It's more than just an oligarchy. It's the facade of democracy with the corporations pulling the strings, using the elected representatives in the government to do their bidding. Corporations don't technically run the country in the sense that the federal and state governments are still ostensible for the people, by the people, and the constitution says so as well. Corporatocracy, being a new term, can capture the way in which corporations sneakily run the show behind the facade of a supposed republic or democracy. Using "corporate oligarchy" would actually be incorrect because there is no legal or constitutional mandate for corporations to actually be in control of the country.
Then explain this paragraph: "I believe something happened to the human race in the past half-century. There has been a persistent trend to create a breakaway society - maybe a breakaway species. As income disparities increase to the point where certain types of life-extension and other technologies are only available to a small number of people you're going to see that breakaway group forming up. Eventually, they'll have the ability to leave the Earth behind. And if that happens, there will be increasing incentive to make sure those folks left behind never get to catch up."
That's what I took issue with. My referencing "breakaway societies" should have tipped you off to that.
It's like you've never read a history book. We're obviously going backwards right now in terms of social mobility, but it's still a lot better than it was for most of civilized human history. Breakaway societies were the norm, not the exception.
Well, yes and no. If NOAA really provided no service whatsoever, it would likely eventually get cut. It certainly would be replaced by private sector equivalents even before being cut.
I would disagree that the private sector doesn't have this problem. Large companies can keep alive product lines and services even if they are losing money or are of low quality. In a situation with monopolies or oligopolies, companies don't really need to convince you to do much of anything: you have no choice but to buy from them or go without. And unlike is the case with government, you can't write your representative, or elect a different president to change the situation.
Well, we could all leave this country and then it wouldn't have any money to pay for NOAA (or any people to staff it for that matter). Really, it sounds to me like you are arguing for no government whatsoever. After all, any government function is technically "unfair" competition against the private sector. You also miss the point that the public sector does things the private sector can't do effectively or fairly, or may not want to do at all. If the private sector really could do a better job, it would have by now. There's nothing stopping private sector weather services, monitoring networks, weather models and forecasting agencies. While some of these exist, they are generally not a whole lot better than what NOAA provides. And none of them would pool their resources into a 4.5 billion dollar a year common resource. Instead, we'd have a system that would cost twice as much with half the value, unless you have a lot of money to pay for the very fancy products.
> There are private satellites and private weather forecasting services. The government need not be involved.
And how much do those cost? How much of the Earth do they cover? Do they provide data at reasonable or no cost to researchers, who are enriching the field for everyone's benefit? Are they required to provide forecasts for every square inch of the country? Sure, the private sector could maybe do some of it, at ten times the cost (gotta make money!), without the free flow of data, and with plenty of competing services that don't interoperate with each other and are designed to make their owners money rather than provide a service for the citizens of the country.
> Most people would be better off if the "entitlements" were all ended today
This is just plain bullshit and you know it. The disabled, elderly and temporarily unemployed should just be thrown on the street tomorrow? Who would really be better off?
They've done nothing because, well, they (the politicians) have done nothing. Or they'll reverse previous gains with new tax cuts, or new major spending increases. Even so, taking the chainsaw approach will be devastating. It may be frustrating to watch the politicians fail to address the problem adequately, but it'll be even more frustrating and painful to watch them destroy the country with draconian policies gutting the public sector. If those policies involve cutting programs like NOAA, we'll get nearly nothing in terms of fixing the budget, but it will cost us a lot elsewhere. That's why it's really important to keep the discussion on the big expenses and not waste time looking at stuff like NOAA and NASA.
Regardless of the reason for why those things cost so much, they do, in fact, cost a lot and take up a large percentage of federal expenditures. Defense is a close 3rd. I agree with you on fixes for Medi{care,caid} and the wealthy paying their fair share. That won't fix the whole gap, though, because parts of the entitlement system are destined to balloon out of control, so no amount of reasonable new taxes will ever keep us in the black.
There's no point in trying to balance the budget in a single package or election cycle. The budget issue is complex and deep. Simply cutting a bunch of things, or massively increasing revenue will have negative results and won't fix the underlying problems and consequences. We must accept that fixing the budget is a decade or longer problem. If the government show that it is actually making progress on solving the problem, I imagine the markets will respond positively, even if we are still running a deficit for a few years yet.
lolwut? First of all, the NWS is part of NOAA. So that dumb argument goes out the window. The FAA doesn't do any weather forecasting of its own that I know of. The NWS produces aviation forecasts, which are used by airports (who might have their own forecasters, but that's not a government thing). If NASA does any forecasting, it's for things relevant to launches and landing and is probably more specific than the NWS is able to provide. It makes sense that NASA would do its own forecasting.
This is hardly an example of waste and fraud. And again, for the price tag of 4.5 billion dollars, we, the American people, are getting a damn good deal: best weather monitoring network in the world, one of the best suite of models, top notch research, high quality forecasts, freely available data that can be used for public, private and academic purposes, and so on. If you want to go on a government waste rant, at least pick a department that really is throwing away a huge amount of money with no returns.
Because they don't have as many resources? Even given that some have more than others, that means that the gap between the wealthy parts of America and the poor parts will only get wider. Poorer states will be unable to provide even basic services effectively, while the rich states can afford more expansive programs.
Cutting these small departments will do almost nothing for the deficit problem, but will hurt our ability to remain competitive in weather monitoring, research and other areas. What's the sense in that?
The deficit problem is almost entirely in two big areas: mandatory entitlement spending and defense. Look at any chart of federal spending and that will be readily apparent. Once those areas are improved, spendingwise, then we can start looking at the smaller programs. Even then, ones like NOAA and the NSF should be near the end of the list, since they provide such useful services at a really great price.
But these programs are only 11.35 billion. They might as well stay in and serve their useful purpose. Not that, of course, they shouldn't be reviewed for efficiency. We can probably dump the DoEd.
This. People don't realize how massively useful some of these programs are (not talking about dept of education, though) and how little they actually cost and how little axing them would help with the budget problem. You only ax the small stuff when axing the big stuff isn't enough. It's like pending hours optimizing a function that gets called once during program execution, while ignoring an inner loop that the program spends 80% of its time executing.
State governments can't pool the resources of the whole country as well as the federal government can. And now instead of 1 good implementation, you have 50 crappy implementations subject to the mood swings of local populations. It's great for some things like implementing education, social services and local roads, but I'd rather have the weather monitoring and research funding come from a single entity that can leverage the power and resources of the federal government.
The spending problem isn't NOAA or NIST, it's "entitlements" and defense. TFA mentions NOAA's $4.5 billion budget. For the services it provides, that's a pretty damn good bang for your buck. Axing NOAA would do about nothing for the national debt, but would cost us dearly in terms of weather data and services. You could axe every single non-defense discretionary spending agency and still end up with a decent deficit. Why go after the parts of the government that actually do a good job and provide useful services? What a fucking dumb idea. Seriously.
They won't do it as well. There already are private weather companies and they can do anything NOAA can do...if they wanted to. If they really are better, then why does NOAA still do all the kickass stuff and run the best weather monitoring network in the world? Where are all the private weather models in the US that run so much better than the ones at NCEP? If there's money to be made, if the private sector really is better at providing weather data and forecasts to the public at reasonable prices and in a way that is supportive of research, public, private and academic, then where is this giant market? It doesn't really exist because NOAA actually does a damn good job. And all the data is available for free, for public use. That means academia can do useful research and private companies can use it to make their own, potentially better forecasts without spending a lot of money on a weather monitoring network or supercomputers for weather models.
Honestly, the current model is pretty kickass. The weather data and modeling is a public good, and anybody, including private companies, can use, abuse, slice and dice that data for whatever purpose without getting tied up in legal issues, IP rules, contracts and other bullshit typical of the private sector. If you want a model for what the government *should* be doing, take a look at programs like NOAA and the NSF, or the agencies that gave rise to the internet. Let the government be the incubator for research and long-term investments and let the private sector come in and make money off of it without having to take a giant risk that probably won't pay off for years or decades. That's how you can create jobs.
Have you see all the crappy 3rd party Windows apps that, despite being written in C/C++ or C#/VB, insist on creating their own custom UI controls that work in subtly (and not so subtly) different ways from the ones provided with Windows and very often don't look the same as the Windows ones (and often look terrible)?
By your silly logic, we can't make any pronouncements about gravity and physics because we've only studied them for a tiny fraction of the time that they've existed and operated in the universe.
The tactic of saying "we haven't been around long enough" is, for the deniers, just a way of moving the goal posts.
Slashdot Mirror
People have been trying to control wealth and power of the world for a lot longer than 200 years.
It's more than just an oligarchy. It's the facade of democracy with the corporations pulling the strings, using the elected representatives in the government to do their bidding. Corporations don't technically run the country in the sense that the federal and state governments are still ostensible for the people, by the people, and the constitution says so as well. Corporatocracy, being a new term, can capture the way in which corporations sneakily run the show behind the facade of a supposed republic or democracy. Using "corporate oligarchy" would actually be incorrect because there is no legal or constitutional mandate for corporations to actually be in control of the country.
Aren't you just the coolest.
If you use C-style macros. Lisp-style macros are a lot better.
Talk about a non-solution.
Then explain this paragraph: "I believe something happened to the human race in the past half-century. There has been a persistent trend to create a breakaway society - maybe a breakaway species. As income disparities increase to the point where certain types of life-extension and other technologies are only available to a small number of people you're going to see that breakaway group forming up. Eventually, they'll have the ability to leave the Earth behind. And if that happens, there will be increasing incentive to make sure those folks left behind never get to catch up."
That's what I took issue with. My referencing "breakaway societies" should have tipped you off to that.
It's like you've never read a history book. We're obviously going backwards right now in terms of social mobility, but it's still a lot better than it was for most of civilized human history. Breakaway societies were the norm, not the exception.
Well, yes and no. If NOAA really provided no service whatsoever, it would likely eventually get cut. It certainly would be replaced by private sector equivalents even before being cut.
I would disagree that the private sector doesn't have this problem. Large companies can keep alive product lines and services even if they are losing money or are of low quality. In a situation with monopolies or oligopolies, companies don't really need to convince you to do much of anything: you have no choice but to buy from them or go without. And unlike is the case with government, you can't write your representative, or elect a different president to change the situation.
Well, we could all leave this country and then it wouldn't have any money to pay for NOAA (or any people to staff it for that matter). Really, it sounds to me like you are arguing for no government whatsoever. After all, any government function is technically "unfair" competition against the private sector. You also miss the point that the public sector does things the private sector can't do effectively or fairly, or may not want to do at all. If the private sector really could do a better job, it would have by now. There's nothing stopping private sector weather services, monitoring networks, weather models and forecasting agencies. While some of these exist, they are generally not a whole lot better than what NOAA provides. And none of them would pool their resources into a 4.5 billion dollar a year common resource. Instead, we'd have a system that would cost twice as much with half the value, unless you have a lot of money to pay for the very fancy products.
> There are private satellites and private weather forecasting services. The government need not be involved.
And how much do those cost? How much of the Earth do they cover? Do they provide data at reasonable or no cost to researchers, who are enriching the field for everyone's benefit? Are they required to provide forecasts for every square inch of the country? Sure, the private sector could maybe do some of it, at ten times the cost (gotta make money!), without the free flow of data, and with plenty of competing services that don't interoperate with each other and are designed to make their owners money rather than provide a service for the citizens of the country.
> Most people would be better off if the "entitlements" were all ended today
This is just plain bullshit and you know it. The disabled, elderly and temporarily unemployed should just be thrown on the street tomorrow? Who would really be better off?
The fact that the budget proposal even has these cuts on small but important programs is still disturbing.
They've done nothing because, well, they (the politicians) have done nothing. Or they'll reverse previous gains with new tax cuts, or new major spending increases. Even so, taking the chainsaw approach will be devastating. It may be frustrating to watch the politicians fail to address the problem adequately, but it'll be even more frustrating and painful to watch them destroy the country with draconian policies gutting the public sector. If those policies involve cutting programs like NOAA, we'll get nearly nothing in terms of fixing the budget, but it will cost us a lot elsewhere. That's why it's really important to keep the discussion on the big expenses and not waste time looking at stuff like NOAA and NASA.
Regardless of the reason for why those things cost so much, they do, in fact, cost a lot and take up a large percentage of federal expenditures. Defense is a close 3rd. I agree with you on fixes for Medi{care,caid} and the wealthy paying their fair share. That won't fix the whole gap, though, because parts of the entitlement system are destined to balloon out of control, so no amount of reasonable new taxes will ever keep us in the black.
There's no point in trying to balance the budget in a single package or election cycle. The budget issue is complex and deep. Simply cutting a bunch of things, or massively increasing revenue will have negative results and won't fix the underlying problems and consequences. We must accept that fixing the budget is a decade or longer problem. If the government show that it is actually making progress on solving the problem, I imagine the markets will respond positively, even if we are still running a deficit for a few years yet.
lolwut? First of all, the NWS is part of NOAA. So that dumb argument goes out the window. The FAA doesn't do any weather forecasting of its own that I know of. The NWS produces aviation forecasts, which are used by airports (who might have their own forecasters, but that's not a government thing). If NASA does any forecasting, it's for things relevant to launches and landing and is probably more specific than the NWS is able to provide. It makes sense that NASA would do its own forecasting.
This is hardly an example of waste and fraud. And again, for the price tag of 4.5 billion dollars, we, the American people, are getting a damn good deal: best weather monitoring network in the world, one of the best suite of models, top notch research, high quality forecasts, freely available data that can be used for public, private and academic purposes, and so on. If you want to go on a government waste rant, at least pick a department that really is throwing away a huge amount of money with no returns.
Because they don't have as many resources? Even given that some have more than others, that means that the gap between the wealthy parts of America and the poor parts will only get wider. Poorer states will be unable to provide even basic services effectively, while the rich states can afford more expansive programs.
Cutting these small departments will do almost nothing for the deficit problem, but will hurt our ability to remain competitive in weather monitoring, research and other areas. What's the sense in that?
The deficit problem is almost entirely in two big areas: mandatory entitlement spending and defense. Look at any chart of federal spending and that will be readily apparent. Once those areas are improved, spendingwise, then we can start looking at the smaller programs. Even then, ones like NOAA and the NSF should be near the end of the list, since they provide such useful services at a really great price.
But these programs are only 11.35 billion. They might as well stay in and serve their useful purpose. Not that, of course, they shouldn't be reviewed for efficiency. We can probably dump the DoEd.
Reading the comments, you'd think this is a libertarian haven.
This. People don't realize how massively useful some of these programs are (not talking about dept of education, though) and how little they actually cost and how little axing them would help with the budget problem. You only ax the small stuff when axing the big stuff isn't enough. It's like pending hours optimizing a function that gets called once during program execution, while ignoring an inner loop that the program spends 80% of its time executing.
State governments can't pool the resources of the whole country as well as the federal government can. And now instead of 1 good implementation, you have 50 crappy implementations subject to the mood swings of local populations. It's great for some things like implementing education, social services and local roads, but I'd rather have the weather monitoring and research funding come from a single entity that can leverage the power and resources of the federal government.
The spending problem isn't NOAA or NIST, it's "entitlements" and defense. TFA mentions NOAA's $4.5 billion budget. For the services it provides, that's a pretty damn good bang for your buck. Axing NOAA would do about nothing for the national debt, but would cost us dearly in terms of weather data and services. You could axe every single non-defense discretionary spending agency and still end up with a decent deficit. Why go after the parts of the government that actually do a good job and provide useful services? What a fucking dumb idea. Seriously.
They won't do it as well. There already are private weather companies and they can do anything NOAA can do...if they wanted to. If they really are better, then why does NOAA still do all the kickass stuff and run the best weather monitoring network in the world? Where are all the private weather models in the US that run so much better than the ones at NCEP? If there's money to be made, if the private sector really is better at providing weather data and forecasts to the public at reasonable prices and in a way that is supportive of research, public, private and academic, then where is this giant market? It doesn't really exist because NOAA actually does a damn good job. And all the data is available for free, for public use. That means academia can do useful research and private companies can use it to make their own, potentially better forecasts without spending a lot of money on a weather monitoring network or supercomputers for weather models.
Honestly, the current model is pretty kickass. The weather data and modeling is a public good, and anybody, including private companies, can use, abuse, slice and dice that data for whatever purpose without getting tied up in legal issues, IP rules, contracts and other bullshit typical of the private sector. If you want a model for what the government *should* be doing, take a look at programs like NOAA and the NSF, or the agencies that gave rise to the internet. Let the government be the incubator for research and long-term investments and let the private sector come in and make money off of it without having to take a giant risk that probably won't pay off for years or decades. That's how you can create jobs.
Have you see all the crappy 3rd party Windows apps that, despite being written in C/C++ or C#/VB, insist on creating their own custom UI controls that work in subtly (and not so subtly) different ways from the ones provided with Windows and very often don't look the same as the Windows ones (and often look terrible)?
By your silly logic, we can't make any pronouncements about gravity and physics because we've only studied them for a tiny fraction of the time that they've existed and operated in the universe.
The tactic of saying "we haven't been around long enough" is, for the deniers, just a way of moving the goal posts.