SteveLAnderson
A lightweight markup language is designed to for the user to quickly write something, and most of them have been designed with the goal of having programmers document their work without having to learn a complicated tool. If you need to write extensions for a lightweight markup language, you're using it wrong.
For anything more than that, I'd use something designed for technical documentation (DITA and DocBook come to mind).
Lightweight markup languages seem easy, and, in the beginning they are, but over time, as revisions pile up and more people work on it and you find you have more requirements than you thought you had, they become a huge hassle. You spend more time fiddling than writing. There's a reason professional writers tend to use richer tools - they make their jobs easier and they make the result better.
If your only experience with government employees is asking them to provide service to you, then all you can comment on is how effective they were at doing that job. You cannot know what their general competence level is, nor can you know how they'd do outside of government employ, because you don't know what their job actually entails. I'll give you a hint, though - it's a lot more then helping you.
Even if you've worked for a government agency, which sounds unlikely based on your most recent post, you've only seen a tiny sliver of government employees. You can talk about the competence of that tiny sliver if you care to, but not all government employees.
Look, I get it, it's easy to complain about government workers. It's like complaining that all used car salesmen and mechanics are crooks. Using it in an attempt to prove a point though, is foolish, and that's exactly what you did.
It's true that Sen. Lieberman, in coordination with Sen. Snowe, threatened a filibuster. At the time, Sen. Lieberman was an independent, not a Democrat. So, it was an independent and a Republican.
I know that's splitting hairs, but these are valid hairs to split.
You see, the GOP continually promised, on one hand, to tie the ACA up in legislative hurdles so it couldn't pass, or, on the other hand, vote for it if it met their requirements.
So, foolishly it turned out, the Democrats played ball with the GOP. In the end, the GOP still did everything they could to block it and voted against it en masse.
I think the error was that the Democrats believed the GOP would vote for the bill if they changed it enough. It was naive.
According to "Homicide in California 2013" (https://oag.ca.gov/sites/all/files/agweb/pdfs/cjsc/publicati...) Table 21, in 2013, there were 1,699 homicide crimes where the type of weapon used was a firearm.
That's just crime data, it doesn't include suicides.
Am I reading this wrong or is the data way off or is it indicating some other kind of firearm violence?
It was hard to learn, though, and the documentation wasn't good.
I think I'll trust Brookings.
"The evidence suggests that the program did indeed incentivize the sale of more fuel efficient vehicles by pulling sales forward from the near-term future. This resulted in a small and short-lived increase in production, GDP, and job creation. However, the implied cost per job created was much higher than alternative fiscal stimulus policies. ... The CARS program led to a slight improvement in fuel economy and some reduction in carbon emissions. The cost per ton of carbon dioxide reduced from the program suggests that the program was not a cost-effective way to reduce emissions, although was more cost effective than some other environmental policies, such as the tax subsidy for electric vehicles or the tax credit for ethanol."
They aren't saying it was great, but they are not saying it was a failure or that it harmed the industry.
There's tons of waste in any large organization. In my experience, private companies have more waste (resources and personnel) then public organizations as they have much less oversight.
Tell that to the departments that are getting $1.1T less over an 8 year period.
Between the sequestration and the lack of budget increases, the US has been going through a period of federal austerity.
And for the US - http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/crime/2013/1...
When Australia decreased the number of guns, the suicide rate (not just gun related suicides, but all suicides) decreased by 65%.
"Obama Encryption Policy Rejects Laws Mandating Backdoors"
The Obama administration is rejecting mandated backdoors. That's what the headline says and it's completely correct.
The rest of your comment is correct; they aren't rejecting backdoors, just rejecting making them mandatory.
No doubt it can be hard to process, but that doesn't mean it's not a case of zero sum mentality.
Left wing voters more often are in it for the long haul. They cringe when someone says something stupid, but they don't react with pitchforks and torches.
That's why there's never been a left wing Rush. It just doesn't work.