hunter's Journal - Democratic Underground http://www.democraticunderground.com http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/tech/rss Sun, 19 May 2013 18:08:02 Sun, 19 May 2013 18:08:02 The U.S.A. is Mexico or Greece with nuclear weapons and a much less generous culture. The American Dream has always been an illusion for most of our population.

Those who were not "successful" and those who were violently excluded from the upper classes were expected to hide away in closets of self-loathing and not challenge or contradict the straight white authoritarian males who... http://journals.democraticunderground.com/hunter/72 Sun, 30 Oct 2011 12:51:43 If someone is working they are contributing to the common good... ... whether or not they are a citizen.

If this is not the case, then the very premise of our economic system is disproved.

We can solve this problem by substantially raising minimum wages, improving working conditions, and granting legal status to anyone who is here working, or who is here as ... http://journals.democraticunderground.com/hunter/71 Sat, 15 Oct 2011 12:51:47 Time Zero translates to 00:00 January 1, 1970 UTC That might be a good place to end the "Common Era."

We should get rid of leap seconds too.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unix_time

For day-to-day human use a [a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lunisolar_calendar"]lunisolar[/a] calendar with uncounted days would be nice. The uncounted days... http://journals.democraticunderground.com/hunter/70 Wed, 05 Oct 2011 12:00:30 I think employers should have to compete against a generous welfare system. Abusive low wage employers wouldn't be able to find employees who would put up with their shit.

A generous welfare system accomplishes a few things.

Number one, it provides for people who are unemployable, those who have "personal baggage," mental illness, personality disorders, simple ass-ba... http://journals.democraticunderground.com/hunter/69 Sat, 10 Sep 2011 16:10:54 Ford vs. Chevy. MacDonalds vs. Burger King. Different flavors of consumerism.

I'm an artist. I make cars and computers out of trash.

My 1985 car has a salvage title and 250,000 on the odometer. My trash laptop runs LXDE on Debian.

If somebody gave me a shiny new computer first thing I'd do would be to install Linux. Maybe I wouldn't ... http://journals.democraticunderground.com/hunter/68 Sat, 23 Apr 2011 10:12:22 Our fossil fuel plants have already created a "toxic wasteland." And it is getting worse.

The volume and toxicity of the waste produced by coal power plants far exceeds that produced in nuclear power plants.

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/8/8c/Kingston-plant-spill-swanpond-tn2.jpg/250px-Kingston-plant-spill-swanpond-tn2.jpg [i] a toxic ... http://journals.democraticunderground.com/hunter/67 Wed, 16 Feb 2011 11:49:34 How do you "train" bacteria? The capability was already in the kit. That's very interesting, especially in these very complex chemical systems that were presumed to be very finely tuned.

Replacing phosphorous with arsenic in these systems ought to break them, and in most organisms it does.

We think we know a lot about bio... http://journals.democraticunderground.com/hunter/66 Thu, 02 Dec 2010 21:51:44 There's a glaring fallacy in all these health care discussions It's that the most expensive health care is the best care.

People with good insurance or thick wallets often get inappropriate care in the USA and end up in worse shape than they would have had they lived in someplace like Canada, England, or even Cuba.

In many cases a generic prescription tha... http://journals.democraticunderground.com/hunter/65 Fri, 19 Nov 2010 11:52:16 Nature is gonna stomp us dead and erase us. Unless we learn to fit in we will become one of those evolutionary experiments that failed, and failed quickly.

100,000 years from now, which is but an instant on nature's clock, the earth will be rich with life again and nothing will be left of the common ape, [i]pan vulgaris,[/i] humanity, but ... http://journals.democraticunderground.com/hunter/64 Sun, 23 May 2010 10:20:10 Does the "common good" exist? The USA has failed if we no longer believe everyone who works contributes to the common good. If doing honest labor for a paycheck does not contribute to the common good then why the bloody hell is ANYONE working, citizen or not? Tell everyone to go home and close the shop. The dream is dead.
... http://journals.democraticunderground.com/hunter/63 Thu, 20 May 2010 11:31:52 I'm a complete science geek, I watched the moon landings, and I agree with Obama. We knew how to get to the moon in the sixties. We knew how to build space shuttles in the seventies. We knew how to build space stations in the eighties.

This is old technology. The institutions built around these technologies are corrupt, most especially the Military Industrial Complex pigs feed... http://journals.democraticunderground.com/hunter/62 Wed, 14 Apr 2010 09:54:47 Sarah Palin is the Paris Hilton of politics. Like we needed someone like that... :eyes:
... http://journals.democraticunderground.com/hunter/61 Tue, 13 Apr 2010 11:05:21 In some places it's a miracle we have any competent teachers. And this has everything to do with the altruism of people who have the calling to teach, and nothing at all to do with working conditions, unions, pay or politics.

In some places any teacher who is willing to show up day after day and simply keep the kids in their seats is damn near a saint.

I... http://journals.democraticunderground.com/hunter/60 Wed, 31 Mar 2010 16:44:06 My wife and I have an HDHP/HSA and prexisting conditions. It's really quite worthless. We max out the high deductible around November every year. So basically we pay for 90% of our medical expenses out of pocket, and get a small fraction of our premiums back in November & December, which just about covers the property taxes on our house.

For the huge am... http://journals.democraticunderground.com/hunter/59 Tue, 23 Mar 2010 08:37:02 Textbooks could be Open Source and Creative Commons licensed. Classroom teachers with appropriate educational backgrounds who actually use these texts could be paid additional salary to update and maintain them.

These textbooks would be free to everyone, anywhere, worldwide.

A state like California could easily support such a program at less cost then it... http://journals.democraticunderground.com/hunter/58 Sun, 31 Jan 2010 09:47:43 The Na'vi are obviously synthetic. They look nothing like the indigenous wildlife. They were obviously created by the planetary intelligence so it could get inside our heads. And it was wildly successful too, so much so that it gained the ability to absorb a human mind with all its pathways and memories fully intact and transfer a facsimile of it into a synthetic body.

The huma... http://journals.democraticunderground.com/hunter/56 Mon, 11 Jan 2010 11:19:29 The U-235 bomb was a certainty. The plutonium bomb was an experiment. Plutonium production at the end of the war greatly exceeded U-235 production and it was obvious the technically more difficult plutonium bombs would be the primary atomic weapon of the post-war U.S. arsenal.

If the Japanese had not surrendered after two atomic bombings it was estimated the U.S. ... http://journals.democraticunderground.com/hunter/57 Thu, 07 Jan 2010 19:08:12 Good. In this case Robert Kennedy Jr. can pound rocks. Solar and wind advocates don't get it, but they are helping pave the way for greater imports of coal generated electricity into California.

The power companies are putting huge amounts of money and effort into opening corridors to states with less restrictive policies towards coal development. Th... http://journals.democraticunderground.com/hunter/54 Wed, 23 Dec 2009 13:43:51 Me too, with the flu, "Bah! Humbug!" I've never liked Christmas much, and this year I got knocked on my butt by some virus too. I got my flu shots, but not the novel H1N1, so it could be that.

I've had it with pretending it's a Merry Christmas. I want to be sitting on a warm beach somewhere they've never heard of Santa Claus, a pla... http://journals.democraticunderground.com/hunter/53 Tue, 22 Dec 2009 11:10:36 We can't even handle the drug-war lords of our own nation. There have been dozens of gang murders within a few miles of my home, some just a few blocks away from my home. The police in my city hardly pay attention to anything unless it is bleeding or has a gun. Fender bender? Stolen x-box? Cars broken into? Serious acts of vandalism? You can file a report o... http://journals.democraticunderground.com/hunter/52 Thu, 03 Dec 2009 13:19:49 Eventually Walmart will become "too big to fail." Then it will be taken over by our government, filled with subsidized white bread, cheap flavored alcoholic beverages, MREs, farm implements, paperback Bibles, trashy magazines, and and all the other bare necessities of life thus fulfilling the USA's God Given destiny as a Christian socialist paradis... http://journals.democraticunderground.com/hunter/50 Sat, 28 Nov 2009 09:30:45 Black Friday is a memorial to dead Chinese coal miners. You buy the stuff they gave their lives for.
... http://journals.democraticunderground.com/hunter/51 Fri, 27 Nov 2009 10:20:55 I'm not going to be happy until the U.S. health insurance industry is dead... ... the remains cremated and buried in a toxic waste dump, the Ghostbusters called out to vacuum up the stench of their corruption and their vile ectoplasmic residue.

If the health insurance industry should arise again we must limit them to small upgrades in medical service, things like custom ta... http://journals.democraticunderground.com/hunter/49 Thu, 29 Oct 2009 21:35:03 It will cost as much as we are willing to spend. Currently the insurance companies are not so much concerned about costs as they are about maximizing the volume of their revenue streams. They don't care about the high cost of medicine so long as someone is willing to pay the fare. Thus far increasing medical costs have only increased the volume of... http://journals.democraticunderground.com/hunter/48 Wed, 02 Sep 2009 15:59:16 It's exactly a "bubble." There's a lot of money invested in health care, and the values of these investments are vastly inflated, worse than the mortgage market ever was.

The bubble is going to break, and nobody wants to be near it when it does. I think this explains much of the inaction of the Obama administration. They... http://journals.democraticunderground.com/hunter/47 Mon, 10 Aug 2009 11:17:18