Hire a dozen or two engineers to work full time porting WebOS to popular Android tablets. Start with the Kindle and Nook tablet. Who says they need to make their own hardware for the foreseeable future if they can make it fairly simple to get WebOS working on a $200-$250 tablet you can get at Best Buy?
You could consider contacting one of the major credit card companies like Visa. That's assuming you haven't done anything which could be construed as actually testing or exploiting the hole. If you have, it's a pretty sure bet the FBI will be on you like white on rice. They might anyway, but that would be a one way ticket to Club Fed.
The easiest way to institute metered bandwidth is to reward users who simply aren't interested in doing a lot of bandwidth-intensive tasks with a lower bill. If I could get my grandmother a $10/month basic plan with 2GB of bandwidth and basic customer service support, with say a $2/10GB add-on fee, it'd be a steal. She'd almost never use the 2GB of bandwidth in the first place, so most of that $10 would end up subsidizing other users--but without jacking her.
This just goes to show that the sociopathically greedy nature of a lot of industry executives has blinded them to the obvious. If you make a higher pricing structure a two-way street, most people won't mind.
is that many states have their own absurd regulatory systems. For example, in many states you have to be "certified" to be a "professional hair braider." Even most pro-government liberals are probably spitting up their coffee hearing that you have to get a license that says you're competent to braid hair and can get fined or locked up for not having it, but it's really there. Same with interior decorating. Yes, interior decorating, not design (which has some architectural components).
What is needed is a top-down audit with a prejudicial eye to remove regulations unless their absence would cause a clear and present danger to life, limb, property or the environment if removed. Virtually all professional licensing needs to be tossed, including for the legal profession. Part of the problem we have today with students bankrupting themselves at law school is because many states make it so that you can't sit for the bar unless you have a law degree (autodidacts need not apply!)
It's a little known fact that many of the southern states are actually as regulation happy as the northern states. The main difference is our taxes tend to be lower and we're (AFAIK) right to work across the board. North Carolina is struggling in no small part because they have long had a profligate political system and a peculiar good ol' boy style of being selectively hostile to economic freedom.
This is what happens when you rely on a a complex bureaucracy to screen even minimally difficult acquisitions. All of the bureaucratic red tape exists to be able to say "we can account for your money" to the tax payer, but what the tax payer really wants is just to get the damn job done cost-effectively. For a lot of federal projects, projects a few million dollars or less, the simplest route is to give a federal PM a budget, give them the freedom to hire contractors off monster.com and get the work done.
But that would require throwing out the whole feel-good kabuki that lets them employ thousands of paper-pushers whose job is to make sure every i is dotted and every t is crossed, but are significantly less useful than tits on a bull when it comes to actually preventing serious wastes of money.
take a close look at yourself first before judging other countries.
To even compare the US with China on these grounds does nothing but make them look less evil by comparison. It's like telling someone who spanks their children a little too much to "clean up their own house before passing judgment" on someone who beats the ever loving shit out of their kid on a weekly basis.
The People's Republic of China is a totalitarian state and most of its "private industry" is a facade for their civilian government or military. They routinely get caught with massive espionage operations in other countries. Whatever good that can from theoretically lower prices are negated by everything else that'll come with their increased role.
Even if the federal government so thoroughly separated itself from the telecommunication system that the NSA spy scandal was not even remotely possible, letting China get its tentacles deeper into our country's workings is asking for a lot of trouble. If in time they establish a backbone connection to Asia, you can bet your ass their spy agencies will be tapping it harder than a keg of top grade beer at a college party.
What pisses me off the most about discussing the debt with most of the people I know is that they won't discuss the numbers. Why? Because they don't want to see what even Wikipedia will show them about how we spend money. The federal government spends the vast majority of its money on domestic spending, not military. The combined total spent every year on the Department of Defense and both the operations in Iraq and Afghanistan are still a few billion shy of all we spend on Social Security per year.
Just Social Security. Think about that for a moment. We spend as much on that as we do on the military, which is one of the only functions of the federal government which no one disputes is a constitutionally-defined function of the federal government.
There is no getting around the fact that first and foremost, we need domestic spending cuts. As a Millennial, I don't give a rat's ass if you "paid into Social Security all of your life." I am paying into it now and it's a fact that I won't receive it. I don't mind paying for the elderly, but the program needs to be cut off at its knees now because it is the height of injustice to expect us and Generation X to fund such a horribly mismanaged program now that the Boomers want to retire. They had 1994-2008 to right the ship of state, to try to rebuild the trust fund (which was destroyed on their parents' watch) and ran one of the most irresponsible periods of American government in our history. Arguably, the worst.
As a practical matter, means test the heck out of Social Security and Medicare while cutting our military's responsibilities. We could shave hundreds of billions per year with neither a loss in our national defense nor creating any genuine inequity by cutting of access to the former for people with private retirement or other government pensions and by bring our troops home. The reason our budget is so out of control is first and foremost our inability to say "no" to anyone, be it the middle age people who want to collect a fat benefit check they don't really need or a foreign government expecting us to police the world.
The Rainbow Warrior was attacked in a way that was supposed to have no civilian casualties. What the French could have quite legally have done is waited for the Rainbow Warrior and the yachts it was bringing to illegally enter French territorial waters to disrupt legitimate weapons testing is have their navy open fire on them.
That's not murder. Murder assumes the attack had no legitimate right to attack. If Greenpeace had disrupted the French military's operations, they would have been quite legally justified in using force.
The simplest way to handle net neutrality would be for the Department of Justice to threaten the ISPs with federal false advertising and related charges if they degrade services provided by content providers who won't pay them for the "privilege" of accessing paying ISP users.
Oh wait, who am I kidding. This is a government that has argued that if we had stricter gun control in place, the ATF wouldn't have conducted Operation Fast and Furious.
While Lee was clearly a victim of racial profiling and media-enabled hysteria about Chinese espionage, this is not to say that he had done nothing wrong. He had, in fact, removed from the lab computer copies of top-secret nuclear weapons simulation codes, a serious offense for which he surely deserved to lose his clearance and his job. There is no evidence, however, that he ever gave the codes to a foreign country or that others at the lab had engaged in similar misdeeds. Indeed, many of Lee’s colleagues were horrified to hear of what he had done. When asked whether other scientists illicitly copied or took home secret documents, one Los Alamos weapons designer told me, “What Wen Ho did was like driving 80 miles per hour in a school zone.”
Los Alamos National Laboratory is far more likely to actually be working with classified documents that if released or stolen would prove to be terribly harmful to the US than, say, what happened to the State Department recently. What Wen Ho did was not like "driving 80 miles per hour in a school zone," rather it was like driving 100mph through a residential neighborhood while dozens of kids were walking across the street as their bus was unloading. It's so reckless and irresponsible that "even if he didn't kill someone," it shows an unacceptable lack of concern for the safety of others and his community.
I know many slashdotters like to chuckle about overclassification, but consider where he was working. Is it really wrong for the federal government to put its boot firmly up the ass of a scientist who works at one of our two nuclear weapons laboratories when he thinks basic procedures are beneath him?
Give the states parliamentary control over all three branches.
-If 3/4 of a state legislature issues a vote of no confidence in its congressional delegation, they're all removed and a new election is called. -If 2/3 of the states issue one within 2 years, the entire Congress is disbanded and an emergency national election is called. -If 2/3 of the states issue one for the Supreme Court or Presidency, either the entire SCOTUS or the entire appointed/elected executive branch are removed. -If a simple majority issue resolutions declaring null and void any federal law, executive order or SCOTUS precedent, it is removed.
With markets less liquid, the market makers that make the markets liquid and efficient will be hampered by a Tobin tax (they will now need a spread of over 1%) and this will create more profit opportunities for the position trading that Soros does.
In other words, it's not clear that the Tobin tax would actually make the markets safer for small investors or hold the high-power players at Goldman Sachs accountable. The only thing that is clear is that very rich position traders with the ability to move significant amounts of capital will gain a very profitable advantage.
Part of this is aimed at punishing the high speed traders. I think a better approach to that would be to pass a law requiring full access to the stock exchanges at very low rates. The stock exchanges are hardly capitalist to begin with, so pushing a massive unfunded mandate on them is just a price they pay for the privilege of maintaining one of the last vestiges of mercantilist privilege in the modern world.
how much many modern people assume our primitive ancestors were total morons who had more in common with a screaming chimp than modern humans in their ability to grasp what they saw happening around them. How fucking arrogant do you have to be to believe that they were just making up something like this instead of perhaps prizing the spotted horses as more aesthetically pleasing to their sensibilities?
When you look at what many of the "scientifically-minded" believed in the 19th and early 20th century like phrenology, eugenics, "the noble savage" and a host of other things it is downright shocking that any remotely history-literate person can be so arrogant.
Most of the weapons that have flooded the third world come from Russia (or the Soviet Union in the past), China or a handful of other countries that routinely ignore international law and protocol on arms dealing. Where was the outrage when the Libyan rebels found all of those brand new Chinese weapons from the Chinese state-owned weapons makers in Gaddafi's posession? Ever notice the dearth of American weapons in all of the third world killing zones?
Frankly, I don't think the pursuit of profit is any more crass than the pursuit of political influence. Either way, you are putting your own good above doing the right thing.
The courier's form factor would have been a nearly perfect psychological fit to many things people use tablets for. It looks like an electronic book that can do all sorts of crazy "computer stuff." With the right software, it would have been perfectly intuitive as an eBook reader, notepad, sketchpad and several other things which would have endeared it to students, readers and business types.
I don't get how it would not "mesh with office." A company with Microsoft's resources shouldn't have any problem creating an Office Lite that has a touch UI. If they'd actually taken it to its logical conclusion with a solid phone, this very well might have done in RIM in the business market.
Software patents are a government program for creating "fairness" among software developers and companies. Government creating "fairness" is one of those things right up there with sex offender laws that no "right-thinking person" in politics dares to question.
Obama was never going to support something which would be called a scheme to let big interests loot "the little guy." That's how most people see this stuff. They don't get caught up in facts like a little company getting nuked out of the water by a big one using blatantly bad patents. Fair is fair and it's not fair that someone gets rich by taking someone else's ideas and succeeding with them.
Is there any chance that if I self-teach Dart, I can get a job in development without a CS degree, once companies begin using the language
Given Google's reputation for doing R&D and then trashing their research projects when they don't pan out, you'd be foolish to stake your future as a new developer on Dart. The tools are not at a point where they are usable on a real, paying job. You don't even seem to have a background where you are able to work on Dart or its future ecosystem yet. Therefore, your best and only realistic route, is to learn something else in parallel.
Pick C# or Java. Learn one of pretty well. Learn Dart and JavaScript as well. Once you learn JavaScript, you might be able to stake a claim as someone who can help debug the browser side of Dart.
I just want to point out, most liberals are not against firing dead weight, but they just want the person doing the firing to actually have a reason (prove that the firee is actually dead weight)
Maybe so, but when was the last time liberals overwhelmingly supported a measure that brought accountability to any major bureaucracy? Instead of just harping on how NCLB would make teachers teach to the test, where was the liberal counter at the state or federal level? Where are the liberals demanding that police review boards gain independent authority to fire (and block them from being rehired!!) bad cops even if their department wants to keep them?
The system the liberals set up in their states has created an environment in which local and state officials often cannot be purged for gross, even criminal, misconduct. Their moral authority, in practice, is zilch on this issue.
When the top 100 Defense Contractors cost taxpayers $306 billion, eliminating the Federal Contractor middle-man seems like an obvious place to start the austerity measures."
And unless you want to establish a Soviet-syle Department of War Production, you'll have a lot of that no matter what. Most of that $306B is spent on acquisition of military hardware that costs an incredible sum of money because it is all custom-built for a single, specialized market. There is no "adjacent market" for a F22 or nuclear air craft carrier ($5B+/ship).
Obviously, there is room to get rid of a lot of that, but the most effective process would be the following which neither liberals nor conservatives would tolerate:
1. Make civilian employment at-will (liberals: booooo) 2. Fire the dead weight left and right (liberals: boooo) 3. Change the law so that government agencies can legally poach government contractors as new employees (conservatives: booo) even if there were pre-existing non-poaching agreements. 4. Liberalize the procurement regulations so that federal managers can hire 1099s on a no-bid basis for temporary work with the caveat that the federal manager can be fired on a performance basis if their contractor cannot or did not do the work (both: boooo)
and use every tool in their arsenal to make filing a take down notice a matter of strict liability on accuracy with the legal damages calculated as the combined man hours needed to service the request times the number of requests plus treble damages if a "preponderance of evidence" shows that the notices were sent via an automated process.
The thing I've noticed from regularly perusing We Are the 99% is that most of them feel entitled to a good job. You are screwing them over and stealing their American Dream if you don't recognize the Awesomeness(tm) that is their Political Science, Art, Psychology, Sociology, General Business or Women's Studies degree. You are just a sympathizer with the 1% if you don't support bailing them out, even if you're part of the 53% and still pissed that your tax money went to Goldman Sachs and Co.
They're going to demand a bailout and probably get it at some point. What is needed is for someone to actually tell them the truth. When blue collar workers with actual marketable skills can barely feed their families, a fresh-faced Psychology graduate ought to consider herself lucky she is a waitress with enough hours to feed herself, even if she doesn't have health insurance.
1. Abolish the current corporate tax code outright. 2. Establish a 2 year tax holiday to let companies move their money back to the US at no charge. 3. Impose a flat a 2% tax on revenues, not profits. 4. Raise the flat tax 0.25% a year until it reaches 4-5% 5. Establish a 15-20% tariff on all goods brought into the US
#5 would kick companies like Apple's ass. Apple Caymens might be able to sell a $600 laptop for $1500+ to Apple USA, but the moment Apple USA puts it on the market, the $1800 entry level MacBook Pro becomes a $2,160 machine; a $2,500 laptop becomes a $3,000 one.
The solution to offshoring is making it so that the products brought back to the US to sell at high profit margins get jacked up so high by tariffs that the quantity they sell is decimated.
This ethic is reflected in a society that is structured in a way that survival is next to impossible without work. Don't fool yourselves - even social safety nets here in Europe are specifically designed to make lack of full time employment unsustainable over the long term. What we need is to provide people with a decent living regardless of what they do, and make anything earned through work a bonus.
Survival should be extremely tenuous if one is unwilling to work. In your desire to tar and feather Protestants, you ignore the fact that the Catholic Church actually teaches the same scripture: "they that won't work, shall not eat." That is how the West has traditionally separated the deserving poor from the undeserving poor. The lazy POS who just has his hand out is not only a burden, but a genuine threat to the survival of the guy who is just down on his luck and wants a helping hand.
People that won't be productive and contribute to the common good are parasites. Their enablers are no better than people who run knowingly infect others with diseases.
Slashdot Mirror
Hire a dozen or two engineers to work full time porting WebOS to popular Android tablets. Start with the Kindle and Nook tablet. Who says they need to make their own hardware for the foreseeable future if they can make it fairly simple to get WebOS working on a $200-$250 tablet you can get at Best Buy?
You could consider contacting one of the major credit card companies like Visa. That's assuming you haven't done anything which could be construed as actually testing or exploiting the hole. If you have, it's a pretty sure bet the FBI will be on you like white on rice. They might anyway, but that would be a one way ticket to Club Fed.
The easiest way to institute metered bandwidth is to reward users who simply aren't interested in doing a lot of bandwidth-intensive tasks with a lower bill. If I could get my grandmother a $10/month basic plan with 2GB of bandwidth and basic customer service support, with say a $2/10GB add-on fee, it'd be a steal. She'd almost never use the 2GB of bandwidth in the first place, so most of that $10 would end up subsidizing other users--but without jacking her.
This just goes to show that the sociopathically greedy nature of a lot of industry executives has blinded them to the obvious. If you make a higher pricing structure a two-way street, most people won't mind.
is that many states have their own absurd regulatory systems. For example, in many states you have to be "certified" to be a "professional hair braider." Even most pro-government liberals are probably spitting up their coffee hearing that you have to get a license that says you're competent to braid hair and can get fined or locked up for not having it, but it's really there. Same with interior decorating. Yes, interior decorating, not design (which has some architectural components).
What is needed is a top-down audit with a prejudicial eye to remove regulations unless their absence would cause a clear and present danger to life, limb, property or the environment if removed. Virtually all professional licensing needs to be tossed, including for the legal profession. Part of the problem we have today with students bankrupting themselves at law school is because many states make it so that you can't sit for the bar unless you have a law degree (autodidacts need not apply!)
It's a little known fact that many of the southern states are actually as regulation happy as the northern states. The main difference is our taxes tend to be lower and we're (AFAIK) right to work across the board. North Carolina is struggling in no small part because they have long had a profligate political system and a peculiar good ol' boy style of being selectively hostile to economic freedom.
This is what happens when you rely on a a complex bureaucracy to screen even minimally difficult acquisitions. All of the bureaucratic red tape exists to be able to say "we can account for your money" to the tax payer, but what the tax payer really wants is just to get the damn job done cost-effectively. For a lot of federal projects, projects a few million dollars or less, the simplest route is to give a federal PM a budget, give them the freedom to hire contractors off monster.com and get the work done.
But that would require throwing out the whole feel-good kabuki that lets them employ thousands of paper-pushers whose job is to make sure every i is dotted and every t is crossed, but are significantly less useful than tits on a bull when it comes to actually preventing serious wastes of money.
To even compare the US with China on these grounds does nothing but make them look less evil by comparison. It's like telling someone who spanks their children a little too much to "clean up their own house before passing judgment" on someone who beats the ever loving shit out of their kid on a weekly basis.
The People's Republic of China is a totalitarian state and most of its "private industry" is a facade for their civilian government or military. They routinely get caught with massive espionage operations in other countries. Whatever good that can from theoretically lower prices are negated by everything else that'll come with their increased role.
Even if the federal government so thoroughly separated itself from the telecommunication system that the NSA spy scandal was not even remotely possible, letting China get its tentacles deeper into our country's workings is asking for a lot of trouble. If in time they establish a backbone connection to Asia, you can bet your ass their spy agencies will be tapping it harder than a keg of top grade beer at a college party.
What pisses me off the most about discussing the debt with most of the people I know is that they won't discuss the numbers. Why? Because they don't want to see what even Wikipedia will show them about how we spend money. The federal government spends the vast majority of its money on domestic spending, not military. The combined total spent every year on the Department of Defense and both the operations in Iraq and Afghanistan are still a few billion shy of all we spend on Social Security per year.
Just Social Security. Think about that for a moment. We spend as much on that as we do on the military, which is one of the only functions of the federal government which no one disputes is a constitutionally-defined function of the federal government.
There is no getting around the fact that first and foremost, we need domestic spending cuts. As a Millennial, I don't give a rat's ass if you "paid into Social Security all of your life." I am paying into it now and it's a fact that I won't receive it. I don't mind paying for the elderly, but the program needs to be cut off at its knees now because it is the height of injustice to expect us and Generation X to fund such a horribly mismanaged program now that the Boomers want to retire. They had 1994-2008 to right the ship of state, to try to rebuild the trust fund (which was destroyed on their parents' watch) and ran one of the most irresponsible periods of American government in our history. Arguably, the worst.
As a practical matter, means test the heck out of Social Security and Medicare while cutting our military's responsibilities. We could shave hundreds of billions per year with neither a loss in our national defense nor creating any genuine inequity by cutting of access to the former for people with private retirement or other government pensions and by bring our troops home. The reason our budget is so out of control is first and foremost our inability to say "no" to anyone, be it the middle age people who want to collect a fat benefit check they don't really need or a foreign government expecting us to police the world.
The Rainbow Warrior was attacked in a way that was supposed to have no civilian casualties. What the French could have quite legally have done is waited for the Rainbow Warrior and the yachts it was bringing to illegally enter French territorial waters to disrupt legitimate weapons testing is have their navy open fire on them.
That's not murder. Murder assumes the attack had no legitimate right to attack. If Greenpeace had disrupted the French military's operations, they would have been quite legally justified in using force.
The simplest way to handle net neutrality would be for the Department of Justice to threaten the ISPs with federal false advertising and related charges if they degrade services provided by content providers who won't pay them for the "privilege" of accessing paying ISP users.
Oh wait, who am I kidding. This is a government that has argued that if we had stricter gun control in place, the ATF wouldn't have conducted Operation Fast and Furious.
Los Alamos National Laboratory is far more likely to actually be working with classified documents that if released or stolen would prove to be terribly harmful to the US than, say, what happened to the State Department recently. What Wen Ho did was not like "driving 80 miles per hour in a school zone," rather it was like driving 100mph through a residential neighborhood while dozens of kids were walking across the street as their bus was unloading. It's so reckless and irresponsible that "even if he didn't kill someone," it shows an unacceptable lack of concern for the safety of others and his community.
I know many slashdotters like to chuckle about overclassification, but consider where he was working. Is it really wrong for the federal government to put its boot firmly up the ass of a scientist who works at one of our two nuclear weapons laboratories when he thinks basic procedures are beneath him?
Give the states parliamentary control over all three branches.
-If 3/4 of a state legislature issues a vote of no confidence in its congressional delegation, they're all removed and a new election is called.
-If 2/3 of the states issue one within 2 years, the entire Congress is disbanded and an emergency national election is called.
-If 2/3 of the states issue one for the Supreme Court or Presidency, either the entire SCOTUS or the entire appointed/elected executive branch are removed.
-If a simple majority issue resolutions declaring null and void any federal law, executive order or SCOTUS precedent, it is removed.
Many liberals who think George Soros is a great guy for supporting this "tax on the rich" don't realize that Soros is one of the rich guys who stands to profit handsomely from it:
In other words, it's not clear that the Tobin tax would actually make the markets safer for small investors or hold the high-power players at Goldman Sachs accountable. The only thing that is clear is that very rich position traders with the ability to move significant amounts of capital will gain a very profitable advantage.
Part of this is aimed at punishing the high speed traders. I think a better approach to that would be to pass a law requiring full access to the stock exchanges at very low rates. The stock exchanges are hardly capitalist to begin with, so pushing a massive unfunded mandate on them is just a price they pay for the privilege of maintaining one of the last vestiges of mercantilist privilege in the modern world.
how much many modern people assume our primitive ancestors were total morons who had more in common with a screaming chimp than modern humans in their ability to grasp what they saw happening around them. How fucking arrogant do you have to be to believe that they were just making up something like this instead of perhaps prizing the spotted horses as more aesthetically pleasing to their sensibilities?
When you look at what many of the "scientifically-minded" believed in the 19th and early 20th century like phrenology, eugenics, "the noble savage" and a host of other things it is downright shocking that any remotely history-literate person can be so arrogant.
Most of the weapons that have flooded the third world come from Russia (or the Soviet Union in the past), China or a handful of other countries that routinely ignore international law and protocol on arms dealing. Where was the outrage when the Libyan rebels found all of those brand new Chinese weapons from the Chinese state-owned weapons makers in Gaddafi's posession? Ever notice the dearth of American weapons in all of the third world killing zones?
Frankly, I don't think the pursuit of profit is any more crass than the pursuit of political influence. Either way, you are putting your own good above doing the right thing.
The courier's form factor would have been a nearly perfect psychological fit to many things people use tablets for. It looks like an electronic book that can do all sorts of crazy "computer stuff." With the right software, it would have been perfectly intuitive as an eBook reader, notepad, sketchpad and several other things which would have endeared it to students, readers and business types.
I don't get how it would not "mesh with office." A company with Microsoft's resources shouldn't have any problem creating an Office Lite that has a touch UI. If they'd actually taken it to its logical conclusion with a solid phone, this very well might have done in RIM in the business market.
Software patents are a government program for creating "fairness" among software developers and companies. Government creating "fairness" is one of those things right up there with sex offender laws that no "right-thinking person" in politics dares to question.
Obama was never going to support something which would be called a scheme to let big interests loot "the little guy." That's how most people see this stuff. They don't get caught up in facts like a little company getting nuked out of the water by a big one using blatantly bad patents. Fair is fair and it's not fair that someone gets rich by taking someone else's ideas and succeeding with them.
Given Google's reputation for doing R&D and then trashing their research projects when they don't pan out, you'd be foolish to stake your future as a new developer on Dart. The tools are not at a point where they are usable on a real, paying job. You don't even seem to have a background where you are able to work on Dart or its future ecosystem yet. Therefore, your best and only realistic route, is to learn something else in parallel.
Pick C# or Java. Learn one of pretty well. Learn Dart and JavaScript as well. Once you learn JavaScript, you might be able to stake a claim as someone who can help debug the browser side of Dart.
Maybe so, but when was the last time liberals overwhelmingly supported a measure that brought accountability to any major bureaucracy? Instead of just harping on how NCLB would make teachers teach to the test, where was the liberal counter at the state or federal level? Where are the liberals demanding that police review boards gain independent authority to fire (and block them from being rehired!!) bad cops even if their department wants to keep them?
The system the liberals set up in their states has created an environment in which local and state officials often cannot be purged for gross, even criminal, misconduct. Their moral authority, in practice, is zilch on this issue.
And unless you want to establish a Soviet-syle Department of War Production, you'll have a lot of that no matter what. Most of that $306B is spent on acquisition of military hardware that costs an incredible sum of money because it is all custom-built for a single, specialized market. There is no "adjacent market" for a F22 or nuclear air craft carrier ($5B+/ship).
Obviously, there is room to get rid of a lot of that, but the most effective process would be the following which neither liberals nor conservatives would tolerate:
1. Make civilian employment at-will (liberals: booooo)
2. Fire the dead weight left and right (liberals: boooo)
3. Change the law so that government agencies can legally poach government contractors as new employees (conservatives: booo) even if there were pre-existing non-poaching agreements.
4. Liberalize the procurement regulations so that federal managers can hire 1099s on a no-bid basis for temporary work with the caveat that the federal manager can be fired on a performance basis if their contractor cannot or did not do the work (both: boooo)
and use every tool in their arsenal to make filing a take down notice a matter of strict liability on accuracy with the legal damages calculated as the combined man hours needed to service the request times the number of requests plus treble damages if a "preponderance of evidence" shows that the notices were sent via an automated process.
The thing I've noticed from regularly perusing We Are the 99% is that most of them feel entitled to a good job. You are screwing them over and stealing their American Dream if you don't recognize the Awesomeness(tm) that is their Political Science, Art, Psychology, Sociology, General Business or Women's Studies degree. You are just a sympathizer with the 1% if you don't support bailing them out, even if you're part of the 53% and still pissed that your tax money went to Goldman Sachs and Co.
They're going to demand a bailout and probably get it at some point. What is needed is for someone to actually tell them the truth. When blue collar workers with actual marketable skills can barely feed their families, a fresh-faced Psychology graduate ought to consider herself lucky she is a waitress with enough hours to feed herself, even if she doesn't have health insurance.
They'd offer her $40k + legal expenses. This is a pissing match, plain and simple.
1. Abolish the current corporate tax code outright.
2. Establish a 2 year tax holiday to let companies move their money back to the US at no charge.
3. Impose a flat a 2% tax on revenues, not profits.
4. Raise the flat tax 0.25% a year until it reaches 4-5%
5. Establish a 15-20% tariff on all goods brought into the US
#5 would kick companies like Apple's ass. Apple Caymens might be able to sell a $600 laptop for $1500+ to Apple USA, but the moment Apple USA puts it on the market, the $1800 entry level MacBook Pro becomes a $2,160 machine; a $2,500 laptop becomes a $3,000 one.
The solution to offshoring is making it so that the products brought back to the US to sell at high profit margins get jacked up so high by tariffs that the quantity they sell is decimated.
Survival should be extremely tenuous if one is unwilling to work. In your desire to tar and feather Protestants, you ignore the fact that the Catholic Church actually teaches the same scripture: "they that won't work, shall not eat." That is how the West has traditionally separated the deserving poor from the undeserving poor. The lazy POS who just has his hand out is not only a burden, but a genuine threat to the survival of the guy who is just down on his luck and wants a helping hand.
People that won't be productive and contribute to the common good are parasites. Their enablers are no better than people who run knowingly infect others with diseases.