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Tim Cook and Other Tech Executives to Meet With President Obama to Discuss NSA Surveillance and Health Care Website
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Homeowners had nonrecourse loans and walked away from underwater houses and began renting. Except the stupid ones.
The bubble in housing was from government policies to get banks to lend to lower income folks, by focusing on variable rate loans! That increased demand for a limited housing stock over a relatively short time.
We have a bubble in bonds now thanks to Barry.
In half from where? Bush had a $450B budget deficit and that was with two raging wars. Obama ramped that to $1.5T right away and cruised on that till Jack Lew's "sequester" tactic stuck despite pressure to get the opposing party to let the deficit run. The reduction to $650B since was not only against the will of this President (railed against sequestration and any budget control), but 50% HIGHER than his predecessor. At its minimum. But on average it's more than double! After running from Iraq and Afghanistan.
The TARP (temporary deficit) remember under Bush was paid back with interest.
This is not a partisan argument. It is a factual observation for me. The fact there is partisanship is part of the observation.
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Were those attacks prevented because of the NSA spying? Wasn't that the whole point of your rant there.
Though I've heard it said a lot, I have no idea what that means as an argument. No system of Early Warning is, or has to be, 100% perfect for it to be worthwhile. In fact, nothing came up when the FBI checked out Tamerlan and family. They could have monitored his parents, who according to a story in the Boston Globe today, are a really dysfunctional family, and the fact that Tamerlan was hearing voices telling him to do things, and younger brother really was the organizer. And the family may have been dysfunctional enough that they produced weird kids.
This is all internally-generated, probably motivated by needy parents and great dysfunction. The fact that the NSA didn't come up with this guy is proof that they are not the massive internal snoop agency/Stasi that The Greenwald alleges is the case.
Or it means no matter how much of out privacy we give up it won't make a difference so why bother.
Isn't' there an even better explanation for why they didn't find anything. Because the government it inept and doing anything. So because the FBI was clueless you are going to say the NSA isn't spying on us?
I'm glad they are concerned about my privacy...
Well, they are concerned about their privacy. Yours? Not so much.
He is, if you know what I mean.
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Straw man argument.
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Always funny when the public sector screws up on a website. But I hope those Google guys they hired weren't the ones who made Google+. Not only is it annoying, but it's GLITCHY.
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Obama has added one of the largest amounts of debt by percentage in the history of US presidents. He's in second place or something. Maybe it's for a good reason, maybe not.
I know how to do it.
Require companies to pay no taxes, and instead, tax workers on their labor!
Companies are forever, individuals are disposable.
Require companies to pay no taxes, and instead, tax workers on their labor!
Companies are forever, individuals are disposable.
Of course they happened, and that's precisely why these surveillance programs are a necessary evil. Don't get me wrong, I'm not willing to give carte-blanche permission to the NSA, to do as they please.
What I am saying is, let them do their jobs without being ham-strung by a myriad of paralyzing red tape (inflicted upon them by well-meaning but misinformed 'absolute freedom' proponents), but with a definite chain of oversight and accountability to prevent abuses.
Earendil below said it very well.
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Total BS
This is total BS. Obama wants to get advice regarding the Obamacare website? He should have been begging them for advice long before his team of bureaucrats completely bungled the job. We need government to stay the hell away from things they have no clue about. Name one government agency that the public enjoys dealing with and has faith in ...you can't.
This is total BS. Obama wants to get advice regarding the Obamacare website? He should have been begging them for advice long before his team of bureaucrats completely bungled the job. We need government to stay the hell away from things they have no clue about. Name one government agency that the public enjoys dealing with and has faith in ...you can't.
I guess Stephenson is there to represent what the US Navy refers to as the "open kimono" contingent?
So Erich Schmidt is there at the conference? Was he sent by the NSA as their clandestine representative?
What red tape, they suck up every piece of data on the internet. There is no red tape but there needs to be, a lot of it.
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Where is the straw man, you mean the NSA saying they are stalking us to protect us from terrorists that still managed to kill people? Or is that the excuse they are using to track our every move?
Well lets be honest, you're more likely to prevent 9/11 if america stop trying to play world police rather than monitoring all internet ever.
Rocketman said:
How exactly was Obama responsible for the FY2009 budget which was agreed in October 2008 before he was even elected?
He is. Apple wants to expand their markets overseas. If US government policy makes potential customers of US company products nervous, and look elsewhere for their technology, Apple's business is in trouble. In the same vein, if US government policy makes commercial solutions suspect, US customers will look to free and open source solutions instead of commercial ones, which will hurt Apple's business here in the US, too.
The NSA shouldn't be dissolved. I still want them intercepting phone conversations of terrorists on their sat phones in the middle of Afghanistan. I also want them trying to decrypt foreign government communications. But it's clear now that the NSA has overstepped its bounds, and it needs to be reigned in. First, it should not be collecting any information at all on US citizens. Any data it has collected must be destroyed. Broad warrantless surveillance should not be legal, and should not happen. If the FBI has a suspect and can get a warrant from a judge, then the FBI can tap somebody's phone, but the NSA should not be collecting data or "metadata" on anybody in the US. Their operations, like the CIA, should be entirely focused on foreign intelligence. Second, the NSA needs to stop undermining the economy with its weakening of encryption that the economy increasingly depends on. They also need to stop harming American businesses with programs like PRISM. We need to trust that our data and communications with businesses in the US are secure and unmonitored. There should be absolutely no backdoors in any encryption hardware or software or secure systems of any sort. Any backdoor, no matter how cleverly hidden, is an exploitable weakness that a foreign power or criminal can use too.
The NSA may claim they are protecting the country, but their current behavior is harming it. The economic repercussions will be with us for decades, but what does the NSA have to show for it? The Boston Marathon still got bombed. There was still a car bomb planted at Times Square. The attacks that have been stopped were stopped by ordinary people seeing something and saying something, taking action to protect themselves and others. Yet still, terrorism as a threat to life is minor compared to dangers we face daily. Why should we give up our most sacred liberties in the name of terrorism when we have not for car accidents or lightning strikes? All life must end eventually, and I for one would rather live free while I'm still alive, than surrender my freedom to a government that has already proved it can't protect me.
Yup, that's why I find it hillarious. Both are biggest offenders in terms of privacy, I stopped uploading pictures to facebook three years ago, sign off google before I run any search.
Bush gave Obama TARP authority of hundreds of billions of dollars and in 2009 Obama got the stimulus bill (amendment to FY09 months after Bush was gone March 11) which added to the budget baseline by over $850B in addition. Don't forget Bush was cooperating with Obama during the transition. The "stimulus" was the so-called shovel ready stuff, massive transfer payments to states, every pork program Pelosi could find x 2, and some other stuff thrown in including the ACORN stuff which was reversed after a legal gotcha. That's the $850B in a single year.
The approximately $350B TARP Bush handed Obama was used for the GM thing, Chrysler, and the suppliers and finance companies including GE. The only funds that will never be paid back are the approximately $20B Obama gave to the auto worker's unions unfunded pensions which would have been wiped in BK, but were not. Also $24B of the GM BK financing.
The numbers are pretty close. There are plenty of books on the details.
The key takeaway is since the 2009 stimulus bill (FY 09 edit D House, D Senate, D President) with the $850B increase in the budget baseline, the D Senate has NEVER passed a budget and sent it for reconciliation with the R House, despite the house passing budgets each and every year. By dragging their feet on the budget which requires only 51 votes and the D has 55, the increased budget baseline stayed in place through Continuing Resolutions (CR) with the associated fights each time. That's what happened and why the $1T annual deficit persisted for 5 years now. Only sequestration reduced it to about $650B right now as an annual addition to debt this year alone. FY 09-14 is 5 budget years without a budget and only CR's and debt limit increases to track the $1T per year new debt on average.
President Barak Obama has never passed a budget. Think about that. That's how Presidents usually govern.
All that government concentration reduced GDP and employment and labor participation and zeroed out savers with the resulting Fed action, further reducing GDP.
Rocketman
http://news.slashdot.org/story/13/12/17/0254235/gms-ceo-rejects-repaying-feds-for-bailout-losses
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It seems very odd to me that people are still relying on healthcare.gov to purchase health insurance...other websites, like ehealthinsurance.com have been fully functional since October 1st and have provided a working means to purchase ACA approved plans within minutes and no glitches whatsoever. What a shock that a website run by profit-driven entrepreneurs works easily without a hitch, whereas a website run by the government is completely broken.
On the other hand Americas private based healthcare system costs more than twice as much as Britain's public based healthcare system for similar outcomes.
Life isn't as black and white as you'd like it to be.
This is a very important point since dems claim a 50% reduction in the deficit since 09. That is, indeed, a true statement, since the deficit was reduced from 1.4 trillionish to 680b or so..., but...WHO is really responsible for the $1.4 trillion deficit in the 09 budget?? Prior to 09 budget, the deficit was 480 billion...so who was responsible for the 480b deficit to the 1.4 trillion deficit?
Republicans claim that the since the deficit was 480 billion in 08, and 1.1 trillion in 2012, obama more than doubled the deficit. Dems say that since obama inherited the 1.4 trillion deficit in 09, and reduced it to 1.1 trillion in 2012 (and now 680B in 2013), that obama has reduced the deficit. As usual, both sides are spinning it.