Its ok, they are throwing a party to celebrate going legitimate. It is a little strange that they are only inviting people who criticized them in the past, and that they are covering the floors in plastic but... hey why worry? They are going legit right?
I am aware of that particular definition of crime. I find it to be quite narrowly focused. It requires certain assumptions, like who you call "the government". What you, and many people call "the government" I call, "the violent gang thats in power". A crime is, basically whatever they say it is.
In the end this gets down to a semantics argument but... its a semantics argument that ends up being somewhat important since it determines how you look at the data. If you see the government as "legitimate" and the black market as something "illegitimate" then it makes sense to look at it this way, and to calculate the GDP as independent of the Black Market.
If you look at the government as just another organization, then why should its definitions of whats "legitimate" vs not matter? the very exclusion of the Black Market is entirely artificial. It *IS* part of the economy. Real money really does move around through it.
I really don't see what makes them legitimate except that a lot of people think they are. If that was enough to convince me of things, I would go to church on sundays and pray to some diety.
As it is they have me convinced enough to keep paying them, but, thats easily under duress. Its so hard to find a professional job that will pay under the table. Sadly.
Since when does the CIA care what is legal or illegal?
Was it legal when they sprayed a small town in France with LSD? Was it legal when they dosed men in NYC without their knowledge? Was it legal when they worked out deals to sell arms in contravention of congressional decisions? Maybe when they were helping import cocaine as part of those same deals? Oh wait... maybe they cared about the legality of torturing prisoners or kidnapping people?
The CIA is about doing what the CIA wants to do. Legal or not. If they cared about the law, you might become deluded into thinking that they work for us. You would be wrong.
Doesn't this depend on your definition of "works"?
If you can explain your crime, with no shame, to family, friends, and possibly not even be effected in terms of job prospects then, I have to ask, what kind of crime you really have committed?
If nobody decries the so called "crime" then that seems like evidence, to me, that the government has overstepped its bounds and lost touch with society.
I love that you don't consider the "black market" part of GDP, just because the gang that declared itself the government in power doesn't get a cut
To be honest, I draw the opposite conclusion entirely. To stay in power means appeasing the people on a base level, which means more punishment, since punishing the guys that you already catch is much easier than catching more, and has a higher ROI from the point of view of the person who wants to be re-elected.
As you say, these systems are extremely complicated. I don't have faith that anyone has a complex enough model to be worthy of being put "in charge" of much, and most of government is a game of blindfolded darts where the players award each other points for throwing in a vaguely correct direction.
"More Sex is Safer Sex" by Steven Landsburg presents an interesting case on the severity of punishment not being a deterrent.
The chapter on LoJack makes the connection that, raising the penalty on car theft has generally resulted in only minor changes in the actual crime rate. I don't remember what he cited there, but the other side... the LoJack case was impressive. What they saw was that if enough LoJacks were sold in an area to raise the overall chance of being caught by about 1%, it correlated with a 20% decrease in car thefts!
It makes sense. With all but the worst prison gangs, most people don't want to get caught. Getting caught means public records, it means trouble finding jobs, it means having to explain to friends and family, etc. There are lots of reasons to not want to get caught, in fact, the entirety of the penalty (whether its decapitation or a slap on the wrist) is modified by the chance of being caught.
So even if the penalty is decapitation, thats only the penalty of getting caught. If I can reasonably expect to do something and not get caught, then why would the penalty even come into the picture? Its like driving a car with your kid in the back seat. If you get in an accident, your child could be killed. There is a chance of this any and every time that you drive a car for any real distance.
However, few people would say that this horrible and unlikely outcome is reason enough to never put their child in a car and drive. In fact, I have never heard the argument made. In fact, I have never even heard the argument made that one should limit or try to avoid that situation.... even though the "worst outcome" is clearly quite severe... the chances of that outcome happening are considered widely acceptable risk.
I would argue that anything that protects "the democratic institution" has already stolen any legitimacy that it has. It is the institutions most fundamental job to make sure that its people support it. If it cannot do this, then it deserves to fail.
I wouldn't believe everything that you read. Its very easy to have 80% of your platform be something that you can't, realistically accomplish, and can blame on others. This has been strategy of both the republicans and democrats for several generations now.
The blowback from using their nukes would be unavoidable and huge. They would see all of their allies (military, trade etc) wither away and publicly oppose them. Any new allies that they gained would be.... useless in comparison to the old ones.
Say what you want, 99% of any leaders real platform is "stay in power". This is usually accomplished by lots of grandstanding and proclamations while doing relatively small real things, not by driving a wedge between yourself and...well... nearly the entire rest of the world.
These "subtleties" can hardly be lost on the Iranian power structures.
or perhaps one of the students degree plans would have been screwed up if the data wasn't changed, and he felt stealing the laptop was the only way to ensure that he had enough time with the data to find what needed to be changed and return it?
Well yes, that's exactly what I was thinking. Well, except for the men part. Not being gay, they don't really enter into my fantasy world. Women have colons and colon bacteria as well!
Actually, the article makes me wonder if a threesome involving anal sex could now be considered a medical procedure. Its not unsafe sex, its a colon bacteria transplant!
Or they could use a front company to buy this company out and kill the whole suit. Why use taxpayer money when they can use money from one of their front operations, or other "off budget" stuff. One would assume that they still get a piece of cocaine shipments here and there. Or illegal arms sales. The CIA has never exactly been sticklers for the rules.
ahahah the CIA... obey laws? ROTFL they are little more than a criminal gang. Legalities didn't stop them from testing aersolized LSD on a small town in france. It didn't stop them from hiring prostitutes to slip LSD to johns in NYC to study their reactions. It didn't stop them from importing cocaine in the 80s, or illegally funneling weapons (against the decisions of congress), it didn't stop them from kidnapping, or torture.....
Now... copyright is going to stop them. Sure it is.
Mark your calendars folks, I never say anything good about more government. Here is the exception...
I have seen this at work on a corporate level. Names and specifics have been changed to protect...well... me.
I knew this guy Jim. He worked at a very large company. His group worked tightly with another group, he realized that the manager of the other group was in bed with one of the vendors. He realized that he had no real evidence, and nobody wanted to listen to him. So Jim went out for some beers with that manager and chatted him up, and eventually got him to bring him into his corrupt little world. He got bribed himself, and dutifully turned the guy in.
Now, the company, as I said was big. He knew that nobody wanted to hear his complaints and suspected that they may not be clean either. So... being such a big company, he went to the department whose job it is to deal with legal investigations and turned his new evidence over to them.
Where whistle blowing fell on deaf ears before, then it gained traction, action was taken, the manager was removed.
SO yes, having these layers where motivations are separated and not everyone can possibly be each others buddy buddy DOES have some advantages.
Of course, nobody above Jim's target was fired... and Jim then was on a series of projects that all failed in odd ways and were blamed on him, and it seemed like every time he did something, a new policy was created to tell us not to do that, and eventually he was let go. After he left, even some low level managers shook their heads and made comments about how it was sad "what they did to him".
hmmm wait... was this supposed to be a story about this working? I guess it sorta, "worked". If by "worked" we mean "fried the lowest guy on the totem pole".
However, if this scanning were implemented, then your own personal data would cause false positives.
Also, while thats a great long term goal, it means that any work that currently involves storing this data on the local machine needs to be changed. That could be a problem in one place, for one reason, or it could be in many places for many reasons. In short, thats going to take time to sort out and migrate over to the new model.
In the mean time, you can mandate disk encryption and solve the most common cases of the problem (stolen laptops), until you have your more robust solution in place. Then you keep full disk encryption and call it defense in depth.
It only seems like a good idea. Its likely to miss things, and have false positives.
A better idea is...mandate full disk encryption. I have done it on my linux based laptop for years, 3 years before my company mandated it. Now, its mandatory. They rolled out a canned solution for departments that want it and don't know any better, and to the rest of us just say "its your ass if its not encrypted" and they make everyone certify, every six months, that if they use a laptop for work, its disk is encrypted.
Well thats how I feel about a war on the citizenry. Honestly, I don't consider this my country so much as the country I was born inside of, and which is run by an entirely different economic class. I openly state my preference for breaking up the union, and see little real benefit to the common people in keeping it together any longer. Its pretty outdated and no longer needed.
I have heard this argument before and find it to be... highly unlikely. There are just too many ways to pull it off. If they were serious, then attacks 2, 3, 4, 5 would all have been planned and ready to go the day 9/11 happened.
instead #2 wasn't even by them, it was by some whacko bioengineer, with no islamist ties, at one of the governments own labs.
#3, the sniper shootings were ok, and a good example of how to do it well, but... seem like they were entirely independant and, in the end, were ended with no real followup.
Its been more than 2500 days since 9/11 and all we have seen was a handful of poorly executed plots that didn't even work out. Each one demonstrated how it could have been done, and yet, if they ALL worked, it still would be a piss poor showing for over 2500 days.
If they pulled off a 9/11 every year or two, it still wouldn't be enough to be a serious threat. SO far, they havn't even managed to match what a couple of lone crazies did for a followup.
I don't see how that logically follows. You make the assumption that the only way to pay for these things is through taxes.
When is the last time the government tried a telethon? Seems to me they just like to tell people "You pay us, for whatever the hell we want to do, whether you like it or not".
I am all for roads, libraries,.... um I don't see where commercial airlines come into this since the government really has little place there except where they have forced themselves in...
I would gladly pay for these. As long as even one cent of it goes to the military, or to persecute people under the auspices of the crusade on drugs, I oppose all of it.
Actually, taxes kind of are theft. I have little problem with this as long as they are not used for things that I find absolutely abhorrent... like military buildups, massive surveillance, and wars.
It doesn't really outrage me...let me tell you why.
I put myself in the shoes of an Afghani. I imagine that my country had been invaded by foreign troops. Then I imagine that those troops told me they were setting up my new government.
Then I imagine that someone released the names of the sympathizers and collaborators who were betraying me by working with the foreign invaders, how sad for them would I be?
They decided to work with the occupation force, they get what they get for that. Its a risky thing to do, as it should be.
Actually, I see more danger in not having people like them. Some of the stuff that they have released, like "Collateral Murder" are things that never should have been kept from the public. Its one thing to keep data secret about troop movements to keep troops safe... its another when the idea is just to "protect our reputation". Its entirely right that people see the realities of war... so we can be reminded why we shouldn't EVER have one.
Personally, I feel bad that I never donated to them when I had the chance. I will gladly send them some cash when they get something set up again. I would rather them have my money than the people running these horrid wars that never should have been started. Its good to see them exposing what a crime war is.
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Its ok, they are throwing a party to celebrate going legitimate. It is a little strange that they are only inviting people who criticized them in the past, and that they are covering the floors in plastic but... hey why worry? They are going legit right?
I am aware of that particular definition of crime. I find it to be quite narrowly focused. It requires certain assumptions, like who you call "the government". What you, and many people call "the government" I call, "the violent gang thats in power". A crime is, basically whatever they say it is.
In the end this gets down to a semantics argument but... its a semantics argument that ends up being somewhat important since it determines how you look at the data. If you see the government as "legitimate" and the black market as something "illegitimate" then it makes sense to look at it this way, and to calculate the GDP as independent of the Black Market.
If you look at the government as just another organization, then why should its definitions of whats "legitimate" vs not matter? the very exclusion of the Black Market is entirely artificial. It *IS* part of the economy. Real money really does move around through it.
I really don't see what makes them legitimate except that a lot of people think they are. If that was enough to convince me of things, I would go to church on sundays and pray to some diety.
As it is they have me convinced enough to keep paying them, but, thats easily under duress. Its so hard to find a professional job that will pay under the table. Sadly.
-Steve
Since when does the CIA care what is legal or illegal?
Was it legal when they sprayed a small town in France with LSD? Was it legal when they dosed men in NYC without their knowledge? Was it legal when they worked out deals to sell arms in contravention of congressional decisions? Maybe when they were helping import cocaine as part of those same deals? Oh wait... maybe they cared about the legality of torturing prisoners or kidnapping people?
The CIA is about doing what the CIA wants to do. Legal or not. If they cared about the law, you might become deluded into thinking that they work for us. You would be wrong.
-Steve
Doesn't this depend on your definition of "works"?
If you can explain your crime, with no shame, to family, friends, and possibly not even be effected in terms of job prospects then, I have to ask, what kind of crime you really have committed?
If nobody decries the so called "crime" then that seems like evidence, to me, that the government has overstepped its bounds and lost touch with society.
I love that you don't consider the "black market" part of GDP, just because the gang that declared itself the government in power doesn't get a cut
To be honest, I draw the opposite conclusion entirely. To stay in power means appeasing the people on a base level, which means more punishment, since punishing the guys that you already catch is much easier than catching more, and has a higher ROI from the point of view of the person who wants to be re-elected.
As you say, these systems are extremely complicated. I don't have faith that anyone has a complex enough model to be worthy of being put "in charge" of much, and most of government is a game of blindfolded darts where the players award each other points for throwing in a vaguely correct direction.
I know its a joke, but....
"More Sex is Safer Sex" by Steven Landsburg presents an interesting case on the severity of punishment not being a deterrent.
The chapter on LoJack makes the connection that, raising the penalty on car theft has generally resulted in only minor changes in the actual crime rate. I don't remember what he cited there, but the other side... the LoJack case was impressive. What they saw was that if enough LoJacks were sold in an area to raise the overall chance of being caught by about 1%, it correlated with a 20% decrease in car thefts!
It makes sense. With all but the worst prison gangs, most people don't want to get caught. Getting caught means public records, it means trouble finding jobs, it means having to explain to friends and family, etc. There are lots of reasons to not want to get caught, in fact, the entirety of the penalty (whether its decapitation or a slap on the wrist) is modified by the chance of being caught.
So even if the penalty is decapitation, thats only the penalty of getting caught. If I can reasonably expect to do something and not get caught, then why would the penalty even come into the picture? Its like driving a car with your kid in the back seat. If you get in an accident, your child could be killed. There is a chance of this any and every time that you drive a car for any real distance.
However, few people would say that this horrible and unlikely outcome is reason enough to never put their child in a car and drive. In fact, I have never heard the argument made. In fact, I have never even heard the argument made that one should limit or try to avoid that situation.... even though the "worst outcome" is clearly quite severe... the chances of that outcome happening are considered widely acceptable risk.
-Steve
I would argue that anything that protects "the democratic institution" has already stolen any legitimacy that it has. It is the institutions most fundamental job to make sure that its people support it. If it cannot do this, then it deserves to fail.
I see no problem here. Let it fail.
-Steve
I wouldn't believe everything that you read. Its very easy to have 80% of your platform be something that you can't, realistically accomplish, and can blame on others. This has been strategy of both the republicans and democrats for several generations now.
The blowback from using their nukes would be unavoidable and huge. They would see all of their allies (military, trade etc) wither away and publicly oppose them. Any new allies that they gained would be.... useless in comparison to the old ones.
Say what you want, 99% of any leaders real platform is "stay in power". This is usually accomplished by lots of grandstanding and proclamations while doing relatively small real things, not by driving a wedge between yourself and...well... nearly the entire rest of the world.
These "subtleties" can hardly be lost on the Iranian power structures.
I believe thats "eat shit through your nose"
Man, didn't you know that bubbles are made of soap! He could have gotten soap in his eye man! Soap in the eye is no laughing matter!
Soap, as we all know, is made with lye! Lye is a caustic chemical that has no place being thrown at people.
So there, see... officer bubbles clearly had reason to consider this assault.
-Steve
or perhaps one of the students degree plans would have been screwed up if the data wasn't changed, and he felt stealing the laptop was the only way to ensure that he had enough time with the data to find what needed to be changed and return it?
Just another unfounded guess to toss on the pile
-Steve
Well yes, that's exactly what I was thinking. Well, except for the men part. Not being gay, they don't really enter into my fantasy world. Women have colons and colon bacteria as well!
May seem funny but you know... will need it for the next one.
Actually, the article makes me wonder if a threesome involving anal sex could now be considered a medical procedure. Its not unsafe sex, its a colon bacteria transplant!
Or they could use a front company to buy this company out and kill the whole suit. Why use taxpayer money when they can use money from one of their front operations, or other "off budget" stuff. One would assume that they still get a piece of cocaine shipments here and there. Or illegal arms sales. The CIA has never exactly been sticklers for the rules.
-Steve
ahahah the CIA... obey laws? ROTFL they are little more than a criminal gang. Legalities didn't stop them from testing aersolized LSD on a small town in france. It didn't stop them from hiring prostitutes to slip LSD to johns in NYC to study their reactions. It didn't stop them from importing cocaine in the 80s, or illegally funneling weapons (against the decisions of congress), it didn't stop them from kidnapping, or torture.....
Now ... copyright is going to stop them. Sure it is.
-Steve
Mark your calendars folks, I never say anything good about more government. Here is the exception...
I have seen this at work on a corporate level. Names and specifics have been changed to protect...well... me.
I knew this guy Jim. He worked at a very large company. His group worked tightly with another group, he realized that the manager of the other group was in bed with one of the vendors. He realized that he had no real evidence, and nobody wanted to listen to him. So Jim went out for some beers with that manager and chatted him up, and eventually got him to bring him into his corrupt little world. He got bribed himself, and dutifully turned the guy in.
Now, the company, as I said was big. He knew that nobody wanted to hear his complaints and suspected that they may not be clean either. So... being such a big company, he went to the department whose job it is to deal with legal investigations and turned his new evidence over to them.
Where whistle blowing fell on deaf ears before, then it gained traction, action was taken, the manager was removed.
SO yes, having these layers where motivations are separated and not everyone can possibly be each others buddy buddy DOES have some advantages.
Of course, nobody above Jim's target was fired... and Jim then was on a series of projects that all failed in odd ways and were blamed on him, and it seemed like every time he did something, a new policy was created to tell us not to do that, and eventually he was let go. After he left, even some low level managers shook their heads and made comments about how it was sad "what they did to him".
hmmm wait... was this supposed to be a story about this working? I guess it sorta, "worked". If by "worked" we mean "fried the lowest guy on the totem pole".
However, if this scanning were implemented, then your own personal data would cause false positives.
Also, while thats a great long term goal, it means that any work that currently involves storing this data on the local machine needs to be changed. That could be a problem in one place, for one reason, or it could be in many places for many reasons. In short, thats going to take time to sort out and migrate over to the new model.
In the mean time, you can mandate disk encryption and solve the most common cases of the problem (stolen laptops), until you have your more robust solution in place. Then you keep full disk encryption and call it defense in depth.
-Steve
It only seems like a good idea. Its likely to miss things, and have false positives.
A better idea is...mandate full disk encryption. I have done it on my linux based laptop for years, 3 years before my company mandated it. Now, its mandatory. They rolled out a canned solution for departments that want it and don't know any better, and to the rest of us just say "its your ass if its not encrypted" and they make everyone certify, every six months, that if they use a laptop for work, its disk is encrypted.
Problem solved. No scanning needed.
-Steve
Well thats how I feel about a war on the citizenry. Honestly, I don't consider this my country so much as the country I was born inside of, and which is run by an entirely different economic class. I openly state my preference for breaking up the union, and see little real benefit to the common people in keeping it together any longer. Its pretty outdated and no longer needed.
I have heard this argument before and find it to be... highly unlikely. There are just too many ways to pull it off. If they were serious, then attacks 2, 3, 4, 5 would all have been planned and ready to go the day 9/11 happened.
instead #2 wasn't even by them, it was by some whacko bioengineer, with no islamist ties, at one of the governments own labs.
#3, the sniper shootings were ok, and a good example of how to do it well, but... seem like they were entirely independant and, in the end, were ended with no real followup.
Its been more than 2500 days since 9/11 and all we have seen was a handful of poorly executed plots that didn't even work out. Each one demonstrated how it could have been done, and yet, if they ALL worked, it still would be a piss poor showing for over 2500 days.
If they pulled off a 9/11 every year or two, it still wouldn't be enough to be a serious threat. SO far, they havn't even managed to match what a couple of lone crazies did for a followup.
-Steve
I don't see how that logically follows. You make the assumption that the only way to pay for these things is through taxes.
When is the last time the government tried a telethon? Seems to me they just like to tell people "You pay us, for whatever the hell we want to do, whether you like it or not".
I am all for roads, libraries,.... um I don't see where commercial airlines come into this since the government really has little place there except where they have forced themselves in...
I would gladly pay for these. As long as even one cent of it goes to the military, or to persecute people under the auspices of the crusade on drugs, I oppose all of it.
-Steve
Actually, taxes kind of are theft. I have little problem with this as long as they are not used for things that I find absolutely abhorrent... like military buildups, massive surveillance, and wars.
You know what.... you are absolutely right. I take it back... there is 1 policy change... the cheapest of all of them, that was good and right!
That was such a good move actually.
-Steve
It doesn't really outrage me...let me tell you why.
I put myself in the shoes of an Afghani. I imagine that my country had been invaded by foreign troops. Then I imagine that those troops told me they were setting up my new government.
Then I imagine that someone released the names of the sympathizers and collaborators who were betraying me by working with the foreign invaders, how sad for them would I be?
They decided to work with the occupation force, they get what they get for that. Its a risky thing to do, as it should be.
-Steve
Actually, I see more danger in not having people like them. Some of the stuff that they have released, like "Collateral Murder" are things that never should have been kept from the public. Its one thing to keep data secret about troop movements to keep troops safe... its another when the idea is just to "protect our reputation". Its entirely right that people see the realities of war... so we can be reminded why we shouldn't EVER have one.
Personally, I feel bad that I never donated to them when I had the chance. I will gladly send them some cash when they get something set up again. I would rather them have my money than the people running these horrid wars that never should have been started. Its good to see them exposing what a crime war is.
-Steve