Comment Re:free electricity! (Score 1) 201
And your nuclear reactor is also turning mass into energy to drive it. Both the mass of the exhaust and it's velocity must take away mass from your craft.
Writing code is nothing like working in a factory producing identical components. It's more like designing a house, followed by an office building, a bridge, a power drill, a pacemaker, a roller coaster, a lunar lander,
If every developer is doing their job perfectly, they will literally *never* write the same code twice. Every single task they do will be different from all of their previous tasks. So how do you measure their output?
This government does not need to reduce spending. A blind goal of imposing austerity will cripple us. While the economy is currently recovering, this will be short lived. When the next crisis hits, we need a government willing to spend.
The government is not like a company or a household. When governments run a deficit, or banks lend money, they add to the money supply the rest of us use. I would much prefer the government to give us money instead of relying on greedy banks for it. But during a crisis, the banking sector will reduce the flow of new money. If the government attempts to do the same, we'll end up like Greece.
The wealthy have captured the government legislation process. If you try to raise the tax rate they will just lobby the government, or buy media time to convince the population that this new tax will effect them too.
Eventually we will revolt in some form, if the economy continues to favour the rich the outcome is inevitable. I only suggested the guillotine to emphasise the problems that France had after its introduction. After replacing their rulers, the new ones turned out to be as bad or worse than the old ones. We may face similar turmoil after we attempt to fix the problem, as often the cure can be worse than the plague. History has repeated this pattern many times.
Consider the 1920's, everything was booming. The rich were getting richer off everyone else, but the imbalance was smaller than today. Then the market crashed, leading to the Depression as governments failed to react in the right way to cushion the economy. In Germany and other places, the downtrodden rose up against the old rulers and replaced them. Eventually leading to WWII.
I hope we are not going to repeat these mistakes again. But the warning signs are there that we may be heading down the same well trodden path.
Orders for production of documents are among the most significant procedures available to the Senate to deal with matters of public interest giving rise to questions of ministerial accountability. It is open to the Senate to treat a refusal to table documents as a contempt of the Senate. In cases of government refusal without due cause, however, the Senate has preferred political remedies. In extreme cases the Senate, to punish the government for not producing a document, could resort to more drastic measures than censure of the government, such as refusing to consider government legislation. (See also Chapter 19, Relations with the Executive Government, under Remedies against executive refusal of information.)
Lets hope that they continue to pressure the government for this information. The rest of the voting process is open, why not the counting software? Or at least easy access to the raw data, so members of the public can analyse it themselves.
An authority is a person who can tell you more about something than you really care to know.
