"The fact that authorities initially lied and denied this was the case as part of the agenda to hastily install scanners after the staged Christmas bombing incident was clearly a case of mass public deception and one of the primary reasons why the scanners need to be removed now."
Seems like he makes a convincing argument to me. Basically it boils down to:
1. California can't afford to pay promised pensions.
2. Public pensions are far more generous than similar private sector retirement options.
I'd like to know:
Are the facts as presented correct? Any errors or misleading statements? If not, then the governor's argument is very strong.
A Republican attacking size of government is par for the course. He assails unions, also par for the course for a Republican. Is he also ignoring special pro-business,anti-tax interest groups that influence his side of the aisle (also par for the course). Having said that, seems to me that assuming his facts are straight that changes are needed.
Personal bias:
Except for first responders, my own perception of government employees is one of rude, under-skilled and self-entitled people who unlike private sector employees don't have to worry about: customer satisfaction, providing value, increasing sales or the company's profitability. In fact, just as an example anecdote, when I was in the military, my experience was that one had to spend as much of the allotted budget or else next year's budget would be smaller. So at the end of the year we ordered a bunch of useless shit we didn't need, created fake orders etc just so we could spend enough to match our budget. The focus wasn't on reducing spending. Seems like government employees fill up some allotted headcount by breathing air, and maybe get some work done sometimes.
I realize that my personal bias is probably wrong, which is why it's called a 'bias.'
What's the draw for an engineer to work at Google these days? Seems like you'd be a small toad in a gigantic pond where your ripples make little impact. Kind of like working at Oracle or IBM or Microsoft or <Big Software Company>. Except there are those dumb bikes all around the campus. Yet still there seems to be this perception there is something 'special' about working at Google that sets it apart from any of the other places, isn't there? The emperor has no clothes? It's not like you're going to get any wealthier from options there than you would at any other relatively same sized company.
Whatever variation may exist, carbon dating has been independently verified via other dating means such as coral ring formations and dendrochronology. Unless whatever is having an effect on carbon dating also affects these other, unrelated, forms of dating in the exact same way we can expect the variation to be small and not significant enough to upend everything we know. The evidence that our dating mechanisms work is undeniable - tectonic movement, linguistic evidence of language dispersion, physiological changes in species and their geographical distribution, etc etc all happen at predictable rates and all match up with what we know about our dating methods.
Really, creationists should be better suited applying their ultra-skepticism at the much larger gaps in evidence and analysis found in their own ideas. The thing about people who value science is that whenever data presents a challenge we have to account for it, unlike the idiot creationists who only embrace data when it agrees with their already pre-conceived ideas.
There's nothing to be terrified of. Just live your life and do your best. If you're going to live your entire life with fear about retirement or debt, then by the time you reach retirement age you'll have lived most of your life in fear. Which is worse? Working during retirement age or living the vast majority of your life in fear? If things get really really bad you can always put a hole in your head or jump off a bridge. So don't worry about it. Just work hard, enjoy your life, and be happy if you want to be.
I swear I thought those words would get edited out by someone else at Cloudkick. I wrote that half jokingly and I guess it made into the actual blog post. :P
It has nothing to do with time travel, if you didn't care to read the article, why care to comment.
Also you can probably only know the future of different, possible similar timelines. Whatever changes you make in those other timelines will not affect your own. You can alter their future but not your own, otherwise you can alter causality. I don't know if altering causality makes any sense.
I don't think you read my comment carefully enough (could be my fault, I may not have been very clear). Just to clarify, unless nobody ever runs Diane's program ever again on their own quantum machine there are an infinite number of Dianes and Tommys not seeing the black hole behind them even though they are also simulations, and they would not know it one way or the other but odds are they could guess they are in a simulation and would more than likely be right.
The funny thing is that, given in the story that it is possible to simulate the universe, even the top level Timmy and Diane can't be certain that they are not in a simulation, only that they are at the top of that particular line of simulations involving them. Imagine that when they publish this paper and others try Diane's program out on their own quantum computer, they will also create infinite simulations, which all also simulate this account of Diane and Timmy creating simulations at a previous point. In each of those infinite simulations of others running Diane's program there will be an infinite number of simulated Dianes and Timmys experiencing themselves as top level in the occurrence described in this story (not seeing the black ball behind them). Basically if the universe can be simulated, we are probably all in a simulation.