The American middle class prospered from the end of WWII up to the time of the Reagan presidency. In the post-Reagan era an increasingly unequal distribution of wealth is the new normal. We have an economical/political system that redistributes wealth upwards. There is no other rational explanation for the current statistics. This is the legacy of Reaganomics: the end of the American Dream.

The US, post-Soviet Russia and post-Communist China are all following the same path to rule by oligarchy. The differences in how control is concentrated are not important to the continuing concentration of power in each system. In Russia, the economic oligarchs are only allowed to slavishly support Putan, or they are jailed or exiled and their wealth stripped. In China the oligarchs are either Party members themselves or the families of Party members. The rest of the rich know that they must participate in the endemic corruption. They were only allowed to succeed because they embraced corruption from the beginning.

In the US the oligarchs have, for the most part, taken over the government and the country is run for their benefit. Examples are too numerous to mention, but I'll highlight a few.

The 2008 market crash. The reason it was so horrific in the first place was that the Bush administration effectively suspended all regulation of Wall Street and Alan Greenspan got to fulfill his Libertarian fantasy. The result, unsurprisingly, was an epic failure. Lack of effective oversight is the wet dream of every oligarch. That's why they love secret unlimited secret campaign contributions, another gift to oligarchs the from the politicians and judges they own.

The bailout from the crash was another astonishing transfer of wealth to the ultra rich. Instead of calling Wall Street to task and making those responsible pay up, the oligarchs were rewarded instead. Many of them are have far more now then they did before 2008, and everyone else is worse off. The new stock market highs are the proof of that. Meanwhile, the job recovery is still lagging, and the jobs that are being generated pay significantly lower then before the crash. This is a mass transfer of assets from the general population to the rich. Again there is no other rational explanation.

An earlier example is Medicare Part D, brought to your pocketbook by Big Pharma and Billy Tauzin,

Two months before resigning as chair of the committee which oversees the drug industry, Tauzin had played a key role in shepherding through Congress the Medicare Prescription Drug Bill. Democrats said that the bill was "a give-away to the drugmakers" because it prohibited the government from negotiating lower drug prices and bans the importation of identical, cheaper, drugs from Canada and elsewhere. The Veterans Affairs agency, which can negotiate drug prices, pays much less than Medicare. Public Citizen called Tauzin's hiring "yet another example of how public service is leading to private riches." Public Citizen President Joan Claybrook said, "a member of Congress who pushed through a major piece of legislation benefiting the drug industry gets the job leading that industry."

The bill was passed in an unusual congressional session at 3 a.m. under heavy pressure from the drug companies. Walter B. Jones (R-NC) said, "The pharmaceutical lobbyists wrote the bill." The drug lobby invested more than $10 million in campaign contributions during the last election and has been a source of lucrative employment opportunities for congressmen when they leave office, said Jones.

Tauzin received $11.6 million from PhRMA in 2010, making him the highest-paid health-law lobbyist.

I'll even make a prediction: when the FCC announces what they will call "Net Neutrality" rules, it will be the end of the internet as an open platform. It will become just as closed, structured and overpriced as the current cable industry. Just like Wall Street and Big Pharma, the cable/telco oligarchs want their non-competitive guaranteed profit margins. And since they have paid for the privilege they'll get it. You have no say in the matter.

So remember, if you like loosing your economic well being and personal liberty in a corrupt surveillance state, it all started with your hero, Ronald Reagan.

Remember, the real name of DHS is DHP: Department of Homland Pork.

Yes, fitting a random person into a full body rig will have zero impact on the false positive/false negative rates. No problem.

They tested this on 75 volunteers. This is an example of the kind of bogus "proof" that is used to justify the utility of polygraphs in the first place.

It's in the same territory as drug companies excluding tests that show problems with their drugs. I'm sure if they ran enough small groups that they could find one with better then 90% and report only that.

Why do polygraph advocates lie so much?

Binary or Hex. But not Octal.

They clearly are more concerned about the publicity aspects of the hack then anything else. Any other issues, like exposure of employee data, don't mean a damn to them.

That's why there are the DCMA takedown notices and the threats to sue. They figure that if they can keep it out of the press then it will soon be forgotten and they won't have much to worry about.

This might work for the general public, but in Hollywood it's not going to be that easy. Besides the powerful individuals that they trashed, it's now obvious that that they also engage in routine conspiracies to get what they want. That's what the Google maneuver was about. A lot of players are going to realize that Sony had done a lot of dirty deeds already, and some will see that previous problems may be the result of underhanded tactics. Not that anyone else is better, but having confirmation effectively raises the stakes.

Personally, I enjoy looking forward to some real pain in Sony land. They have a bad reputation among the Hollywood rank and file, so there will be a lot of schadenfreude in the new year. It's long overdue.

What are the alternatives? Who will fund things like deep sea diving or space launch systems? (Big game hunting is just a stupid troll.)

There are only two groups outside of individual rich people who can fund these endeavors: governments and normal investment. Governments are already in the game. India just launched their first heavy lift vehicle, for example.

Regular investment will never take that kind of risk. Perhaps in the past you could have raised money on Wall Street or the equivalent, but these days big financial institutions expect government subsidized guaranteed profit. It's so much easier to buy legislation, manipulate the system and control regulators then invest in long term innovation. Acquisitions and mergers along with zero interest prime rate funding lines their pockets without any bothersome "investing". Why bother with risky space investment, for example?

So it's fine if big egos go after these kinds of things. There are a lot worse ways that the ultra rich spend their wealth. Would you rather see Musk with Tesla and SpaceX, or Ellison with his billion dollar yacht?

By the way, you are subsidizing Ellison's yacht and purchase of the island of Lanai in Hawaii. He took out a loan against his stock in Oracle, so the interest he pays defers his income taxes. To quote another rich asshat, "taxes are for little people."

Given how abysmal PHP is as a language, it seems completely consistent that an overwhelming percentage of the deployed systems are security failures. PHP seems to breed incompetence.

RTFA

Additionally, there are no radioactive mind control CIA spiders in your basement. Seek professional help.

Apple is part of the US oligarchy. Just like European royalty in the 18th and 19th century, today's oligarchs often have more in common with each other then they do with the people of their own country. That's why nothing is likely to happen with Apple in China.

If you're going to play the oligarch card, trying to cast primary blame on the peasants/consumers avoids the real issue. There is class warfare going on, but only one side knows it's a war. Right now the peasants are clueless, so they always loose.

In the US the KKK is really close to the government. They, and other right wing advocates of violence, get away with a lot of stuff that would end up in big trouble for non-right wingers.

For example, the incoming House Whip, Steve Scalise, gave a well received speech to a white nationalist group in 2002

(Reuters) - U.S. House Majority Whip Steve Scalise, a Louisiana Republican, gave a speech at a conference of white nationalists when he was a state lawmaker in 2002, the Washington Post reported on Monday, citing his spokeswoman.

Spokeswoman Moira Bagley said Scalise, the No. 3 Republican in the House of Representatives, was not familiar with the ideology of the European-American Unity and Rights Organization, or EURO, when he attended the event in the New Orleans suburb of Metairie, the Washington Post reported.

EURO was founded in 2000 by David Duke, a former leader of the Ku Klux Klan who served in the Louisiana House of Representatives and ran a high-profile race for governor of the state in 1991.

Given the name of the group, and the participation of David Duke, his claim he was unaware of the white racist nature of the gathering are not credible.

As for toleration of right wing threats of violence, there's an ongoing problem in Utah with people with guns threatening Bureau of Land Management employees

(Reuters) - A pair of motorists in a pick-up truck brandished a firearm and flashed a threatening sign at a federal land management agent in Utah, officials said on Thursday, about a month after a widely-publicized armed standoff with a rancher.

...

Crandall said a BLM employee was driving an agency vehicle on Interstate 15 near Nephi, about 90 miles south of Salt Lake City when two motorists whose faces were covered pulled alongside him and made an obscene gesture.

The suspects pulled away but returned minutes later, flashing a gun and a hand-scrawled sign that read: "You need to die," Crandall said.

She said the incident was reported to the Utah Highway Patrol but the BLM agent could not provide investigators with a license plate number because it appeared to be covered with duct tape.

So imagine if some non-honkies in masks threatened a federal employee with guns. There would be a 100 person team from the FBI on the case immediately, and someone would be arrested shortly whether they were involved or not. Not many resources were spent trying to find the perps in this case. Since it's Utah, all that happened is the the BLM has removed insignia from their vehicles.

So not all terrorists are created equal. It counts less if you are white and Christian.

You realize this has nothing to do with capitalism, at least of the free market variety. They conflict is over who is going to get the money when they raise the rates. It's essentially which group of crooks is going to get to gouge customers.

The primary beneficiaries are the upper management. No big corporation is run for the clients, stockholders, or employes who do the real work. It's all intended to enrich the people at the top.

It's how things are right now: no democracy, no capitalism, no freedom. Nothing to see here, move along.

He's doomed as a Republican because he supports that science stuff. If you support science, then you are obviously in cahoots with them liburuls, so you are on the side of evil with evolution, anthropogenic climate change, and the earth not being flat.

His only hope is to turn NASA and space into a faith based program, at least as far as the Republican base is concerned. Some possibilities are going to outer space to find Jesus in heaven, replacing rockets with prayer, proclaiming that God wears a space suit and teaching in school that a flat earth is a reasonable alternative the round earth theory.

There's a restaurant/coffee shop and hotel. They have their own brand of beef, and a beef feed lot just up the road. You can buy steaks at a butcher shop to take with you.

This makes a lot of sense as a pilot project location for Tesla. A lot of people already make it a stop going between Southern and Northern California and there are a lot of Tesla owners in the state. I think that many Tesla drivers will just stop to take a break anyway and that would give the swap facility more flexibility to schedule their stations. It's a smart move.

T-Mobile's market capitalization is $21.35 Billion. A $90 million fine is a joke.They spend more then this for office supplies. And they won't have to pay nearly $90 million, because they will game the system so that very few people get the refund. The corrupt asshats who are responsible went home this weekend, had a drink and laughed the heads off over how useless the FCC is. It is a near certainty that they still came out ahead on the deal.

You want a fine that will make them take notice? Fines for companies that do large scale interstate commerce should be scaled to the worth of the company. The pretend $90 million figure is 0.4% of their market capitalization. Make the fine 1% or more of their market capitalization and I guarantee they will pay attention. Make it 2% or more and there might even be a turnover of the CEO and board of directors, which is what should really happen. Remember that they willingly participated in fraud to the tune of $67 million. The fact that no one is exposed to any jail time for this is a measure of how corrupt our pretend capitalistic system has become.

Given their track record, it will probably work. They did the Big Dog and Cheetah quadrupeds and the PETMAN and Atlas humanoid robots.

Boston Dynamics is now owned by Google, so Google is now a direct provider of equipment to the US military. Maybe this means their motto has been modified from "Don't do evil" to "Don't avoid evil."