain that this is the wrong question to ask.
The appropriate questions are, as I've suggested: Does it make sense to spend this money, given our massive debt & massive budgets to begin with? There's dozens of projects that are "just 50-100 billion, a drop in the bucket." And if we keep adding them, we're just adding to our already crushing debt burden. If this *is* a national priority, are we willing to forego other expenditures in order to make room for this?
We can't just keep spending money the way we do. Some things, even if they're really nice, really great ideas, and would be the coolest things since sliced bread, we simply won't be able to afford. We need to evaluate *any* federal expenditure in the context of its value to the nation, and how much of a priority the item really is. Building a handful of HSR lines between a handful of cities is doing one of two things: 1) *starting* a massive long-term expenditure to build a nationwide HSR system; or 2) wasting the money on connecting a few cities with HSR, and then getting bored with the project and deciding it's not as fun as it should be.
I don't doubt that the state of California has done extensive planning, and would love to see HSR between SF and LA. But they're not paying for it on their own, they're asking residents of the 49 other states to pay for it as well. And they certainly haven't evaluated their state plan in the context of a nationwide HSR plan's costs and benefits.
As I said elsewhere in this thread, it's about living within our means as a nation: I would love to go buy a high-end BMW with all the bells and whistles. But I drive a decent, but far less expensive Volkswagen, because it's what I can afford.
And since the "We're spending way more in Iraq and Afghanistan than this would cost" argument always gets trotted out in these situations, I'll answer pre-emptively: Yes, I absolutely agree that we should be reviewing and curtailing our involvement in our current conflicts. Once again, the expenditures need to be evaluated in the context of our priorities as a nation. It's not an either-or proposition, where *either* we get Military spending to maintain a presence in Iraq and Afghanistan, *or* we get a high speed rail program. It's entirely possible that *both* are high priority items that should be funded fully, and it's entirely possible that *neither* are priorities that should be funded - meaning we pull our troops out, AND we don't provide federal funding to these HSR links.
1) Get out in front of Nokia's restructuring announcement, so people know that there's something "exciting" coming from HP in the next few months. Nokia - I expect - will more or less announce that they're scrapping MeeGo and Symbian and moving to Windows Phone 7 on their smartphones.
2) Get your hat in the ring before the press spends weeks reviewing Apple's iPad 2 & iPhone 5;
3) Get their name in the papers: "Forthcoming Android AND WebOS tablet computers look to challenge iPad dominance. The Motorola Xoom tablet - running Android - and the HP TouchPad - running WebOS - are the most recently announced tablets aimed at unseating the current king of the tablet hill, the iPad. Comparison of features, prices, etc. follows!"
Why let the other platforms dominate a slow-press period?
I wouldn't be so quick to predict Android's overwhelming triumph, and the imminent demise of WebOS.
It's interesting to me that the (admittedly small number of) WebOS users I know have reacted nearly as strongly positive to it as iOS users have to their devices; Android doesn't seem to generate as much enthusiasm for the devices - the reactions seem to run from "It's okay, you just have to tinker with it a bit to get everything the way you want it," to "I don't like it."
Everybody's a potential switcher, and Google's encouragement towards making apps in the Android Market cheap/free (and thus ad-supported) simply makes the bar to switching away from Android that much lower - if you haven't paid for many apps, you don't have an investment in the platform to tie you to it. Outside of Slashdot, I don't know too many people who rave about their Android phones, but I know lots of people who have been waiting breathlessly for the iPhone to come to Verizon.
Based on the reaction people who've used WebOS seem to have, WebOS could be a surprisingly strong contender if they get the tablet right - people who use it seem to like it, a lot, and HP has a hell of a lot more marketing power to push it if they want to.
No, I'm not ignoring that at all. I'm questioning whether now is the appropriate time to drop 53 billion dollars on HSR projects. And if it is worth doing at this point, and it is a valuable project, is 53 billion dollars over 6 years enough to make much of an impact at all? And if we spend that 53 billion dollars now, are we simply borrowing more money to pay for other pet projects that aren't as important as well?
Again: it's about living within our means. I have no personal issue with the notion of investing in rail service, provided it's an *investment* (and not just pork-barrel spending), and provided that we're: a) not shortchanging some other more important project elsewhere, and b) not just continuing to run up the debt because "what the hell, it's only another 53 billion dollars, that's a drop in the bucket compared to our total national debt."
Wow, you'd think I suggested that "pay only for what you personally use" is what I was suggesting!
Your taxes pay for all that, and: 1) They also pay for roads in your jurisdiction. 2) They also pay for schools in your jurisdiction. 3) They also pay for medical care at hospitals in your jurisdiction.
Is this 53 Billion dollars of spending going to build a national high speed rail service? Is there a plan to build such an infrastructure? How much does it cost? Is there any hope of it being self-sustaining, or even making a return on the initial investment that would allow the government to improve other services with the revenues?
"I want it, and I want it now" is not sufficient justification for appropriating money from your fellow citizens to pay for something that you think would be cool. I actually listed 4 very important questions that should be discussed about *any* major expenditure like this, but I suppose you were too busy constructing a straw man to notice that.
Until somebody realizes that those fancy high speed trains are an easy target, and blows up a bomb on one. And then the TSA becomes responsible for protecting our vital national rail assets, and your nuts get fondled again - having the delightful double-whammy effect of expanding TSA spending to secure all the rail stations, and driving down ridership because people would rather drive than get molested.
You could certainly make an argument that when high speed trains are built by confiscatory taxes from all citizens, and disproportionately benefit a few areas of the country where a lot of the people footing the bill don't live and will never benefit from this construction, the high speed trains are indeed at odds with personal liberty.
If I never ride a high speed rail line between LA and San Francisco, is it right of the federal government to take money from me and hand it to the government of California for building that line?
There are several hurdles a program like this should need to clear to become a federal expenditure: 1) Is it an investment? What is the projected (realistic) return on that investment? 2) Is it critical infrastructure? What is the impact of not having this infrastructure if we simply don't have the money to fund it? 3) Given the current financial condition of the country, and given the priorities we've decided on *as a nation,* is this an important expenditure at this time? 4) Is there money to fund everything that we've decided is as-important or MORE-important than this as well, without having to resort to additional borrowing to fund it?
These are important questions, and if we can't answer them, we need to sit down and think some more about how this program fits into the nation's needs & priorities. I do this every month, it's called living within your means: I'd love a new laptop to replace my 4-year-old, increasingly-overburdened home system. But funding my 401k for retirement, paying down my current car loan ahead of time, and having some free spending money left over to go out and have some drinks with friends now and again are more important to me than buying a new laptop. So, I put aside $100 a month into my "new computer fund", and fund my other, higher, priorities fully first.
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He was close, but a little off the mark: it is not to provide for the "welfare of a state," (or the people who live in a single state), but to provide instead for the "general welfare of the United States" - the country, as a whole, not individual states receiving preference to certain others. You're right, in that it does apply to the people of the United States, but the spending and taxation must, in general, be applied evenly - you can't just say, for example, "Ohio has to pay 75% income tax, and California pays nothing," or "everybody has to pay 10% of their income, and we're going to use that money only to build roads in Florida, but nowhere else."
If Congress can argue that it promotes the "general welfare," it's fair game according to established precedent, unless it directly conflicts with a power explicitly prohibited to Congress. In the current interpretation, the General Welfare + Necessary & Proper Clause + Commerce Clause = "The Federal government can lay taxes and spend federal money on almost anything it wants to, as long as they say they're doing it to help 'everybody'."
The problem with this is that the government loses sight of the fact that having the ability to exercise a power doesn't mean it must be exercised constantly.
Not quite - the grant is to provide the general welfare of "The United States" - meaning, the country as a whole, without prejudice against any particular state or region. If it benefits the "whole country," it can be said to promote the general welfare.
Two different interpretations existed for the clause - one, put forth by James Madison, was that it was intended ONLY to provide for spending on the "general welfare" for the items specifically listed in Section 8 of the Constitution after this clause; Alexander Hamilton put forth the opposing viewpoint that "promoting the general welfare" gave Congress a wide latitude to decide on how to tax & spend federal money.
One of the first (and few) cases to test the interpretation of this clause, US v Butler, 1936, declared a federal agriculture program unconstitutional because it violated the Tenth Amendment; at the same time, the court affirmed the Hamiltonian interpretation, declaring that congress had wide latitude to tax and spend to promote the general welfare, so long as it is, in fact, the "general welfare of the US," and not intended to, for instance, benefit California at the expense of Ohio, or vice versa.
They don't need to use the clause to pass social programs, because it's been challenged and decided by the courts already, and yes, Congress has expanded the meaning of the commerce clause over time, too.
1. Honest question: Iraq, but not Afghanistan, I presume? Or do you include Afghanistan here, because the 9/11 attacks were not official actions of the Afghani government? Let's assume that reducing our involvement to 1 country would cut the cost (projected at $172 billion for this year) in half, so we've saved 90 billion.
2. 2nd engine program for the F35 multinational fighter. Savings: ~ $500 million. (Note, this is not "the entire F35 fighter program" that they don't want - it's simply the funding for an additional engine option for the jet.)
3. Base closures: a big expenditure, certainly - but I suspect even this is not as clear-cut as we might think. We have joint-defense treaty obligations to our allies overseas, and it may actually be more cost-effective to meet them with people stationed abroad than it would be to be constantly shipping men and material by cargo transports. I don't think we can simply say "close every base everywhere in Europe and Asia," both because of those treaty obligations (and the joint-training requirements they create), and because of the simple fact that projection of military power abroad - say to the areas of the Middle East like Afghanistan, where there is a legitimate need to provide air support for missions there are a lot cheaper than buying a bunch of new aircraft carriers or shipping everything from US bases every time we need to do something. (Consider things like humanitarian relief missions, as well - those foreign bases provide a very real staging point for shipping relief supplies.)
http://www.commondreams.org/views04/0115-08.htm (certainly not a "right wing" publication) reports that the Pentagon names the cost-to-replace our foreign bases at 115 billion, with a total cost-to-replace of all facilities at nearly 600 billion. So rough numbers, let's say 1/5 of the facilities budget of the DoD would go to supporting those overseas bases, as well. According to this data, the projected expenditures are 685 billion, including Afghanistan & Iraq - let's assume 510 Billion for our "non-afghan/iraq" budget. Assuming the money is spent proportionally, 20% of that (~102 Billion) could be cut if we closed *every base we currently operate on foreign soil*.
So... we can cut $200 billion or so from the budget, by terminating our involvement in Iraq and closing all our foreign bases. Of course, not every foreign base meets the criteria you set forth - in nations friendly to us, without hostile neighbors, so the number would be still lower - let's ballpark it at 175 billion dollars saved.
Overall, I'll agree, that's a significant sum of money. But the Defense spending is far from the only reason we're in trillions of dollars of debt, either. Cutting defense spending is not a sufficient measure to close our 1+ trillion dollar annual budget deficits - we are living beyond our means, and even if we cut the entire Defense Department tomorrow, we wouldn't close that budget gap.
And let's be honest, with a bit of fiddling, you could probably do that with an Android phone and an online service like flickr, facebook... hell, even dropbox would probably work fine for simple backup.
They make SD card readers for the iPad and iPhone, I have to imagine that you could do the same thing with an Android phone as well, then just upload the images through a wifi/3g connection.
Such as? Which specific programs and expenditures that should be eliminated? It's real easy to go "Holy shit, we spend a lot on the DoD," much less clear what programs are specifically unnecessary and should be ended.
Yeah, problem is that the preamble of the Constitution has never been interpreted as a substantive source of legal authority for the federal government. Hint: It's the contents of the document, not the "introductory summary of what the document is about" that is where the powers are granted.
The General Welfare clause is in Section 8, where it grants Congress:
"The Congress shall have Power To lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises, to pay the Debts and provide for the common Defence and general Welfare of the United States; but all Duties, Imposts and Excises shall be uniform throughout the United States;"
"General Welfare" is a highly subjective term, and open to a broad range of interpretations. I'd suggest being very careful - and very small-c-conservative - about granting powers using *that* clause, because if Democrats want to use it to grant Congress the authority to create a single-payer healthcare system (with all of the broad powers that such regulation would grant the federal government), when the conservatives get in power, they can then claim that it's promoting the "general welfare" to push through their pet programs.
If you care about personal liberty, then you must be very careful with broad sanction for "General welfare" legislation & spending. Once you start broadening that definition because "I think it's better for everybody," then anybody else can do anything else they want with that same justification, once they're in power. It is in your own best interests to limit the power and reach of the government, and one of the best ways of doing that is by limiting its granted powers to the specifically enumerated programs called for, rather than using "general welfare" as a catch-all justification for every program you think would be fun to implement.
No, your original comment was this: "Well the risk of leaking the names of contributors would be the right-wing nutcases in our government who want those people executed for treason. If a contributor even has a hint that their name might get out there they are more likely to shut up completely." -- in essence, that the "right wing" would deter contributors if leakers' anonymity wasn't guaranteed properly.
If you don't think that "life in prison, no parole" would be a pretty fucking effective deterrent to leaking, then you're kidding yourself.
There's already functionality built into iOS allowing ipads, ipod touches, and iPhones to be used as remotes for an Apple TV, all over a wireless network.
http://www.apple.com/itunes/remote/
You can't think of any way this type of technology could be easily used to create custom input devices for iOS apps running on an Apple TV? Because I sure can.
First: Your point assumes that only right-wing nutcases are capable of killing people in return for revealing some secret that is damaging or embarrassing to someone in power. This is demonstrably false, as even a cursory examination of history will show.
Second: You assume that the only people a leaker would have to fear are right-wing people, as if liberals and left-wingers never have secrets they want to keep that others might want to know about. This too is demonstrably false, as even a cursory examination of history will show.
Third: As far as the death penalty in this situation, a Republican legislator from Michigan doesn't have the authority to do anything *except* make public statements about his opinions. In fact, it's a Democratic appointee (Eric Holder, the US Attorney General) who must oversee the Justice Department's efforts to build a case against Mr. Assange. All reports indicate that he's doing so, and most reports say that charges could include "espionage" - which can carry a death penalty sentence. If it was only the right-wing who was interested in prosecuting, he wouldn't be wasting time with trying to build a case, since I doubt very much that John Boehner and Eric Cantor have a lot of leeway to order Mr. Holder around.
Fourth: The Democratic senators who are chiming in with their support have specifically used the term "espionage" - are you suggesting that they're completely unaware that - under current law - it can carry a death sentence as a penalty? Or are you suggesting that since they object to the death penalty, a life sentence would somehow be a "good" alternative for a leaker to be facing? "Right wingers want to kill you, left wingers want to lock you in a 10x10 concrete box for the rest of your life." "But what about not going to jail or dying?" "Sorry, that's not in the cards."
In summary: Leakers embarrass authority. It is a natural reaction to react strongly to being publicly embarrassed, and that has nothing to do with being "right wing" or "left wing" - it has to do with "I'm in charge, and you just made me look bad."
Yes, that's right, it's only right wing nutcases like John Kerry, Diane Feinstein, and Clair McCaskill who believe that an organization like WIkileaks is a danger. And let's not forget Atty General Eric Holder, appointed by President Obama, who is expending a great deal of effort to build a case against Assange and Wikileaks.
My god, it's just a bunch of neocons after him, it MUST be a right-wing conspiracy!
Yeah, the minimum hardware spec is completely unreasonable!
-- Capacitive, 4-point multi-touch screen with WVGA (800x480) resolution
-- 1 GHz ARM v7 "Cortex/Scorpion" or better processor
-- DirectX9 rendering-capable GPU
-- 256 MB of RAM with at least 8 GB of Flash memory
-- Accelerometer with compass, ambient light sensor, proximity sensor and Assisted GPS
-- 5-megapixel camera with an LED flash
-- FM radio tuner
-- 6 dedicated hardware buttons - back, Start, search, camera, power/sleep and Volume Up and Down.
That pretty much defines a baseline "state of the art" for new smart phones these days. And they're minimum requirements - not detailed specifications for what must be in the phone, no more, no less.
What's the big issue? Other than a few thousand people who are seeing their wet dreams of a "fully open" hacker-friendly handset evaporate... do you think most people buying Nokia phones give a shit whether their phone runs MeeGo or Symbian or WP7? They want it to work, and they want it to have rough feature parity with the other phones on the market. (I.e., don't give me a flip-phone without touchscreen, GPS, data plan, browser, etc., and call it a "smart phone"). Nokia has hundreds of millions of customers. A fraction of a single percent of those customers actually care what operating system their phone runs. The rest think in terms of "can I browse the web?" "Can I read my email?" "Can I listen to some music?" "Can I make a phone call?"
It's not about the OS, it's about the functions. The OS enables functions, but nobody other than people who enjoy tinkering is going to care which OS is enabling those functions.
Openmoko is a joke, full stop. And yet, it's *exactly* what you're predicting will happen when all these tens of techs around the world get SO FED UP that rather than buy a phone that's hacker friendly, they decide to build an entire piece of hardware from the ground up to make something that's "hacker friendly" only inasmuch as you need to be a hacker to get the thing to work at all.
If you need to have hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars in manufacturing equipment to produce a piece of "open hardware," it's gonna be pretty hard to get there without having a business backing you - the market for "open source wooden spoons" ("Whittled by inmates on death row from virgin balsa wood!") is probably pretty small.
I'm all for it. Can we start building some very efficient and very safe nuclear power plants instead?
I ask because a lot of people who want alternative energy sources seem strangely unwilling to accept any alternatives involving anything except sunlight, wind, and perhaps tide power on the coasts.
Sure, I'll even say that Android has some decent-to-use alternatives available, and some Android phones have more features. That's not the point I'm making. The point I'm making is that, even for that, the Android phones don't seem to be generating the enthusiastic response that the iOS devices and, in my experience, WebOS do. And what that means is that people need very little reason to go looking for something else.
Your link falls far short of establishing a trend, however. How many people buy third-party insurance on their phones? My guess is that they represent a very small portion of the overall iPhone purchases to date, so a "large % increase" in claims doesn't necessarily mean this is something that represents a larger movement of the market. Nor is there any comparison with other types of phones, to see if this is representative of "people who insure phones" more than "people who own iPhones."
As you correctly note, wanting the "new shiny" is human nature. And it's only intensified by knowing that it's a new version of something *you already really like.*
And again, that's the entire point, in response to the person who declared WebOS devices DOA above: Android doesn't seem to be generating a lot of enthusiasm outside of Slashdot and Google employees. WebOS, if the software & hardware is done well (and frankly, what I saw in the demo looked pretty promising), and backed by a company with HP's marketing clout, could turn out to have much longer legs than anybody expects today. Five years ago, people probably wouldn't have predicted a time that Nokia's profits were collapsing and RIM's market share was eroding as quickly as it is today. But here we sit, with a dramatically different landscape.
Leaving aside your overly general assertions, I'll point out the simple fact that's implied by your own statement: iPhone users, for *whatever* reason you wish to ascribe it to, are by and large happy with their platform, and not switching *away* from the iPhone - even if they buy a new phone, they're (very often) buying a new iPhone. If other phones have all of these features and have had them for years, why *are* people buying (and then staying loyal) to the iOS platform?
I know the popular view around here is "because they're uneducated sheep who don't know any better." But I think that answer falls far short of explaining the situation.
Oh, I know this scenario happened in Spain - it's just lucky for the Spanish people that the TSA isn't a Spanish government agency. But here in the US, we're learning to never underestimate the lengths a federal agency will go to increase their annual budget and cop a quick feel at the same time. :)
And I maintain that this is the wrong question to ask.
The appropriate questions are, as I've suggested: Does it make sense to spend this money, given our massive debt & massive budgets to begin with? There's dozens of projects that are "just 50-100 billion, a drop in the bucket." And if we keep adding them, we're just adding to our already crushing debt burden. If this *is* a national priority, are we willing to forego other expenditures in order to make room for this?
We can't just keep spending money the way we do. Some things, even if they're really nice, really great ideas, and would be the coolest things since sliced bread, we simply won't be able to afford. We need to evaluate *any* federal expenditure in the context of its value to the nation, and how much of a priority the item really is. Building a handful of HSR lines between a handful of cities is doing one of two things: 1) *starting* a massive long-term expenditure to build a nationwide HSR system; or 2) wasting the money on connecting a few cities with HSR, and then getting bored with the project and deciding it's not as fun as it should be.
I don't doubt that the state of California has done extensive planning, and would love to see HSR between SF and LA. But they're not paying for it on their own, they're asking residents of the 49 other states to pay for it as well. And they certainly haven't evaluated their state plan in the context of a nationwide HSR plan's costs and benefits.
As I said elsewhere in this thread, it's about living within our means as a nation: I would love to go buy a high-end BMW with all the bells and whistles. But I drive a decent, but far less expensive Volkswagen, because it's what I can afford.
And since the "We're spending way more in Iraq and Afghanistan than this would cost" argument always gets trotted out in these situations, I'll answer pre-emptively: Yes, I absolutely agree that we should be reviewing and curtailing our involvement in our current conflicts. Once again, the expenditures need to be evaluated in the context of our priorities as a nation. It's not an either-or proposition, where *either* we get Military spending to maintain a presence in Iraq and Afghanistan, *or* we get a high speed rail program. It's entirely possible that *both* are high priority items that should be funded fully, and it's entirely possible that *neither* are priorities that should be funded - meaning we pull our troops out, AND we don't provide federal funding to these HSR links.
Why announce now? My guesses:
1) Get out in front of Nokia's restructuring announcement, so people know that there's something "exciting" coming from HP in the next few months. Nokia - I expect - will more or less announce that they're scrapping MeeGo and Symbian and moving to Windows Phone 7 on their smartphones.
2) Get your hat in the ring before the press spends weeks reviewing Apple's iPad 2 & iPhone 5;
3) Get their name in the papers: "Forthcoming Android AND WebOS tablet computers look to challenge iPad dominance. The Motorola Xoom tablet - running Android - and the HP TouchPad - running WebOS - are the most recently announced tablets aimed at unseating the current king of the tablet hill, the iPad. Comparison of features, prices, etc. follows!"
Why let the other platforms dominate a slow-press period?
I wouldn't be so quick to predict Android's overwhelming triumph, and the imminent demise of WebOS.
It's interesting to me that the (admittedly small number of) WebOS users I know have reacted nearly as strongly positive to it as iOS users have to their devices; Android doesn't seem to generate as much enthusiasm for the devices - the reactions seem to run from "It's okay, you just have to tinker with it a bit to get everything the way you want it," to "I don't like it."
Everybody's a potential switcher, and Google's encouragement towards making apps in the Android Market cheap/free (and thus ad-supported) simply makes the bar to switching away from Android that much lower - if you haven't paid for many apps, you don't have an investment in the platform to tie you to it. Outside of Slashdot, I don't know too many people who rave about their Android phones, but I know lots of people who have been waiting breathlessly for the iPhone to come to Verizon.
Based on the reaction people who've used WebOS seem to have, WebOS could be a surprisingly strong contender if they get the tablet right - people who use it seem to like it, a lot, and HP has a hell of a lot more marketing power to push it if they want to.
No, I'm not ignoring that at all. I'm questioning whether now is the appropriate time to drop 53 billion dollars on HSR projects. And if it is worth doing at this point, and it is a valuable project, is 53 billion dollars over 6 years enough to make much of an impact at all? And if we spend that 53 billion dollars now, are we simply borrowing more money to pay for other pet projects that aren't as important as well?
Again: it's about living within our means. I have no personal issue with the notion of investing in rail service, provided it's an *investment* (and not just pork-barrel spending), and provided that we're: a) not shortchanging some other more important project elsewhere, and b) not just continuing to run up the debt because "what the hell, it's only another 53 billion dollars, that's a drop in the bucket compared to our total national debt."
Wow, you'd think I suggested that "pay only for what you personally use" is what I was suggesting!
Your taxes pay for all that, and:
1) They also pay for roads in your jurisdiction.
2) They also pay for schools in your jurisdiction.
3) They also pay for medical care at hospitals in your jurisdiction.
Is this 53 Billion dollars of spending going to build a national high speed rail service? Is there a plan to build such an infrastructure? How much does it cost? Is there any hope of it being self-sustaining, or even making a return on the initial investment that would allow the government to improve other services with the revenues?
"I want it, and I want it now" is not sufficient justification for appropriating money from your fellow citizens to pay for something that you think would be cool. I actually listed 4 very important questions that should be discussed about *any* major expenditure like this, but I suppose you were too busy constructing a straw man to notice that.
Until somebody realizes that those fancy high speed trains are an easy target, and blows up a bomb on one. And then the TSA becomes responsible for protecting our vital national rail assets, and your nuts get fondled again - having the delightful double-whammy effect of expanding TSA spending to secure all the rail stations, and driving down ridership because people would rather drive than get molested.
You could certainly make an argument that when high speed trains are built by confiscatory taxes from all citizens, and disproportionately benefit a few areas of the country where a lot of the people footing the bill don't live and will never benefit from this construction, the high speed trains are indeed at odds with personal liberty.
If I never ride a high speed rail line between LA and San Francisco, is it right of the federal government to take money from me and hand it to the government of California for building that line?
There are several hurdles a program like this should need to clear to become a federal expenditure:
1) Is it an investment? What is the projected (realistic) return on that investment?
2) Is it critical infrastructure? What is the impact of not having this infrastructure if we simply don't have the money to fund it?
3) Given the current financial condition of the country, and given the priorities we've decided on *as a nation,* is this an important expenditure at this time?
4) Is there money to fund everything that we've decided is as-important or MORE-important than this as well, without having to resort to additional borrowing to fund it?
These are important questions, and if we can't answer them, we need to sit down and think some more about how this program fits into the nation's needs & priorities. I do this every month, it's called living within your means: I'd love a new laptop to replace my 4-year-old, increasingly-overburdened home system. But funding my 401k for retirement, paying down my current car loan ahead of time, and having some free spending money left over to go out and have some drinks with friends now and again are more important to me than buying a new laptop. So, I put aside $100 a month into my "new computer fund", and fund my other, higher, priorities fully first.