Geek-OpGeek-Op
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I promise... this isn't just a geography joke. Like many Americans I tend to watch the State of the Union Address each year, followed by the response from the other party. While I'll try my best to keep my personal politics out of this article I found one part of the response speech that even still nags at me for how far from accurate it is: "In our economic stagnation and indebtedness, we are only a short distance behind Greece, Spain, and other European countries now facing economic catastrophe."
While people can argue over the downgrade of the U.S. credit rating from a single credit rating agency, a move which marked similar downgrades from other European countries shortly thereafter, this had less to do with the ability of the US to pay its bills and had much more to do with our willingness to pay our bills, primarily stemming from the control of the purse strings which rests with congress and an ugly public fight that marked the first time the raising of our debt ceiling was held hostage by our own representatives (and no one is surprised by Congress' 11% approval rating).
I digress. Greece just reached an initial deal that will help them cut their spending (known as Austerity). While people throw around the phrase "deficit reduction" what they really mean is cutting spending. Alexander Hamilton had envisioned how quickly the American economy could grow and our political position could improve by taking massive foreign loans. Yes, our country was founded on a principal of improved value through revolving debt. It's a practice that spread from our government to our people and it cost us about five very difficult years so far. The same thing is happening in Greece, except their economy generates an incredibly small amount of money compared to the U.S. and you have a nearly non-existent production rate for exported items.
Much of this is due to the 55 age limit for retirement, but there are myriad reasons. Now Greece is being forced into making tough decisions in order to not go bankrupt and see its current political upheaval turn far more reactive and potentially violent. Take for instance minimum wage. They are reducing it by 20%, or if you're under 25 it's being reduced by 32%. Could you imagine the Congress in the US reducing Minimum Wage by 1/3? While they aren't yet raising the age of retirement as we've done slowly over time they are slashing benefits to be proportional to the contribution you made to the fund while working. In other words... they're moving from a flat rate retirement system to something more closely resembling our social security system.
One of the next things Greece is moving towards is automatic deductions for taxes in each paycheck, something they don't currently do, instead expecting citizens to fork over all their taxes at the end of the year based on their year's earnings. The current method has resulted in constant and systemic fraud, whereby the country is being cheated out of millions of dollars of tax revenue every year. Once again, this is something the U.S. already does. Citizens can expect more fees levied against them for services because they hope to privatize more of the government "with the aim of collecting billions of euros" as described by Dave Gilbert's breakdown of the Austerity measures (http://www.cnn.com/2012/02/14/world/europe/greece-austerity-detail/index.html?hpt=hp_bn2).
My question to Gov. Mitch Daniels is this... if the U.S. is doing so badly that it is on the verge of a collapse more spectacular than Greece then why is Greece working so valiantly to operate more like the U.S.? I'm certain it's not just to slow the flush down the drain.
/rant
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There is an old axiom that most everyone is familiar with: "Be careful what you wish for, because you just might get it." This holds true as much for massive corporations as it does for each of us as individuals. The proof of the matter is AT&T.
In 2007 a, frankly naive, corporation (or nefarious with future plans depending on your view point) called AT&T (a quite young corporation in archaeological time measurements) decided to get a stranglehold over the Smart Phone market by making an exclusivity deal with Apple for their most recent MUST HAVE tech toy... the iPhone. This deal would cement their market strength for years to come, and they could lure new customers by making all the features of the iPhone readily available as part of a tidy unlimited data plan. All things went according to plan.
But then issues started to crop up. People disliked the lack of reception from AT&T's network. People lamented leaving Verizon for AT&T and being locked into deals by virtue of their phone. Resentment grew. But AT&T owned the market on the iPhone and if people wanted one, they had to suffer for it. As time moved on the success of this pairing led to even greater resentment from the public beholden to AT&T to satiate their Apple Lust.
Then Verizon cracked the Apple Barrier. With another network competing for business it was time AT&T did something drastic to keep their customers. At this point AT&T never invested in their infrastructure to be able to appropriately maintain the needs of their customers. If you purchased an unlimited plan from them they couldn't back out of the deal... but they could force you to. Now they're pressuring customers to drop those old unlimited plans by killing their connection speed if they... you know... try to use what the phone for the reasons they bought it: http://news.yahoo.com/t-customers-surprised-unlimited-data-limit-080906861.html.
While this seems like a vile and detestable case of bait-and-switch it, surprisingly, isn't. You see AT&T is not preventing you from using your unlimited data; they are simply slowing down your service. Nothing said they had to provide you that data quickly. Even the phone itself isn't culpable as it's downloading at the speed of the network. The biggest kick being that this effect is punitively levied against customers with data consumption that is lower than the limited plans and if you contact AT&T they'll tell you should switch to the limited plan (maybe, if you're lucky, they'll be nice and waive the hefty fees related to cancelling your current unlimited contract early!)
AT&T was so unprepared for its success that now it’s using your Smart Phone to make you look like an idiot.
/rant
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A few weeks back you probably remember Google plastering a black band across its logo (as if it were mourning the loss of Caesar) and sites such as Wikipedia shutting down to fight SOPA and PIPA (not the future queen's sister). Due to massive public response the government gave the bill a reprieve to be re-adjusted because in its most recent form it amounts to little more than censorship at the fingertips of Big Brother.
Days later, in an unrelated move the FBI arrested Kim Dotcom, the main man behind Megavideo and Megaupload, taking down those sites and arresting a number of people involved with the venture. Why did this happen? Because Megavideo is a den of illegal copyrighted material. What's odd is that Megavideo deletes files that violate copyright when they are contacted to do so. However, Megavideo does not incorporate any search functionality in their site so the only way to find a particular file or video is to get a link off of a third party website.
In this way websites like Sidereel.com aren't breaking any laws as they're not uploading or downloading or posting any illegal material, they are simply providing a link to that material. Some sites such as ALLUC.org are founded on a legal loophole. While Megavideo is willing to remove copyrighted material when notified the FBI still raided them and the site was shut down. If this happened, then why are SOPA and PIPA even up for discussion? They're not needed.
In fact the Megavideo takedown resulted in the pre-government shutdown of VideoBB, Fileserve and a number of other sites that, while they may contain some pirated material, were also the homes of perfectly legal file sharing practices. Filesonic, for instance, only allows users to download files that they uploaded; the sharing capabilities are entirely shut down in response to their expectation that government action could be imminent. There are obviously laws on the books that do exactly what SOPA and PIPA are ideally designed to do and what Congress had been lobbied to believe that they would do.
At this point it's hard to view SOPA and PIPA as anything other than a real world manifestation of an internet meme (I heard you like copyright protection laws in your copyright protection laws, dawg). When these bills are returned to Congress I suggest a further public campaign against them, because there are already laws in place that make them unnecessary, which tells us one thing, dear readers, SOPA and PIPA are only about money and censorship and in the long run are a horrible venture for the public that we are in danger of imposing upon ourselves through our elected officials so lazy and ignorant that they never contacted experts in the field they were attempting to pass laws on when designing the bill to understand the applicational effects of the bill in the real world. Take the laws to the extreme and we could see sites like Facebook banned in the US because someone had posted a picture that had the trademarked golden arches of a McDonald's in the background.
Here we are, still at the dawn of the information age and the threat of silence looms, yet we have no one to blame but us, for we silence ourselves.
/rant
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There's a phrase I generally dislike, perhaps for its cutesy abrasiveness about reaching for the moon because if you fail you'll be among the stars. The phrase is just catchy enough to be used by supportive moms and kindergarten teachers everywhere, but doesn't take into account how tragic miscalculations can leave you a sad little dreamcicle as you are doomed to orbit Earth because you forgot to prepare for the vacuum of space, metaphorically speaking of course. Despite my contempt for the not quite folksy saying there was a more grounded variation used by White House spokesman Jay Carney, "If you got through a year and you achieved everything on your list then you probably didn't aim high enough." In content it's the same phrase, just without all the saccharin condescension. The thing is, it's not wrong.
The point of setting goals isn't simply so we complete tasks, because we could all just set our goals very low and do the bare minimum to survive. The point of setting goals is to set your sights on things you don't necessarily think you're capable of completing, sometimes things that are vastly beyond what you expect your capabilities are. In fact, in general people might not set their goals high enough. They may be so dependent upon little achievements and so afraid of the sting of failure that they might not recognize the triumph of "almost." Almost is a powerful thing. It lets you know that you might be able to meet that goal with another try. Almost gets you back on that horse you fell off of (most likely metaphorically again).
Look over those goals that were just out of reach last year and put them back in your sights, then add in some new ones that are even tougher. You know yourself better than you did last year and know more of what you're capable of. Even with all that knowledge if you accomplish one of those goals you secretly thought you couldn't do you still might manage to find a way to surprise yourself.
/rant
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