somebody has a crush!

Sorry, don't know how to play this video :(
http://www.vimeo.com/29906321

I hope they're all released quickly so they can get right back out & protest.

yeah, the more i read about this protest and what exactly they are about the less i can get behind it. i do fervently support their right to protest and i really do think the way the police have been handling this has been some B.S. but as for the content of the protest...meh.

http://www.jpmorganchase.com/corporate/Home/article/ny-13.htm

Sure is blatant.

I don't oppose the idea nor the means of peaceful protesting, but frankly I question the point. At best it's symbolic. I think any sensible person realizes that the corporations and politicians are going to just sit back and avoid making waves until the protests are finally exhausted. Then it'll be back to business as usual. Frankly, if they wanted to affect change, they would not only need protesting on the order of at least ten times the number right now, but they'd need to affect voting significantly.

To be honest, I think the most exciting idea for "revolution" would be a successful third political party. One that comes out of left field and not only takes the presidency but grabs majority seating in Congress. Of course, that's a pipe dream right now, but it's fun to dream.

Go Bernie, it's your birthday!

http://current.com/shows/countdown/videos/occupy-wall-street-bernie-sanders-celebrates-protests-calls-for-real-wall-street-reform

Revolution is only impossible because you & so many others think it is. Do you really think that there aren't hundreds or thousands of people involved in these protests that aren't just as skeptical as you? These people see a multitude of problems & many of them don't know what to do about it so they're expressing their dissatisfaction in the only way that they know how. Many of them saw their "hope & change" get flushed down the toilet with Obama & now they've discovered that voting is a joke.

honestly i dont think revolution is impossible. i am just really not sure i want any part of this future these people want to build. yes a better future for veryone is a great and inviting enterprise. however there is a massive divide amongst the citizenry as to what that that means and how to get there, from step one!

there are reallyony two things i can strongly agree with so far with this movement, corperations should not be considerd as people, and the bedroom antics between the government and business need to end.

Gaaaaaahhhh.

Seriously? I can't believe they actually plaster this on the net for all to see. The arrogance of those *******s, trying to play it off as some noble cause. What's worse is your average Joe with his head up his ass will see it that way.

A donation of 4.6 million to pay for 1000 laptops, or, $4600 per laptop. http://www.fdc.net.nz/productsandservices/itemdetails.asp?itemid=275591 Seems like a lot of machine for writing speeding tickets.

They're probably Toughbooks with car mounts, extensive warranties, and network service crap. So they're highly unlikely to be that tripped out.

Or it's just a blatant bribe and won't be used for what they say it will.

Or it could've happened a couple months ago (in June) like people are starting to report and you are jumping to conclusions. People just dug this **** up and are plastering it all over like it happened now. Jesus christ. This Occupy Wall Street protest is getting into fox news level territory of hilarity.

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-06-03/scene-last-night-perelman-bon-jovi-at-new-city-police-foundation-s-gala.html

Or such a large sum given publicly would have a significantly easy paper trail to trace and thus could be even casually identified as legitimate. All it'd take is a "let's see the invoice" + "let's see the new car installations". Woh, that was hard to prove!

Nah man!!! you guys are buying into the cover-up man!!! its a conspiracy man!

"Because revolution -- armed uprising--requires not only dissatisfaction but aggressiveness. A revolutionist has to be willing to fight and die -- or he is just a parlour pink. If you separate out the aggressive ones and make them the sheep dogs, the sheep will never give you trouble."

The conspiracy theorists would merely say that they were buying insurance in case something like this happened. It isn't much of a leap when you take protests & rioting around the world in to consideration (much of which started before this donation). Maybe they took the predictions that this sort of thing was likely to happen in the U.S. more seriously than we did.

I personally think that it's a waste of time trying to surmise "why" they did this. Conjecture doesn't really strengthen the case of either side.

As we know from studying even our own history, aggressiveness often followed peaceful protest, if grievances were serious enough to warrant it. I'm obviously not saying that this will necessarily turn aggressive. I'm skeptical because of our complacency. However, we certainly have a long history of aggressiveness.

Ahhhh, screw it. I'm now supporting a revolution of any kind. I don't have to see eye to eye with them to agree that something is rotten, and the quicker this house of cards collapses the sooner every one can get about the business of rebuilding, hopefully with a stronger foundation.

A revolution would be very, very bad. We would have to completely remove corporations from any sort of power first, or all we'll do is sweep out the government and leave them in it's place.

That would be, by definition, a reformist outcome, not a revolutionary one.



Reminds me of the Che quote (or seemingly attributed quote) "Let's be realists, let's do the impossible"



Well considering that "Wall St" is the target of this movement, I would say that's first on the agenda: removing corporate rule over society

i dont think it even needs to be a successful revolution, the people in power just need to see it.

Oh my GOD!!!! Its like they don't WANT to be taken seriously!

Here is a list of their (proposed)demands right from the occupy wall St website:
http://occupywallst.org/forum/proposed-list-of-demands-for-occupy-wall-st-moveme/

This is some radical fruitcake ****!

yeesh...


edit: that's just one member of the site posting that... read the comments

That list isn't that radical. It's more akin to something you would find in a social democratic party in the European mainstream actually

ah! i didnt notice that was just ONE guys work. thanks for pointing that out. i feel a little better about this.



you mean like the way Spain, Italy and Greece are set up??

Guys nuts. But I agree with him on the infrastructure point...

First, that is a forum post, so that doesn't accurately paint what the movement is trying to achieve.

But yes, I have come across that, and it is absolutely hilarious. I really want to give the benefit of the doubt to the protestors and say that this isn't what they believe. This is just a shining example of gross ignorance. Seriously, 20/hr minimum wage. 100% taxes/tariffs on imported goods. Debt forgiveness for all. Every economist must be just peeing their pants right now from laughter. ANYBODY who thinks those first two are good ideas should be barred from ever talking about the economy.

Why not point out the countries that are doing relatively well (considering)? Besides, the U.S. isn't doing that great either (thus is why there are protests in over 50 cities).

Imposing tariffs isn't necessarily bad, as long as you make a distinction between compensating for foreign government policies and labor market protectionism. The free market cannot compensate for externalities, but artificially increasing the prices of imports would expose those costs to consumers. Raising the minimum wage is a bad idea because it will only drive inflation.

Universal single-payer healthcare system is good for the economy for a lot of reasons. The American private system is enormous, expensive and inefficient. Insurance companies dictate acceptable procedures to doctors and require expensive, unreasonably detailed accounting. Doctors face more personal risk and need to sacrifice more of their income to malpractice insurance and settlements. Furthermore, health insurance premiums have been increasing drastically since 2007, with simultaneous decreases in coverage; health insurance is becoming a truly debilitating cost of employment, driving unemployment in sectors where health insurance is an expected benefit. Private healthcare significantly increases the risk of business and recreational travel to the United States. Private healthcare expenses are the #1 cause of bankruptcy and debt foreclosure in the United States.

Guaranteed living wage income is a terrible idea.

Free college education would be a horrible waste of resources. It's already a horrible waste of resources. The majority of jobs do not require a college education.

A fast-track process to end the waste of fossil fuels is good. Unfortunately, the only efficient alternative energy source is nuclear fission.

Infrastructure spending would be good.

Ecological restoration would be good. Decommissioning all of America's nuclear power plants would be good if and only if the plants are then replaced with safer and more efficient nuclear power plants.

Racial and gender equal rights amendment might be good, it's come up before (and passed congress, but wasn't ratified.)

Open borders migration is a terrible idea.

Electoral accountability is a good idea.

Debt forgiveness might be a good idea. Realistically, most of the debt floating around today is never going to be repaid. It's a total house of cards. There are an awful lot of delinquent debts, but the banks aren't acting on them because it would look bad on their quarterlies. Annihilating this debt would allow debtors to gain at least some utility from their purchase, and it would allow investors to see how much money the financial companies have actually lost.

Outlawing credit reporting agencies is a terrible idea.

Laws protecting collective action are a good idea.

While I understand that relying SOLELY on any one other alternative energy source for major power needs is not nearly as effective as nuclear, and while I understand that solar has a very low energy conversion rate (something like 5-10% I think?), I fail to understand why something like solar can't be more widely implemented apart from political ones. From everything I know, solar generally pays for its initial cost after 5-10 years and then...free, practically limitless energy. It's not like power can't be STORED for when there's a cloudy day (a reason why solar-powered flashlights are actually useful). I just fail to understand why implementing something like solar is such a terrible idea, especially in conjunction with other sources.

Production plants are fairly cheap to build. They use a huge fresnel lens to focus sunlight on a core, usually molten sodium iirc, and use the heat to drive a steam turbine. The problem is that it uses up a ton of land, so the only reasonable place to build the plant is where the land quality is low, like in the desert, but it makes cooling/condensation less efficient and it makes the water more expensive and/or environmentally harmful.

It's also not practical to store the energy in meaningful quantities; the few appropriate battery technologies still require too much room, cost too much money, and have memory. Capacitors are too inefficient.

Photovoltaic is lol.

I was thinking more along the lines of sticking panels on top of houses and such, but at least now I know why for the major power plants!

Putting panels on houses is definitely practical in some places, e.g. California, where loads peak during the sunniest parts of the day. You don't even need to store the excess power in this case, just dump it onto the grid and let apartment buildings have the excess.

They're already doing this, though, and it takes something like 6-8 years to break even (not including whatever time you spend cleaning them off.) Good luck paying off a solar panel in 6-8 years in the Pacific Northwest!

This is pretty cool if you've got 10 minutes to spare.

No, I mean more along the lines of the health care system in the UK, the Welfare state of Sweden, etc.

Those are what us Leftists call "reformist" ideologies, not revolutionary or radical ones. Not that revolutionaries aren't involved in this thing of course.

Anyway this is a development: [h=1]Citing Police Trap, Protesters File Suit[/h]http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/05/nyregion/citing-police-trap-protesters-file-suit.html

Isn't the city bus service suing them too? Goddamn what a huge waste of tax dollars the NYPD is engaged in. Oh wait no JPMorgan made sure they have enough money.

ah, ok. thought you were refering to the whole shabang, like the guaranteed living wages of 20$/hr regardless of employment and completely open borders combined with doing away with free trade...

I said right in the text you quoted, that those (common knowledge) experiments demonstrate certain broad problems inherent with authority. However, they in no way demonstrate that all implementations of authority systems are strongly susceptible to this behavior, and it would be highly dishonest, and quite frankly stupid to claim this. It certainly does not support your thesis that all police are terrible people on power trips.




What did I say about single cases. Have you never heard of a part to whole fallacy? Demonstrating that one implementation is bad does not prove that all are. This is like saying that because the I-35W Mississippi River bridge collapsed, all bridges are inherently flawed. This is bad reasoning on a very, very obvious and fundamental level.



I never said it was a great source, it's just the best we have (that I know of), and it is sufficient for the very broad point I was making. I certainly would not use it to compare individual rankings, but it's reasonable to use for making very broad observations.



What the hell are you talking about? It is completely reasonable to say that people of all cultures don't like it when they are taken advantage of by corrupt authority figures. This effects all person's safety, regardless of how well they conform to the culture's ideals. There will be differences, but in this case we are talking in terms so broad that they can be treated as a constant. Moral anything-ism is not relevant. We are simply describing how well a system (a police force) can accomplish a more or less universal goal (enforcing law with out abusing that authority on a personal level beyond the prescription of the law.) The example of protesters in China is not at all relevant because those policemen were acting entirely in accordance with the law. The nature of that law is an entirely a different matter, and much more strongly culturally dependent.



Oh good, so so you've decided to life your life around a bunch of rules haphazardly derived from a pseudo-Abrahamic culture rather then think of ways reasonably satisfy the inherent humans needs and desires you already had naturally built into you. And what is the result? You've managed to have standards so unreasonable that you are outraged at any possible implementation of a society. Great job.

I mean, I can agree that I don't at all like police corruption and incompetence, and I am angered by it on a case to case basis, just as I am saddened by the fact that people die in car accidents. However I am not outraged at the system, because it is not reasonable to expect ideal performance from a system, nor is it wise to shoot for ideal performance in most cases.