Ah yes... The 'liberty' to die impoverished from medical bills for lack of insurance.
There is no 'freedom' in poverty.
I do find Silicon Valley libertarians amusing though, as the delude themselves into believing they bootstrapped their fortunes, when they actually owe their entire careers to work built entirely on that dreaded government investment.
So that's the plan... Pressure Apple with the iBooks thing and use it to try & force them to help out with obama care website.
"C'mon Tim. I think I think I can get justice to ease up a bit on the iBooks thing. Look at it this way. It' s a win-win" "Sorry B.O. Nothing but a big Bag-O-Hurt™ there. Can't do it. No way, no how."
Probably not, but President John Adams might have been when he set up the first American Public Health Service built and maintained by mandatory fees paid by citizens, in 1798.....
Zuckerberg already in the administrations pocket, they don't need him. Hopefully those that have been summoned for an audience with The One will have bit more sense.
Agreed. Obama has a golden opportunity to live up to the promise he made in 2007. He really has been nothing short of the biggest disappointment for potential change I've ever seen in politics. Remember when the media were branding him the next kennedy? Lol.
You are being too harsh. Obama has acomplished quite a bit in the face of what I'd call pernicious adversity. Here's a list of 225 things...
I heard Carl Icahn is sneaking in to the dinner dressed as a waiter to try and convince Tim Cook to buyback more shares instead of wasting time with this 4th Amendment nonsense.
Thank you Edward Snowden. Obama likes to do all these deals behind closed doors. Why not discuss your agenda with the people first? I'm not American but since Australia is pretty much a state of America, I want to concur with others. What a disappointment and weak leader he's turned out to be...
Good plan, they should have done this a while ago. Collectively, these companies probably account for the majority of the world's website traffic. Google has managed over 1 billion unique hits in a month. Instead, they outsourced it to a Canadian company CGI Federal:
They appear to have about double the number of employees as Google but the project was clearly too much for them. I don't see why it really has to be managed by a single company. They could have contracted separate companies in each state with separate servers. The main site would just act as a site to direct people to their state site and the databases would all be separate. If needs be, they'd sync the databases centrally every so often.
Yeah, let's hear what all these millionaires and billionaires think about income inequality and social mobility.
There aren't easy answers to these issues, especially from people who have been successful because many think that it comes naturally from their hard work. For every success that happens, there are hundreds/thousands of people trying just as hard and don't make it. There was a story about a graffiti artist who painted the walls at Facebook and was paid in stock:
How many artists across the world do the same thing and those companies don't take off? The difference in reward for the same job is based on nothing but chance.
Look at how many Android device manufacturers there are and Samsung takes all the money. I think it's in part because people tend towards simple options. We don't have time for all the in-betweens, we want black/white, good/bad, hero/villain. Look at comic books, you don't get anyone called mediocre-man helping someone who has fallen on hard times by paying their utility bill, it has to be superman saving someone from something life-threatening. We only want as many big names as we can remember for each industry, preferably two per sector maximum:
mobile hardware - Apple/Samsung
mobile software - Apple/Google
desktop software - Apple/Microsoft
desktop hardware - Apple/HP/Dell/Lenovo, a bit too many but we'll see what happens
burgers - McDonalds/Burger King
pizza - Domino's/Pizza Hut
online retail - Amazon/eBay/Etsy
social - Facebook/Twitter
You get the idea, very few brands that people want to succeed. That stunts economic growth because small companies have so much to fight against and have no means to do it. These big companies don't pay the full tax rates. While they pay more money, it's the rates that matter because it's about margins. Small companies paying higher rates can't have competitive margins so that they can invest it in growth, unlike the big companies. The capital to grow small companies has to come from investment from wealthy people who then become even wealthier if the companies take off. Rich becoming richer = income inequality again.
To encourage economic growth and fix income inequality, this needs to be almost flipped upside down. The big companies need to be punished harshly for not paying the full tax rates. Small companies need every incentive and tax break they can get so that they can grow and employ people locally. The problem is that so many companies become successful because they are centralized all-in-one companies and want to manage everything and that ties in with our desire for simplicity.
One of the biggest issues I think there is for individuals concerning social mobility is matching people with fulfilling jobs. Everybody has their own rough idea of what they enjoy and employers know what jobs need to be done but they very rarely match up because a lot of jobs just aren't rewarding (I don't mean financially). This has to tie in with education. So many educational institutions are out of touch with employers that students just don't get the training for real jobs. In part this is due to how quickly industry changes but education still doesn't adapt to it.
Now, let's say that someone gets the training, gets the opportunity to use it, that has to be a recipe for success. But no, if you take the example of the App Store with almost no barriers to entry, this is still a system that's setup to promote the few at the expense of the many:
Social mobility can't happen when this is the setup. So what's the solution then? People will say communism/socialism doesn't work, people have to live and die by their efforts, there needs to be incentive and reward for success and lack of it for failure. That's great when you're one of the few who benefit from it but increasingly, the inequality is growing and larger and larger numbers of people are feeling that work/life is designed to be weighted against them in order to benefit the winners no matter how hard they try.
Financial institutions share a lot of the blame. They have done untold damage to the economy and the media coverage of it has blown over. Everybody is tied into a system of debt-creation that's going to keep growing and when the people in control decide there's not enough profit, just up everyone's interest rates for mortgages, credit cards, loans etc. Debt is a non-issue to wealthy people, it's a device to keep the poor working harder than they should and why they need more healthcare than they should and it's ideal for the wealthy that this happens as it creates a class of desperate workers that do unrewarding jobs for them.
The issues don't fit into bullet-points, people are too complex. The solutions certainly don't. There needs to be a radical overhaul of how business functions, how our monetary system functions and is controlled and the mentality that it's only the right of the few to live a rewarding life.
What a wonderful, thought-provoking post. I'd love to have dinner with you.
Obama gathered the heads of the tech companies before for help on the economic crisis. And, he dismissed every suggestion the heads had because he deemed them to be "too politically risky". Jobs actually became frustrated with Obama because of it. This, like then, will be a show for the press and nothing will really come from it.
I doubt the President or anyone else could have foreseen the rise of the anarchist Tea Party back then. At least the GOP seem to have awakened to the danger within. This isn't meant as political, rather historical observation by a Brit in the USA.
Tea Party (which is not a political party, by the way) full of anarchists? Nope. Those following Tea Party ideals are typically neo-conservatives enraged by multiple Republican losses, failure of the president and Congress to abide by the Constitution and massive bailouts for financial institutions that should've gone bankrupt but were the recipients of money the majority of America screamed they should not receive. They are not anarchists.
I think Marvin has his heart in the right place, but "good feelings" don't make for good government. In fact, the only time we should ever hear about the Federal government is when they are carrying out their constitutionally limited duties. This Congress and president are a disgrace, and the same goes for the last 40 years of government.
I do find Silicon Valley libertarians amusing though, as the delude themselves into believing they bootstrapped their fortunes, when they actually owe their entire careers to work built entirely on that dreaded government investment.
Obama gathered the heads of the tech companies before for help on the economic crisis. And, he dismissed every suggestion the heads had because he deemed them to be "too politically risky". Jobs actually became frustrated with Obama because of it. This, like then, will be a show for the press and nothing will really come from it.
Perhaps he invited them to demand a redoubling of the Obamacare propaganda effort since this misbegotten mess has fallen far short of their advertised goals.
The core problem, in which Obama has been complicit, is that government wishes to have a black box in which they can operate without legal or public scrutiny, and to have unchallengeable power to decide how much of government operates outside the black box and how much will be hidden inside it.
The Bush administration conceived of detention at Guantanamo Bay so it could hold detainees to a Constitution-free zone, until the Supreme Court finally ruled that there is no such thing as a Constitution-free zone that the U.S. controls. The NSA's programs are similarly designed to somehow escape legal reality: just as Guantanamo has a special court, there is a secret, one-sided court that writes permission slips for the NSA. Anyone trying to challenge these programs in regular court faces great difficulty because of the government's circular argument: this stuff is secret, so you can't introduce evidence that proves you've been affected, therefore you have no standing to sue.
What Snowden did was reveal secret documents that finally gave someone standing to sue in court. They could prove they were being targeted for surveillance simply because they were Verizon customers, and a Snowden document showed that all Verizon phone records were going to the NSA. Similarly, Apple customers potentially gain standing to sue about any unconstitutional activities that Apple was involved in, willingly or not, if Apple is named in more Snowden documents.
Obama has little credibility to advocate for the premise that government must not operate in a world of secret law, where the executive branch can secretly "interpret" the Constitution any way they want, because he didn't do the right thing while these things were secret and he knew about them.
Obama gathered the heads of the tech companies before for help on the economic crisis. And, he dismissed every suggestion the heads had because he deemed them to be "too politically risky". Jobs actually became frustrated with Obama because of it. This, like then, will be a show for the press and nothing will really come from it.
Absolutely for show. Why else are executives from Zynga and Etsy on the list? Seriously. Why not meet with top business leaders in other American industries?
Comments
Originally Posted by Ireland
Remember when the media were branding him the next kennedy? Lol.
Remember when the Nobel Committee gave the Peace Prize to Obama? :facepalm:
GQB... Are you a friggin Commie??
Pressure Apple with the iBooks thing and use it to try & force them to help out with obama care website.
"C'mon Tim. I think I think I can get justice to ease up a bit on the iBooks thing.
Look at it this way. It' s a win-win"
"Sorry B.O. Nothing but a big Bag-O-Hurt™ there.
Can't do it. No way, no how."
Probably not, but President John Adams might have been when he set up the first American Public Health Service built and maintained by mandatory fees paid by citizens, in 1798.....
Oh my a "Founder" was a commie!
Or.
Not.
Zuckerberg already in the administrations pocket, they don't need him. Hopefully those that have been summoned for an audience with The One will have bit more sense.
http://pleasecutthecrap.com/obama-accomplishments/
I heard Carl Icahn is sneaking in to the dinner dressed as a waiter to try and convince Tim Cook to buyback more shares instead of wasting time with this 4th Amendment nonsense.
Obama likes to do all these deals behind closed doors. Why not discuss your agenda with the people first?
I'm not American but since Australia is pretty much a state of America, I want to concur with others. What a disappointment and weak leader he's turned out to be...
This man is a traitor to the constitution.
No better than Bush and Cheney.
Um. Hello - it wasn't the disclosures that was the problem, was it? It was the illegal act, not the reporting of it. Blame the messenger as usual.
What a wonderful, thought-provoking post. I'd love to have dinner with you.
Obama gathered the heads of the tech companies before for help on the economic crisis. And, he dismissed every suggestion the heads had because he deemed them to be "too politically risky". Jobs actually became frustrated with Obama because of it. This, like then, will be a show for the press and nothing will really come from it.
Tea Party (which is not a political party, by the way) full of anarchists? Nope. Those following Tea Party ideals are typically neo-conservatives enraged by multiple Republican losses, failure of the president and Congress to abide by the Constitution and massive bailouts for financial institutions that should've gone bankrupt but were the recipients of money the majority of America screamed they should not receive. They are not anarchists.
No, sorry, they built that. You didn’t.
Perhaps he invited them to demand a redoubling of the Obamacare propaganda effort since this misbegotten mess has fallen far short of their advertised goals.
The core problem, in which Obama has been complicit, is that government wishes to have a black box in which they can operate without legal or public scrutiny, and to have unchallengeable power to decide how much of government operates outside the black box and how much will be hidden inside it.
The Bush administration conceived of detention at Guantanamo Bay so it could hold detainees to a Constitution-free zone, until the Supreme Court finally ruled that there is no such thing as a Constitution-free zone that the U.S. controls. The NSA's programs are similarly designed to somehow escape legal reality: just as Guantanamo has a special court, there is a secret, one-sided court that writes permission slips for the NSA. Anyone trying to challenge these programs in regular court faces great difficulty because of the government's circular argument: this stuff is secret, so you can't introduce evidence that proves you've been affected, therefore you have no standing to sue.
What Snowden did was reveal secret documents that finally gave someone standing to sue in court. They could prove they were being targeted for surveillance simply because they were Verizon customers, and a Snowden document showed that all Verizon phone records were going to the NSA. Similarly, Apple customers potentially gain standing to sue about any unconstitutional activities that Apple was involved in, willingly or not, if Apple is named in more Snowden documents.
Obama has little credibility to advocate for the premise that government must not operate in a world of secret law, where the executive branch can secretly "interpret" the Constitution any way they want, because he didn't do the right thing while these things were secret and he knew about them.
Absolutely for show. Why else are executives from Zynga and Etsy on the list? Seriously. Why not meet with top business leaders in other American industries?