Contracting it isn't the biggest problem. Paying bottom dollar is. That means that you don't get the best people. Paying people more means they're less motivated to engage in profitable hijinks when someone asks them to plug something into your network, or photograph your documents. That's because happiness stops increasing dramatically with money after you reach middle class. Once your needs are met, bribery is less effective. Obviously not ineffective, of course. That's where loyalty used to come in. Problem is, corporations don't treat you with any, but they still need it from you. Solution? Treat employees like humans and pay them enough to live on.

To be fair, the system's primary role is arguably figuring out where you are without a sextant. They'd have done it even if they couldn't have used it for bombs and cruise missiles because it didn't work at higher speeds or something.

Find ways to avoid taxes (as opposed to evading them) like incorporating and writing everything off. Wars run on taxes.

Also, sneaking in and smashing something that's insured will just delay the inevitable. If you must take direct action, make it meaningful, and not just a fuckoff waste of time.

Everybody run out and incorporate right now. Apparently it's cheap in Oregon. Then you can write everything off, declare losses, and pay no taxes just like the rich. They're apparently terrified that you're going to do this, why else double-downmod this innocuous comment?

Incorporate now if you want the same rights as your corporate masters, or at least a subset of them.

The US is a great country if you're making $200,000 a year.

If you're making $60,000 a year, which is about the median family income, it's not so great. You have to come up with college education for your children, health care, housing, and transportation. A lot of that would be taken care of by your taxes in a northern European social democratic country.

Yeah, it has 9 of the world's 10 best universities (maybe), but how much do you have to pay to go to one of those universities? When I meet kids from a top school, they seem to have one thing in common -- rich parents. And the kids who don't have rich parents and are waiting on tables to get through school don't usually make it, according to the statistics.

The Asian immigrants that I've met who are killing themselves to get their kids into the US are also pretty wealthy in their native countries. There was a story in the New York Times about how Asians were buying $200 million condos in Time Warner Center and, in one case, sending their kids to Columbia University, where you'd wind up spending $100,000 to for an undergraduate degree. Even on a "lower" income level, of a few million a year, if you own an Asian car dealership, for example, your kids can make more money with an MBA in the US than running the family business back home.

But if you're a middle-class person today, and your parents are making under $100,000, you'd be a lot better off in Europe than the US. College education is free in Europe outside the UK. In the US, even a good state university can cost $100,000 to graduate. Which means you'll have an undischargeable debt for the rest of your life. Europe also has a lot of pro-worker policies, like unions and high minimum wages.

That is awfully naive. A presidential election costs each candidate $1 billion, and they raise the money mostly from billionaire contributors and corporate interests. Politicians don't listen to grassroots activists, they listen to $100,000 contributors.

A lot of people did just what you described to try to stop the Iraq war. It didn't work. So we killed 650,000 innocent people and handed over Iraq to ISIS. Good work, Bushie! (BTW, there were no WMDs.)

A lot of people did just what you described, after Obama was elected, to push for a single payer health care system, and when that didn't work, for a public option, but they couldn't match the big lobbying groups, like the drug industry, the hospitals, and the insurance companies. So now you have to pay $8,500 a year for health care.

Even Martin Luther King couldn't get anywhere without some pretty powerful supporters who could raise a lot of money and pull some political strings. (And the FBI was tapping his phones.) I'm not sure MLK could have done it today. He might have wound up with a 20-year sentence for terrorism.

The U.S. is getting economically more unequal, the plutocrats are running the country, the Republicans have figured out a way to fool most of the people most of the time (TV), and I don't see a way out. If some radical wants to take direct action, doing something crazy that seems pointless to me, I can't tell him that I have a better way. If we're going to talk about futile destruction, destroying a $50 million satellite makes a lot more sense than signing up to fight in Iraq.

http://www.buzzfeed.com/kateno...
Bernie’s Reasons Why Not
The progressive champion weighs running for president. “The situation is fairly dismal.”
Kate Nocera and Ben Smith
BuzzFeed
March 4, 2015
(Bernie Sanders may not run against Hillary Clinton for 2 reasons: (1) It has to be done well, or people will say that the ideas themselves don't have support. (2) It may be impossible to raise enough money to compete with Hillary Clinton, whose network plans to raise $500 million.)
“The depressing part about that is that even if you did something phenomenally well — say you have 3 million people giving a $100 contribution each, which would be an enormous achievement — you’d be raising one-third of what the Koch brothers say they are spending.”
“The question then occurs whether or not at this point in history you can beat the money folks,” he muses. “It may be that they have too much power and too much money and a real progressive may not be able to take them on.”

They've identified a legitimate problem, although they don't have a solution.

As it turned out, technology has wound up monitoring our daily lives. We have what amounts to a Telescreen https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... monitoring everything we read and write.

Except for cash, federal agencies monitor every bank deposit and withdrawal, and every financial transaction.

(That's how Elliot Spitzer got caught hiring an escort -- and he was a multimillionaire governor of New York State.)

And they can seize cash.

If you're ever arrested, you have a police record that you can never escape.

We have license plate scanners and facial identification in the works that will be able to follow every car and every face.

The government is owned by campaign contributors. We spend $1 billion on every presidential candidate, and if you can't pay you don't play.

Maybe when there's a threat to the public welfare that everybody is ignoring, smashing a $50 million satellite will raise the alarm and get some people interested. Sometimes it works. Unfortunately it didn't work this time.

He's lucky he only got 18 months. Today he might have been convicted on a terrorist offense, and gotten 20 years, longer than a lot of murder sentences.

I wish he had touched off a movement to protect our privacy, but it didn't work. Good try, though.

Only corporations have rights. This seems like the best deal no matter where you live anyway.

I'm using WebVirtMgr for KVMs (libvirt) but it doesn't do LXCs, though libvirt does. Proxmox does both, but I don't want to pay for it (at my scale, it doesn't make sense) ... what else is out there, something which can handle both KVMs and LXCs and hopefully LXDs even, although if I want that I'll probably just use a KVM

You can also pay for the privilege of not being harassed. You can block ten numbers, you can block numbers without caller ID, and you can get caller ID. And you can pay for each of these features.

He's rocking them like rocks all day, in his cradle of love, which also rocks.

Right, and when it comes to power generation deaths are the only metric that matters.

Well, don't keep us in suspense: what are these important metrics we should sacrifice human lives to improve?

Uhhhh, setting the coal on fire doesn't exactly render the region uninhabitable for generations to come. When the fire goes out, it's habitable again.

In 250 years, possibly more. After which you get to wait for the ground to return to normal again.

The engineers should have put the brakes to any construction efforts taking place in those locations, based on that fact alone.

They can't. The spirit of the organization employing them does not let them. Their role is to implement the decisions of the leadership and rationalize them. Conforming to their role earns them social capital, and going against costs it. And they can't possibly earn that capital fast enough to pay for keeping a plant blocked for long.

Coal with CCS is about the same price.

CCS - Carbon Capture and Sequestration? I wonder if you could drive the price down by keeping the carbon dioxide gaseous and feeding it to nearby greenhouses - possibly through a simple pipe. Heck, if you used the greenhouse products as biofuel in the plant you could create a completely closed loop :).