Prosecutors claim Qwest CEO Joseph Nacchio was guilty of insider trading, and that his prosecution had nothing to do with his refusal to allow spying on his customers without the permission of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court. But to this day, Nacchio insists that his prosecution was retaliation for refusing to break the law on the NSA's behalf.
Oh no, if we just spend enough money on schools, and feed little Johnny a federal breakfast, we'll find that everyone is smart enough to be an electrical engineer. Even all the little minority kids are geniuses but we lie and say they're not because racism. Bullshit, bullshit, bullshit. I'm sick of it.
Assuming that you're not just a racist troll (it's not clear from the posting) I think you're missing the point.
While I agree that there is an innateness to intelligence, failing to educate capable kids is bad for society. The geniuses (Einstein, Turing, etc.) may make it, but a potentially great brain surgeon may be working as a middle-manager at a department store because there was no path to medical school.
You're local EPA can measure it's success in PPM of various pollutants. But we sorta forget that (which is odd, what with all the news of China's cities, or with the "Smog Days" in major American Cities).
The USFDA is pushing for companies to perform their own food inspection. I'm sure that there are some very dedicated and hardworking people at the USFDA. I'm equally sure that there's excess headcount. I don't think that the change in food inspection policy include actually decreasing headcount at the USFDA (might be wrong on that).
Police measure crime rates.
Despite filling the prisons and militarization of the police forces along with more money spent on police and quasi-police organizations (eg TSA) there has been no significant change in crime and people don't feel safer. They quote decreases like lower homicide rates, but much of that can be attributed to improved medical care. Billions have been dropped in the "War on Drugs" with no measurable effect. You can't cut that simply because billions have already been spent - it's a success.
The Fed Reserve can measure economic growth. And the SEC can measure how much money was lost by investors on shoddy investments.
Yes, yes, a huge and successful bureaucracy, the SEC. It's good to see the government protect investors from bad investments while promoting lottery sales purchases. There's a balance to be struck there, and the size of the SEC is unrelated to that.
A bit more regulation before the housing bust woulda been nice. Anyone remember Glass-Seagal? As Liz Warren pointed out we had 50 years w/o a major bust until we repealed that...
OK, you're right, in this case we have a clear measure of the success of this department - they failed miserably. Did we defund them? Change anything? I agree that it's a legislative problem, but why do we fund a department that is unsuccessful in it's effort? Thinking about it, we have a clear indication that some departments are successful. For example, NLRB. The GOP have been trying to defund that for a while. Given that we have a clear metric that useless organziation are fully funded, presumably the ones that are being defuned must be doing something.
For a contest involving writing source code, it's astounding and infuriating that the judges did not link to the source code in the results.
What did you expect? It's a contest for writing obfuscated code and you expect a webpage that has clear, concise information?
If you drive to work in LA where it takes more than an hour to get to or from work, you'd want to plug in.
Why would you need to charge if after driving 2 miles?
Runs perfectly on a Mac. (10.8)
Interesting. From above the black box on Chromium 30.0.1599.114 (Chromium probably explains the lack of support on my system):
This page uses Portable Native Client, a technology currently only supported in Google Chrome (version 31 or higher; Android and iOS not yet supported).
If you want luxuries like reliable electricity
It's better than many third world countries but "reliable" is not the word I would apply to the US power grid
no hostage taking
Unless someone, somewhere declares you a terrorist, then they have a spot for you: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guantanamo_Bay_detention_camp
no need to bribe the local politician
In the US they are called "Campaign Contributions" - functionally identical
and no government shakedowns
Unless you don't cooperate with the NSA - http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-switch/wp/2013/09/30/a-ceo-who-resisted-nsa-spying-is-out-of-prison-and-he-feels-vindicated-by-snowden-leaks/
well, sometimes you have to pay your workers a bit more to go along with that...
Not really, the tax payers will pick up the slack - http://money.cnn.com/2013/06/04/news/companies/walmart-medicaid/
Anyone can make an omelet with eggs. The trick is to make one with none.
