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Michael McAllister

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Everything posted by Michael McAllister

  1. Michael McAllister
    The reason I chose the discretionary spending chart is because it gives an idea of how legislators currently in Congress allocate the money, whereas total spending includes spending predicated on decisions from previous administrations.
  2. Michael McAllister
    The connection is that funds for these other interests have to come from somewhere. This usually means reducing funding from things like education and healthcare in order to offset corporate tax cuts.
  3. Michael McAllister
    I assumed you were in favor of single-payer because you like your government healthcare coverage. Nothing wrong with that.
  4. Michael McAllister
    Well, if you flip that on its head, the US government theoretically does not have the right to snoop on private conversations without a warrant. The Patriot Act says otherwise. Unauthorized access of online databases is quite common these days. The integrity of the vote is one of the most important things to a free and open society. Putting so much of this data in the cloud seems like a disaster waiting to happen.
  5. Michael McAllister
    So if a congressman gets a ton of money from Lockheed Martin or GE, where is the incentive to provide better healthcare? If you're old and broken, those companies can just push you aside and recruit younger soldiers.
  6. Michael McAllister
    Where you think senators and congressmen get all of their campaign donations from?
  7. Michael McAllister
    I can only speak from my experience. Medicare in its current form isn't great but at least I can get the care I need. When I was younger and on my parents private insurance, they tried every excuse in the book not to pay for care, or they would only cover part of it and not the rest, effectively making treatment impossible. When there is a profit motive to deny coverage, the patient suffers. What you have noted is a government bureaucracy that largely takes its marching orders from private interests—pharmaceutical companies, fossil fuel industries, defense contractors, and on it goes. These industries have no incentive to care about the people they harm because the end goal is to make profit. I do not believe this particular email chain is the worst offender, but it does show the power structure between the tech industry and government. Other emails are certainly far worse but are not appropriate for this forum. You are correct, but those particular emails are not relevant to this forum.
  8. Michael McAllister
    Again, it doesn't seem like we disagree. The VA is an excellent program that deserves more funding.
  9. Michael McAllister
    The Veterans Administration is a government-funded program which is paid for by tax dollars. It is a single-payer program in that the government funds it. Medicare is also government-funded. Where's the disagreement here?
  10. Michael McAllister
    How is that BS? Back in the day, the Democrats did indeed try to appeal to racist white southern voters so where do we disagree?
  11. Michael McAllister
    You're a conservative in favor of single-payer healthcare then? Rare to hear that. Awesome!
  12. Michael McAllister
    In the day of Lincoln, Democrats and Republicans were essentially the exact opposite of what they are now. Also, debates were very organic. There was no moderator and they often took place in the town square. Questions were not given in advance, nor was the event orchestrated by a giant corporate entity.
  13. Michael McAllister
    There's plenty of propaganda on both sides. A system which forces the constituency to choose between two terrible options creates this false dichotomy of good cop, bad cop. Lincoln and Washington would be considered left in comparison to modern-day neocons. In contemporary politics, the line between left and right politicians has all but merged. It's the will of corporations versus everyone else (oligarchy).
  14. Michael McAllister
    Over the past few weeks, WikiLeaks, known for releasing information and communications of some of the most powerful government players, has been releasing daily dumps from the compromised email account of Hillary Clinton's campaign chair, John Podesta. In a new email release (ID 37262), it has been revealed that Google's Eric Schmidt detailed a rough draft back in 2014 to use the cloud (big data) to create a system in which to aggregate voter information. Excerpt: Depending on how much data Google intends to aggregate, this may not be an issue. That being said, with the number of data breaches increasing in recent months, this really gives me pause. I have mixed things about this. As a geek, I love the idea of things being more connected and the ease of access to information. How can I be assured that the data will be restricted in certain ways? How many different eyes will see the information? I've donated to candidates this election, so will third parties be able to hand this information off to Google at their leisure? Given that a number of states use electronic voting machines, will Google somehow have access to this information? What are your thoughts?
  15. Michael McAllister
    Bitter sweet. It was fun, Vessel.
  16. Michael McAllister
    Haven't been able to watch CSF in a while. Too much content. @LinusTech should consider turning the CSF Patreon into a LMG page that encompasses everything, so every viewer knows it exists. It's unrealistic to expect every viewer to watch every video on every LMG YouTube channel. Some viewers might only watch Techquickie or WAN Show for example. Those viewers would never see the Patreon mention.
  17. Michael McAllister
    @LinusTech Respectfully, you're completely wrong about Patreon. I, and possibly others, had no idea Channel Super Fun has a Patreon page because it is never mentioned. Ever. Start mentioning it and people will support it. You are overthinking it. A Patreon for all things LMG merely needs one tier. Jim Sterling does this and people love it! Try $10,475/month (current when this was written) love just for producing content. No promise of t-shirts or giveaways. Patreon is an option, not a requirement. People like options. Give them options.
  18. Michael McAllister
    Source?
  19. Michael McAllister
    Considering that you're a self-identified libertarian, it's extremely odd that you are so ready and willing to accept a simple "the FBI says" so it must be true approach. If WikiLeaks is releasing forged documents, and knowingly so, that's obviously unacceptable to anyone that cares about the truth. If the FBI has evidence that they are forged, why don't intelligence officials give us a link to WikiLeaks and the "real" documents to compare the two? Surely, they want to quash misinformation, right? I'm not saying that the FBI is never right or they're always nefarious. What I am saying is that US intelligence agencies are not shy about lying here or there to do damage control. I do not blindly accept their word on this because they could easily disprove this by showing their own documents. I don't suspect they will do that, however.
  20. Michael McAllister
    I looked at your links and all of them, except for the Wired link, talk about the Sidney Blumenthal drama. There have been some mainstream outlets that have linked to supposed forgeries, but those have come from the dailynewsbin. I've said this before on other sites but I'll reiterate here. If any of these false documents are proven to be disseminated by WikiLeaks, not a third-party attributing them to WikiLeaks, the appropriate legal action can be taken. Writing or providing false documents which are potentially damaging to a person's character is libel. A third-party website saying WikiLeaks forged documents is not the same as linking to the documents in question.
  21. Michael McAllister
    The Sidney Blumenthal documents were taken out of context and misattributed by Sputnik News. The author quickly realized his mistake but it already went viral. This article by Cassandra Fairbanks explains what happened.
  22. Michael McAllister
    $50. Even more absurd!
  23. Michael McAllister
    Yeah. Right. $299.95 / month
  24. Michael McAllister
    Honestly, for $50 extra month, you might just be better off upgrading to a business-class account. No bandwidth caps and you get priority whenever there is an outage or other service problem. If I'm not mistaken, the customer service works differently as well. You can actually talk to domestic customer service representatives.
  25. Michael McAllister
    You have to log into your XFINITY account. There should be a services tab. Click Internet and that should give you a link to a usage meter.
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