How dare you criticize the status quo? Don't you know that the job market for top executives is perfectly efficient, and that their compensation reflects their contribution to the company they serve?
\end{sarcasm}
Four decades ago, during the Nixon administration, the powers that be talked about the lack of technical talent in the United States. Clinton revived the discussion in the 1990s, and Obama talks about it now.
In the big defense contractors (e.g., Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, Northrop Grumman, etc) the most senior engineer makes less than the most junior manager. It does not matter if the senior engineer has a PhD from Caltech and the junior manager was a business major at Cal State.
This reality exists also in the Silicon Valley, but in a more subtle form. If the job market is efficient, then (in theory) the lack of qualified engineers should lead to an increase in pay for top engineering talent, right? Well, the job market is not efficient. Engineering is viewed by many as a blue-collar profession, and the pay gap exists to differentiate the ruling class from the working class.
re: (2) I suggest that congressmen start checking the executive branch, which is their duty. Failing to do so, they committ a soft form of treason. We expect the guys in uniform to sacrifice their lives, but the congressmen are not even expected to sacrifice their careers in the defense of the U.S. Constitution. Soldiers will continue to die for nothing, and congressmen will continue avoiding unpopular fights that might cost them votes.
Fortunately for the political class, malice can easily be disguised as incompetence. Plausible deniability makes it hard to attribute culpability.
If a mafia top dog sends his goons to invade private property, his goons get shot at and return fire and kill people, then the mafia guy is a criminal. If the commander-in-chief sends his goons in uniform to invade a sovereign nation that poses no threat to the U.S., his pawns get shot at and return fire and kill 100,000s of people, then the commander-in-chief is a national hero, and anyone who dares to disagree is a traitor, a liberal, a communist, a socialist, un-american scum. Lesson to be learned: if you want to be a criminal, avoid the private sector.
That will never happen. Unfortunately, the political decision-makers are above the law. We all know that. Does anyone remember LBJ & McNamara being prosecuted for the deaths of 58,000 Americans and over 2,000,000 Vietnamese?
All that is obvious. One does not need to come from a military family to understand that. Common sense should suffice. The interesting questions are:
1) if the WikiLeaks war logs contain "nothing new" (according to the White House), then why is that it's a problem of national security?
2) yes, guys with guns must be held to the highest standard possible; unfortunately, the civilians who have the power to send the "guys with guns" to invade sovereign nations and kill people are held to no standard at all. We didn't lower the bar, we removed the bar. Zero accountability for the decision-makers, death penalty to the pawns in uniform? Isn't a rogue executive branch potentially more dangerous than a rogue Army private?
3) did Congress authorize the war in Afghanistan? I don't remember any declaration of war. If we're not officially at war, then what Rogers claims to be "treason" does not call for capital punishment.
4) if we are at war and Manning should be executed for treason, then why not execute Cheney too? Didn't he reveal classified information and endangered Americans when he exposed Valerie Plame?
"I do a little introspection and realized that I'm not all that outraged about the actions of the American government with respect to Afghanistan and Iraq."
If you don't live in Russia nor China, what makes you think that the U.S. won't converge towards tyranny at some point in the future and start using their fantastic military machine to invade countries at will, building an empire that neither Napoleon nor Hitler could even dream of? If that sounds impossible, let us not forget that Germany in the 1920s was quite different from Germany in the 1930s.
I remember the huge demonstrations against the invasion of Iraq in Europe in early 2003. Hundreds of thousands of people protesting in Barcelona. The biggest protests since Vietnam. And, then, one year later, the Madrid metro bombings "forcefully" convince the vastly anti-war Spanish electorare that it was intolerable to have a handful of troops in Iraq. Just because you don't live in the U.S. nor the U.K. do not rule out the possibility that you might suffer the consequences of the reckless invasion of Iraq.
Either you're too naive or not cynical enough. Assange is on a power trip, but WL is necessary and has been useful so far, so I forgive him. He has a large ego and wants to deliver impact. Exposing informants is peanuts. Why would he do it intentionally? He has already caused one government to collapse (in Kenya). If you had such power, would you use it for the little things, or for the big things? Too bad for the informants, it would have been better if no names had ever been exposed.
I never claimed that they are incompatible. I merely claimed that those who invade a sovereign country that posed no threat, leading to 100,000s of deaths (5,000 of which U.S. soldiers) have no moral authority and cannot claim that their irresponsibility is even remotely comparable to the irresponsibility of revealing possible informants' names.
Your argument is absolutely ridiculous. This has nothing to do with republicans vs democrats. As far as I know, LBJ and McNamara were democrats. And so are Hillary Clinton and John Kerry, who voted for the war in order to avoid jeopardizing their chances of getting to the oval office. What exact part of "meretricious congressmen" didn't you understand?
Assange has never claimed that there are no legitimate secrets. He's not exposing cyphers nor nuclear secrets. The truth that he's exposing is one that the Afghans know well, but that the American public does not know. The purpose of WikiLeaks is to promote transparency and accountability by exposing truths that catalyze reform. This means, essentially, to close the feedback loop so that the electorate can make wise decisions every four years. If the electorate has no clue what is going on, you have no republic, you have a farce.
What reform is attained by exposing someone's phone or address? That's right. None. If you can't understand that privacy and transparency aren't incompatible, then you must be seriously intellectually challenged. In other words, you have no point, and you have no argument.
Who has the moral authority to hold Jake accountable? He exposed the truth. By contrast, Bush, Cheney & Rumsfeld gave us Gulf of Tonkin II, the meretricious congressmen gave the executive branch all the power it wanted, we know that we invaded a country based on lies, 100,000s have died, and noone has been held accountable. What's the rule here? You kill 1 it's a tragegy, but if you kill 1,000,000 it's a statistic?
The webapp market is limited by people's leisure time. There can't be 10 Facebooks, because if the average person spends 30 min per day on Facebook, then it would have to spend 4h30min on the other 9 webapps. Nobody has that much time. The market for electronics, photonics is almost unlimited... because these technologies are meant to automate, not to entertain. This is not a matter of electronics being "nobler" than webapps, it's just the realization that one encounters certain limitations in the webapp area that do not exist elsewhere.
The burden of proof lies on the accuser's shoulders. How do you know it's not disinformation? From now on, the Pentagon will blame WikiLeaks for every civilian death. WikiLeaks had no incentive to put innocents at risk, but the Pentagon has all the incentives to discredit WikiLeaks.
Agreed. But please do note that the Taliban didn't fly any aircraft into buildings. The ones who did were Saudis. The Taliban want to kick the invader out, just like the Vietcong 40 years ago. If you think the war in Afghanistan is motivated by the desire to kill Al Qaeda, you need to read a thing or two on geopolitics.
I am not after financial independence the easy way. I could never work for an investment bank. It's boring. And even if you're paid $200K a year at a bank, you're still a pawn. Nothing more than a mere cog in a big machine, unable to decide your own future. I don't advocate that. I am only stating that there are tradeoffs. You can trade money for freedom. You can trade excitement for safety. You can be a sheep and be bored, you can be a wolf and be lonely.
In any case, there's nothing particularly noble about empire per se. Sure, it pleases the ego. But there's always a bigger empire. And empires require HR departments and middle managers and other such distasteful things. You don't need to be the captain of an aircraft carrier. It's also fun to run a pirate ship.
How dare you criticize the status quo? Don't you know that the job market for top executives is perfectly efficient, and that their compensation reflects their contribution to the company they serve?
\end{sarcasm}
Four decades ago, during the Nixon administration, the powers that be talked about the lack of technical talent in the United States. Clinton revived the discussion in the 1990s, and Obama talks about it now.
In the big defense contractors (e.g., Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, Northrop Grumman, etc) the most senior engineer makes less than the most junior manager. It does not matter if the senior engineer has a PhD from Caltech and the junior manager was a business major at Cal State.
This reality exists also in the Silicon Valley, but in a more subtle form. If the job market is efficient, then (in theory) the lack of qualified engineers should lead to an increase in pay for top engineering talent, right? Well, the job market is not efficient. Engineering is viewed by many as a blue-collar profession, and the pay gap exists to differentiate the ruling class from the working class.