Well, politics has gotten complicated over the past 100 years or so. Most people have 1 thing they are good at... maybe 2. In order to fully comprehend what's going on in politics you need to commit a significant portion of your day to reading, weighing and digesting information on the subject because it's literally changing by the second. At least a programming language stays relatively the same over longer time periods. Lucky for us, computer geeks usually have jobs that allow them to surf the internet for large parts of the day and stay on top of things.

It used to be that news papers and TV would figure out what information was relevent, set it up in such a way that readers could come to a few rather clear conclusions and then decided for themselves. Abortion is either about the Rights of the mother, or murdering babies... you pick. Well, the media in mid century suddenly became a lot more biased. The activism of the 50s and 60s lead a lot of kids into the field with the single minded goal of shifting public opinion. They did well, you can find dozens of studies that show most media, in most countries around the world are left leaning. In the past decade however we've seen the Right catch up, and we have Fox, al jazeera. etc... and while the majority of leftist reporters were "left leaning" in their work, these new entities are outright blaintent about their goals? The result? We now have very left wing reporting as well. I don't watch either, I think it's shameful what's going on in the news media today.

So what's your average person supposed to do? They're caught up in black and white issues, which likely aren't black and white at all if you study them. And often they aren't even the issues those people would be most interested in. I can't say a lot about the Canadian financial problems, I live in the USA... but if they are similar to ours then:
1. We need a simplified tax code. There should be 3 lines on your tax forms, how much you make, the percentage of that you have to pay in taxes, and your signature. No more subsidies, loopholes, nothing. The government should not be attempting to manipulate private citizens into spending a certain way. Every such program in history has ended in disaster. (The dust-bowl is a good example)
2. We need to FEWER taxes. I don't mean less, I mean fewer. The current system of "Tax everything" is directly and intentionally designed to obfuscate how much you are actually paying in. You pay taxes on what you earn, when you spend, on the roads you drive, the gas you buy, to register your car... that all needs to die. There should be a national sales tax. That's it, nothing else. You should not be charged for earning, saving or investing money.
3. We need to drastically cut spending. The vast majority of what the government spends money on its out right insane. Specifically in the US, our military spending borders on full retard levels. I know in Canada you have a large subsidie to the logging industry you'll likely regret later. We can all identify silly crap the government should not be involved in.
4. We need temporary tax increases until we get out of debt. Then we need to make it illegal for our governments to borrow money except in times of war.
5. The government needs to get out of and stay out of the economy. It would be one thing if there were financial wizards trying to manipulate the economy, but it's not, it's politicians.

Dude, they have submarines. There's no doubt they have UAVs.

Since most of my texts are intended for criminals anyway, this doesn't seem to be that big of a deal to me.

For some reason, every time they want to put up a new store, they build new. Meanwhile, when the old stores get closed they just sit and the building never gets used. It's almost like ringworm, you get this ever expanding ring of dead stores that expands out for the city center. Every day I drive by 3 abandon grocery stores and even worse, new construction for 2 new stores of about the same size!

Its good to hear they are doing something with at least some of them.

Is that what you really think it's about? Let me tell you about a project I was involved in a while back...

There's a website where a customer could go to, to look up information about products. These products are basically services, so you need a contract and such to get them, so after you've perused the website you're going to either need to call, or a salesman is going to have to find out who you are and call you.

There's a vendor out there (Actually many of them) that sells a service where you install some of their software and give them various API access to your site. When someone visits the site, this software logs the session, logs EVERY bit of information about your visit and stores it. Now, keep in mind, they do not know who you are likely. You can create an account on the site and if you do they have your info, but likely they don't. There's a lot of psychological manipulation involved in getting you to log in and reveal who you are, but if you don't, that's ok to. They track your IP, your web browser, where your IP originates from, your OS, the time you spent on the site, everything you looked at, etc... from all of this they give you an ID. When you visit the next time, they know who you are... it's very accurate. I was so amazed by the process I tested it and tried to trick it. Even Tor didn't matter. It used that as a data point to identify me the next time I logged in.

So now you're visitor 12548... but they still don't know who you are. This is where the outside vendor or "partner" comes in. They have thousands of customers. All of which have thousands or tens of thousands of hits per day. So now you go to a different site, fall for their psychological manipulation to create an account... Boom, they have your email address, possibly more if you provided your name and number. But the fact of the matter is, if they have your email address they almost assuredly have the rest of your personal info with just a few simple queries. This is all automatic, it happens very fast, all of that companies customers get relayed the data. Then this data comes in as a "Sales lead" creates a ticket and gets shipped to a salesman who calls you. Not only does the salesman have your name, number and where you work, he knows just about every site you've visited in the past 30 days that's affiliated with the company that does the data mining, and the salesman knows everything about what you've been doing on his website.

Now he's ready to make a sales pitch and probably knows more about your habits that your wife does. Is that ok with you? Think of a financial institution that knows you've been looking for a loan to consolidate your debt... and they know all about your plans to go to Hawaii next month... or prediliction for furry porn? or anything else?

This isn't about serving up targeted adds. If it were, it wouldn't be a problem.

Because the project managers were given criteria. 1. it had to last for X months... 2. it had to be under X kilos. Which do you think was a harder goal? I think it's pretty obvious. Making things that last forever is easy. Making things that are light is easy. Making things that are both? Little bit more difficult.

Yes, all government is evil. A necessary evil. If our only protection from wolves at night were a vicious wild dog, would we keep it? Yes... but we'd keep it tied up good and tight (the constitution) and we certainly wouldn't let it roam the countryside marauding every other village whenever it liked. Best thing for it is to deprive it of its food (taxes) to keep it good and weak.

I don't like Apple, and Steve Jobs was a dick. But... I applaud Apple for not paying into our tax system. What our government does with the money it collects is immoral and often unconstitutional. If Apple had paid their taxes the feds would have likely just used the money to build another domestic spy agency. Fuck the IRS, fuck the government, thank you Apple, even though I'm sure your primary goal was greed, at least your money will get re-invested in some new apple toy and not used to send hellfire missiles into funerals around the world.

As many others have replied, I object to both your propositions. People can and do change. Even a murderer that gets back out should be given their constitutional rights back again. After all, do you really think any law is going to even slightly hinder their ability to get a gun if they want to use it to commit a crime? I'd argue that the law actually creates an black-market that wouldn't otherwise exist and likely aids someone with ill intent.

No, the only advantage of Google+ is: It's not facebook.

People are dicks. Get over it. I've been called a thousand different offensive names in my life. We're all different and it's in our evolutionary behavior to exclude those that seem "Different" in any way we can to keep dominance over the group/tribe whatever... They key is realizing this, and letting the dumb be dumb. Words really can't hurt you, only your own insecurities can.

What's hilarious and ironic is that you here are doing the Exact Same Thing. You've chosen to single out those you feel are insensitive, you've categorized them and you're trying to exclude them. I'm willing to bet that you even have your own pet names for them as well... redneck, teabagger, white trash, bigot. You are as they are, human. If you've found a better way to live your life, then do so. Ridiculing those that don't follow your lead is... well... just as bad as calling them fags. It's just a different made up word meant to make them feel bad and not mate with your wife.

It's a sad that I know for a fact there are people in that facility watching this very thread right now and I can't say what I really think about it. That's where we are today. It's not going to get better, it's going to get worse. We can't even appeal to those that are watching us to do what is right and moral, because they were chosen specifically for their psychological predilection to do what they're told. The government of this country is doomed not just because of it's direction but also because the one thing it's excelled at over the years is squashing dissent without appearing to do so. Governments in the rest of the world have to deal with revolutions every so often, but like the forest that's long overdue for a wildfire, this countries going to go up like a torch when it finally does happen.

If it's such a great idea and no-ones making them, then do it yourself and get rich. I do think, however, that you'll soon realize that most couches are purchased by wives for reasons very different than utility... and the draping of the extension cords is done later by husbands thinking only of utility.

Thanks for that. It's an engineering work of art. Very impressive.

* 10 million violations is 250 billion dollars? Holy fuck.

The only company that I can think of that has that large of a database of health records would be either one of the government agencies... or Epic. Time to buy some stock.