Well, you're missing an important dynamic here, which is groupthink.

When people decide whether something is true or false, right or wrong, the first thing they do is look around to see what other people think. And this is actually not a bad heuristic. Sometimes when you're in jail for civil disobedience it's because you are, in Thoreau's words, "a man more right than his neighbnors". But most of the time it's because you're a mule-headed crackpot. You should at least consider the possibility that if everyone else disagrees with you, it may be because you're wrong. But most people go further. They play it safe by only having opinions they see lots of other people having.

So shills actually do something far more significant than trick politicians and civil servants into believing there are armies of just plain folks out there who care so much about the natural rights of cable companies that they'll donate impressive amounts of time and money out sheer public spiritedness. Shills alter the public perception of what a normal opinion sounds like.

This isn't Civics 101. This is how politics works in the real world. It's a little bit like stage hypnosis. When diplomats are surprised or outraged in that particularly insincere way they have, everybody knows it's phony. But somehow they go along with it because -- well nobody seems to know why. Same when a politician cites the support of some group that everyone knows is paid to express support. People know it's fake, but they react as if it were real

I think this gets to yet another function of shills. I think they function as a signaler of fitness in the Social Darwinism game. It's a bit like buying an ad during the Superbowl; it doesn't really say anything about how your beer tastes. It signals that you're a successful, Serious Player in the beer game. Having flocks of flying PR monkeys at your beck and call doesn't mean that those monkeys spout anything but gibberish. It means you've got the resources to be a Serious Player; a kingmaker perhaps, and you've put skin in the game. And so we go along with the gibberish, because it's more important to be on the winning side than the right one.

^^^^ Now they have. Every level meta you go pushes the rock bottom that much lower...

In 4.6 billion years the sun makes 17 orbits of the Milky Way. We get around.

If it was just the greater Ephrata metroplex (heh) you might have a point. But they fibered up the whole of Grant county. Almost as big as LA county, but only 28 people per square mile. Gray's harbor county fibered up at the same time and is much the same. Now what?

They do, in some states. I believe Ohio has a Libertarian party ballot at the primaries; there may be others.

The Tea Party isn't registered as a political party; they are a movement within the Republican party. They may well be able to gain separate primaries if they wanted them, but as far as I can tell their goal is explicitly NOT to do that. They don't want to run against Republicans in a general election; they want to replace Republican candidates with those more to their liking.

If they were to run it as a third-party race (or if Cantor were to run a write-in campaign) it would open up a huge opportunity for the Democrats. (Something like IRV might prevent that, though there are other ways to subvert IRV.)

This is another one of those political talking points that amount to nothing more than dishonest quibbling. Yes, the kind of "tenure" that university professors get would make no sense for a high school teacher, but that's not what "tenure" means in public schools. It has the same *name*, but it means something *different*.

It's practically impossible to get rid of a university professor with tenure. An elementary school teacher *can* be fired, but only for specific causes. Here are the list of causes which, under my states laws, a tenured public school teacher can be fired:

(1) inefficiency,
(2) incompetency,
(3) incapacity,
(4) conduct unbecoming a teacher,
(5) insubordination
(6) failure to satisfy teacher performance standards
(note) teachers can also be laid off due to staff reductions.

This seems like a pretty complete list of the justifications a reasonable person would need for firing a teacher. If a principal has documentation of any of these causes, the teacher is out. Immediately. The teacher can appeal to an arbitration board, but pending any reversal of the firing the teacher is not allowed back on campus.

It's actually quite straightforward to fire a tenured teacher. Two of my kids teachers were dismissed, even though they had tenure. One for gross inefficiency, the other for conduct unbecoming a teacher (she told a black student he should "go back to the plantation"). The teacher fired for bad conduct was the head of the local teacher's union. The union did not make a stink in either case; it generally doesn't. It's OK with dismissals for cause, so long as there is documentation and proper procedures are followed. If there weren't documented cause or the teacher didn't get his right of appeal, they'd fight that, as they should.

The myth that you just *can't* fire a tenured public school teacher is sometimes spread by lazy principals. They'll tell unhappy parents, "Gee, I'd like to get rid of that one, but he's got tenure. It's practically impossible to get rid of a tenured teacher." There was a case like that in my town where the principal kept telling parents there was nothing he could do about a certain teacher. Then they school got a new principal, and a few months later he fired the teacher in question.

All those young adjunct professors who are publishing like mad, refusing no committee assignment, and enduring any indignity their superiors can dream up in the vain hope of grasping the brass tenure ring. Often the decisions of the tenure committee are inexplicable, so you have no option but to put your nose to the grindstone and pray.

That doesn't excuse the attitude "I've got mine, to hell with this place," but it makes it more understandable.

Population density is why we don't have gigabit fiber to tiny little rural towns in the middle of nowhere like Ephrata, WA (pop 7000). No, wait. They have had gigabit fiber to the home since 2001. Back when that cost a metric boatload of money. And yet the network made an embarassingly large profit they had to pay back to their customers because they are a nonprofit. How is that even possible?

It is possible because your density story is a lie. It is made up. There is no truth to it. If Ephrata, and even smaller towns in that county, can have gigabit at a reasonable price 14 years ago then we all can now. The tech is 100x cheaper now. There is no excuse for not fibering up the whole country.

Now they are both going to sue me for the slander of associating each with the other. They'll probably both win too, and have to sue each other over fractions of my soul. But the judge will be in on it and award both the same soul three times each.

Not as dumb as paying more per gigabyte of RAM on your Cisco server for the privilege of paying more per gigabyte of RAM and Gigabit of network bandwidth on your Oracle software so you can pay extra for the ports on your Cisco network switch. With mandatory support contracts all 'round.

They should merge and call the result Oracicle.

Somehow in my mind Cisco and Oracle are the same company. Maybe I have reached my dotage, but when I see one mentioned the other may as well be there too. They are like Satan had identical twins separated at birth.

Remember when desktop computing was bigger than pocket computing? I do. But then I remember when personal computers were new too - back before there was an IBM PC as such. Things change.

I've been to Europe. You should go too, because if you're right and they're 50 years ahead of us, you should check it out.

Judging from the state of things in Europe, the Great Decline isn't going to be so bad. Sure a few of the people there don't speak American and a lot of 'em have queer opinions. But the grub, once you get used to it, isn't half bad for foreign muck. And a lot of the places they've got seriously kick-ass beer, and that goes a long way in my book.

And they've got a lot of hot women. I think it goes with the whole picturesque thing. I've got to admit they're really good at that. I mean, we have majestic mountains, and so do they, but *they* but these crazy cuckoo clock houses on 'em. Yeah, it's kind of gay, but if that's the way things are going we might as well get used to that sort of thing. I mean, what's the point of swimming against the tide of the future if in the end what you're fighting against is houses with fancy fretwork and really good beer. I can live with that.

I agree with you on this one, but it does raise interesting questions.

What if the researcher were running SETI@Home? That would still be wrong. But would it be *as* wrong? As in "fired and barred for life* wrong?

What about someone who uses his office computer to do some Christmas shopping, or to check movie times? That seems to me to be a judgment call. There are behaviors which in moderation are harmless to the employer and which benefit the employee, but when taken to extreme are abuse.

This stuff is worth thinking about, because the simple answers are going to be too restrictive, and too restrictive is, for practical purposes, the same as too permissive. People don't respect rules that don't make sense, they find ways around them. That inflates the cost of enforcement too.