I, too, am worried about people who are so cynical they won't vote.
I am also worried about voter ID campaigns which are set up to prevent certain groups of people from voting. I hope these don't succeed because if they do the system may be gamed so that only voters who support the status quo will be allowed to vote.
It's annoying, but you can dispute the claim right inside your YouTube video manager. I deal with this on an almost daily basis, and the claims are always released."
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: As the country moves farther to the right
Sweet, let's liquidate the nuclear arsenal then. That should being in some greenbacks.
Yes, we could sell the weapons to other countries, and then increase Homeland Security and the Defense Department to protect us from the weapons we have just sold. We'd make money on the sale, and then create jobs by hiring inspectors and soldiers.
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: As the country moves farther to the right
We lead the world in military equipment sales. It's a growth industry for us.
IPS – U.S. Foreign Weapons Sales Triple, Setting Record | Inter Press Service: WASHINGTON, Aug 27 2012 (IPS) - "U.S. weapons sales around the world have massively expanded over the past year, setting several records. Agreements for foreign arms sales in 2011 totalled around 66.3 billion dollars – three times higher than the previous year and constituting an 'extraordinary increase', according to the Congressional Research Service."
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: As the country moves farther to the right
I'd put it on the right because the government isn't involved.
The far left and the far right could probably find a meeting of the minds if politicians weren't trying to divide and conquer. For example, does this sound left or right?
About the Institute for Local Self-Reliance | Institute for Local Self-Reliance: "ILSR challenges the conventional wisdom that bigger is better, that separating the producer from the consumer, the banker from the depositor and lender, the worker from the owner is an inevitable outcome of modern economic development. Surprisingly little evidence supports this conventional wisdom. In every sector of the economy the evidence yields the same conclusion: small is the scale of efficient, dynamic environmentally benign societies."
Re: Re: Re: Re: As the country moves farther to the right
But if you have big government on the left and small government on the right, then we have absolutely moved to the left.
Where would you put the shareable movement? Let's say people are forming cooperatives but the government isn't involved. Is that left because it involves a form of communal ownership or right because it is outside of standard forms of government?
Is the worker-owned collective more on the right or more on the left?
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: As the country moves farther to the right
The people in East Berlin before the wall came down Lived a "government owned life".
It's my understanding that they didn't like it very much...
I'm just saying that the US military is a government-owned life. No getting around that. Expand the military and you are expanding government. Put more people in the military and give out more government contracts for military operations and you are expanding government.
It was nice to have all that free medical care. And retired military do appreciate the pension.
Re: Re: Re: As the country moves farther to the right
Another thing I find quite ironic is the push from the right to expand the military.
You can't get more government than the military. My father was a career military officer. I thought it was a great life and if the government wants to hire more military personnel and take care of their families, I'm all for it.
We had government health care. We had government housing. We shopped in government run stores. We attended government run schools. The government provided a generous pension after to anyone who served 20 years or more.
The fact that I lived a government-owned life is why I don't fear the government. It was very good to my family and me.
Government has gotten bigger and more powerful. What was once considered immoral behavior is now acceptable. Regulation by government has increased almost exponentially. Government control over social programs has expanded continuously over the last century. All of these are principles endorsed by the left.
The government keeps expanding under Republican administrations, too. And some Republicans want to set up a vast border patrol to keep everyone out. That takes money and expands the government. And then you've got Republicans advocating additional laws to prevent abortions, gay marriage, etc. Republicans want government just as much as they accuse the Democrats of wanting it. The Republicans just want to dole out the money to different groups.
The thing is, economically no politician dares to drastically slash government or the economy tanks. Imagine what happens if the government no longer employs people, no longer pays for contracts, and no longer provides funding to citizens. The country might benefit from that sort of tough love, but if you suddenly stop handing out government money, every company in the country loses the cashflow that comes from government money, directly or indirectly. I dare the Republicans to actually stop government in its tracks and no longer pay anyone. What I am worried about is that we'll get another Bush -- a President who cuts taxes AND raises government spending. If you are going to fight a war, damn it, make citizens actually pay for it. And if they don't want to pay, maybe we won't get into so many.
I think pretty much everyone agrees that we're moving to the right. What was once considered moderate is now labelled liberal or far left.
I don't think a country moving to the right is going to make civil liberties a priority. With all the talk of requiring voter IDs, requiring papers to prove you are a legal resident, a push to favor Christianity over other religions, and so on, you can see the trends here.
I was thinking about the cases where there have been massively unexpected engineering failures (e.g., Titanic, World Trade Center building collapse).
The issue, it seems to me, is when engineers/designers give people the impression that what they have designed won't fail (even worse, when the engineers themselves believe that).
If, on the other hand, society is told that systematic failure is a possibility and that there's a X% likelihood of that happening, then everyone can decide whether or not it's worth the investment to develop backup systems to cover the potential problems.
For example, archiving records is a good example. Everyone is told to make more than one copy. And some folks take the extra step to make copies on multiple media. If you want to make sure your precious photos survive, you might want to have them on your computer, on an external hard drive, on DVD, in the cloud, AND in hard copy format.
There are groups now that check to see which charities are actually using the money you give them for the causes they say they support and which charities are using your money to pay lavish salaries to the employees.
If people are crowdfunding because they think the people they are supporting need the money, then they are likely to get pissed if they find out the money is really going to pay for generous salaries and perks to those involved in the project.
If, on the other hand, the crowdfunding project is really just a form of presales, then the people signing up for the rewards will likely be satisfied as long as they get the product they were buying in a reasonable time and of the quality they expect.
As I said, whether crowdfunding as a concept continues to work depends on how many people are satisfied with the process. If there are enough scams that people learn to be wary, it won't continue to work.
The shareable movement as a whole is grappling with how to facilitate exchanges while also reducing risk to everyone involved. eBay is the biggest example of a system that mostly works, although there are categories of products I would never buy on eBay because there are too many scams for those items.
The primary reason I don't fund any Kickstarter projects is that too many of my friends are doing them. It is easier to tell everyone I won't contribute money that way than to explain why I backed some projects but not others.
For example raising $3000 to manufacture a new type of iPhone case and immediately booking a trip to cancun with the money.
Most likely this is already happening, but in a form that isn't obvious. Let's say your rewards cost you almost nothing to make and your margins are huge. You don't bother to tell people that most of the money you are raising is going directly into your pocket, but as long as you deliver what you promised to deliver, then theoretically you've done nothing wrong.
I'm a big fan of the shareable movement, so Kickstarter and the like are experiments I support.
However, it is true that if enough projects don't deliver as promised (I don't think we're there yet), givers will back off and the concept will fall out of favor.
It is in the best interests of companies like Kickstarter to make sure there are a high percentage of satisfied givers.
Agenda 21 is a 1992 United Nations resolution that encourages sustainable development globally. Although it is nonbinding and has no force of law in the United States, it has increasingly become a point of passionate concern to a circle of Republican activists who argue that the resolution is part of a United Nations plot to deny Americans their property rights."
Bush Jr. ran the White House like a bushiness firm and was extremely strict. If you were late to a meeting you got locked out. Most of his presidency paralleled with a DNC congress and Bush gets the blame for a bad economy.
He gets blamed because he got us into a war, but didn't raise taxes to pay for it.
I've been okay with the concept of ContentID because it allows YouTube to exist for the moment. If we had to wait until copyright laws were changed before YouTube could exist legally, then we might be YouTube-less for decades. It strikes me as workable interim system to keep YouTube up and working while people adapt to new music industry realities.
That being said, there should be ways to correct errors like this. No, these companies shouldn't be able to take down public domain songs. What likely happened is that they claimed copyright on versions of public domain songs their companies recorded and ContentID didn't know the difference. Every label that has recorded a copy of "Oh Little Town of Bethlehem" has probably submitted its recorded version to YouTube, so there are multiple copyright claimants for the same song. Each recorded version has its own copyright, but the song itself shouldn't be under copyright.
There should be a way to tweak YouTube each time copyright is falsely claimed. And I am sure there are ways to enter false claims like this into the ContentID database so that after it happens once, it doesn't trigger any more of them. But maybe Google isn't in any hurry to do that, or maybe it has been done, but the musicians getting caught in the system haven't been told that. I don't know.
It's one of the few industries left in the country that still makes money. It supports many police departments, their equipment suppliers and the prison industry, not to mention thousands of pawnbrokers and the stores you use to replace the stuff stolen from you. And although we can't be told - national security, know what I mean - over the past 35 years or so it probably saved the taxpayers hundreds of billions in funding for CIA black operations.
Totally agree. Often conservative policies don't mean smaller government. What they really mean is this: "Let's support laws that enrich the companies we like." Hasn't that been what airport scanners have been about, too?
Government budgets have gone up during Republican presidencies. In fact, one of the ironies of the current campaign is that people who want to see more government money to boost the economy say the only hope is to elect Romney. If Obama wins, the Republicans block all of his proposals. If Romney wins, it's "Who cares about the deficit. Let's spend government money and get this economy going again."
Someone I follow on Twitter pointed this out. I didn't know a conservative version of Wikipedia existed or that this theory was a point of contention. I read this and was wondering when the anti-science folks might want to dispute the idea that diseases can be spread from not washing one's hands.
On the post: Your Cynicism About Lobbyists Only Helps The Lobbyists Win
I always vote
I am also worried about voter ID campaigns which are set up to prevent certain groups of people from voting. I hope these don't succeed because if they do the system may be gamed so that only voters who support the status quo will be allowed to vote.
On the post: Major Labels Claim Copyright Over Public Domain Songs; YouTube Punishes Musician
The workaround
"Brian Hazard said...
It's annoying, but you can dispute the claim right inside your YouTube video manager. I deal with this on an almost daily basis, and the claims are always released."
On the post: 2012 Democrats: Remember That Civil Liberties Thing From 2008? Um, Nevermind
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: As the country moves farther to the right
Yes, we could sell the weapons to other countries, and then increase Homeland Security and the Defense Department to protect us from the weapons we have just sold. We'd make money on the sale, and then create jobs by hiring inspectors and soldiers.
On the post: 2012 Democrats: Remember That Civil Liberties Thing From 2008? Um, Nevermind
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: As the country moves farther to the right
IPS – U.S. Foreign Weapons Sales Triple, Setting Record | Inter Press Service: WASHINGTON, Aug 27 2012 (IPS) - "U.S. weapons sales around the world have massively expanded over the past year, setting several records. Agreements for foreign arms sales in 2011 totalled around 66.3 billion dollars – three times higher than the previous year and constituting an 'extraordinary increase', according to the Congressional Research Service."
On the post: 2012 Democrats: Remember That Civil Liberties Thing From 2008? Um, Nevermind
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: As the country moves farther to the right
The far left and the far right could probably find a meeting of the minds if politicians weren't trying to divide and conquer. For example, does this sound left or right?
About the Institute for Local Self-Reliance | Institute for Local Self-Reliance: "ILSR challenges the conventional wisdom that bigger is better, that separating the producer from the consumer, the banker from the depositor and lender, the worker from the owner is an inevitable outcome of modern economic development. Surprisingly little evidence supports this conventional wisdom. In every sector of the economy the evidence yields the same conclusion: small is the scale of efficient, dynamic environmentally benign societies."
On the post: 2012 Democrats: Remember That Civil Liberties Thing From 2008? Um, Nevermind
Re: Re: Re: Re: As the country moves farther to the right
Where would you put the shareable movement? Let's say people are forming cooperatives but the government isn't involved. Is that left because it involves a form of communal ownership or right because it is outside of standard forms of government?
Is the worker-owned collective more on the right or more on the left?
On the post: 2012 Democrats: Remember That Civil Liberties Thing From 2008? Um, Nevermind
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: As the country moves farther to the right
It's my understanding that they didn't like it very much...
I'm just saying that the US military is a government-owned life. No getting around that. Expand the military and you are expanding government. Put more people in the military and give out more government contracts for military operations and you are expanding government.
It was nice to have all that free medical care. And retired military do appreciate the pension.
On the post: 2012 Democrats: Remember That Civil Liberties Thing From 2008? Um, Nevermind
Re: Re: As the country moves farther to the right
There are some folks who want to declare Christianity as the official religion of the US. They'd like to move us ever closer to a theocracy.
On the post: 2012 Democrats: Remember That Civil Liberties Thing From 2008? Um, Nevermind
Re: Re: Re: As the country moves farther to the right
You can't get more government than the military. My father was a career military officer. I thought it was a great life and if the government wants to hire more military personnel and take care of their families, I'm all for it.
We had government health care. We had government housing. We shopped in government run stores. We attended government run schools. The government provided a generous pension after to anyone who served 20 years or more.
The fact that I lived a government-owned life is why I don't fear the government. It was very good to my family and me.
On the post: 2012 Democrats: Remember That Civil Liberties Thing From 2008? Um, Nevermind
Re: Re: As the country moves farther to the right
The government keeps expanding under Republican administrations, too. And some Republicans want to set up a vast border patrol to keep everyone out. That takes money and expands the government. And then you've got Republicans advocating additional laws to prevent abortions, gay marriage, etc. Republicans want government just as much as they accuse the Democrats of wanting it. The Republicans just want to dole out the money to different groups.
The thing is, economically no politician dares to drastically slash government or the economy tanks. Imagine what happens if the government no longer employs people, no longer pays for contracts, and no longer provides funding to citizens. The country might benefit from that sort of tough love, but if you suddenly stop handing out government money, every company in the country loses the cashflow that comes from government money, directly or indirectly. I dare the Republicans to actually stop government in its tracks and no longer pay anyone. What I am worried about is that we'll get another Bush -- a President who cuts taxes AND raises government spending. If you are going to fight a war, damn it, make citizens actually pay for it. And if they don't want to pay, maybe we won't get into so many.
On the post: 2012 Democrats: Remember That Civil Liberties Thing From 2008? Um, Nevermind
As the country moves farther to the right
I don't think a country moving to the right is going to make civil liberties a priority. With all the talk of requiring voter IDs, requiring papers to prove you are a legal resident, a push to favor Christianity over other religions, and so on, you can see the trends here.
On the post: United Airlines Massive Computer Crash Leads To Handwritten Boarding Passes
It's about risk management
The issue, it seems to me, is when engineers/designers give people the impression that what they have designed won't fail (even worse, when the engineers themselves believe that).
If, on the other hand, society is told that systematic failure is a possibility and that there's a X% likelihood of that happening, then everyone can decide whether or not it's worth the investment to develop backup systems to cover the potential problems.
For example, archiving records is a good example. Everyone is told to make more than one copy. And some folks take the extra step to make copies on multiple media. If you want to make sure your precious photos survive, you might want to have them on your computer, on an external hard drive, on DVD, in the cloud, AND in hard copy format.
On the post: The Inevitable Crowdfunding Backlash When People Realize Projects Fail & Change
Monitoring it like a charity
If people are crowdfunding because they think the people they are supporting need the money, then they are likely to get pissed if they find out the money is really going to pay for generous salaries and perks to those involved in the project.
If, on the other hand, the crowdfunding project is really just a form of presales, then the people signing up for the rewards will likely be satisfied as long as they get the product they were buying in a reasonable time and of the quality they expect.
As I said, whether crowdfunding as a concept continues to work depends on how many people are satisfied with the process. If there are enough scams that people learn to be wary, it won't continue to work.
The shareable movement as a whole is grappling with how to facilitate exchanges while also reducing risk to everyone involved. eBay is the biggest example of a system that mostly works, although there are categories of products I would never buy on eBay because there are too many scams for those items.
The primary reason I don't fund any Kickstarter projects is that too many of my friends are doing them. It is easier to tell everyone I won't contribute money that way than to explain why I backed some projects but not others.
On the post: The Inevitable Crowdfunding Backlash When People Realize Projects Fail & Change
Re: Re: Re:
Most likely this is already happening, but in a form that isn't obvious. Let's say your rewards cost you almost nothing to make and your margins are huge. You don't bother to tell people that most of the money you are raising is going directly into your pocket, but as long as you deliver what you promised to deliver, then theoretically you've done nothing wrong.
On the post: The Inevitable Crowdfunding Backlash When People Realize Projects Fail & Change
Disappointment rate is the category killer
However, it is true that if enough projects don't deliver as promised (I don't think we're there yet), givers will back off and the concept will fall out of favor.
It is in the best interests of companies like Kickstarter to make sure there are a high percentage of satisfied givers.
On the post: GOP Platform May Include Internet Freedom Language... But Also Wants Crackdown On Internet Porn
The Tea Party officially butts heads with the shareable movement
Republican Platform Opposes Agenda 21 - NYTimes.com: “'We strongly reject the U.N. Agenda 21 as erosive of American sovereignty, and we oppose any form of U.N. Global Tax,' the platform reads.
Agenda 21 is a 1992 United Nations resolution that encourages sustainable development globally. Although it is nonbinding and has no force of law in the United States, it has increasingly become a point of passionate concern to a circle of Republican activists who argue that the resolution is part of a United Nations plot to deny Americans their property rights."
On the post: GOP Platform May Include Internet Freedom Language... But Also Wants Crackdown On Internet Porn
Re: Re: Re: Re:
He gets blamed because he got us into a war, but didn't raise taxes to pay for it.
On the post: Major Labels Claim Copyright Over Public Domain Songs; YouTube Punishes Musician
There should be a better feedback loop
That being said, there should be ways to correct errors like this. No, these companies shouldn't be able to take down public domain songs. What likely happened is that they claimed copyright on versions of public domain songs their companies recorded and ContentID didn't know the difference. Every label that has recorded a copy of "Oh Little Town of Bethlehem" has probably submitted its recorded version to YouTube, so there are multiple copyright claimants for the same song. Each recorded version has its own copyright, but the song itself shouldn't be under copyright.
There should be a way to tweak YouTube each time copyright is falsely claimed. And I am sure there are ways to enter false claims like this into the ContentID database so that after it happens once, it doesn't trigger any more of them. But maybe Google isn't in any hurry to do that, or maybe it has been done, but the musicians getting caught in the system haven't been told that. I don't know.
On the post: GOP Platform May Include Internet Freedom Language... But Also Wants Crackdown On Internet Porn
Re: Re:
Totally agree. Often conservative policies don't mean smaller government. What they really mean is this: "Let's support laws that enrich the companies we like." Hasn't that been what airport scanners have been about, too?
Government budgets have gone up during Republican presidencies. In fact, one of the ironies of the current campaign is that people who want to see more government money to boost the economy say the only hope is to elect Romney. If Obama wins, the Republicans block all of his proposals. If Romney wins, it's "Who cares about the deficit. Let's spend government money and get this economy going again."
On the post: GOP Platform May Include Internet Freedom Language... But Also Wants Crackdown On Internet Porn
An anti-science bias
E=mc² - Conservapedia
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