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Comment by sc00ter | Hacker News Reader

Your tax dollars at works.

Please tell me that you weren't educated in the United States. I can't understand how else someone could misunderstand such a fundamental concept of our election process.

Ah, yes, because somehow wasting all that money on an election campaign is okay so long as it is voluntary taxation. Then I remember that this is the same group of intellectuals that voted up "Star Trek-like computer with voice interface" (a 15 line mashup that is neither a computer, nor Star Trek-like) to the top of HN. God bless America.

Do you actually think this is how taxes work?

Also the same group that created Y Combinator, Hacker News, and the Internet. If you don't like it, you can see yourself out.

We created the Internet?

Al Gore is American :)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARPAnet

This comment fails on many levels. Here is another:

If this was our tax dollars at work[0], I would say it's a good investment since it worked and got Obama elected. By contrast, Romney's online infrastructure (ORCA), which in the context of this comment can be interpreted a non-tax dollars (i.e. private money) crashed on election day, and Romney did not get elected.

I would rather have my tax dollars spent on something that works than have something privately funded that doesn't work.

[0] which it's totally not, the campaign was entirely funded by matching donations and Obama did not participate in the federal election money scheme.

No, just campaign dollars.

If by tax dollars you mean the money that I willfully donated to President Obama's campaign; then by all means, yes, my “tax dollars.”

Campaigns in America aren't publicly funded (that is, they aren't funded by tax money). The money to build this and to run the rest of Obama's campaign was raised by the campaign itself.

The only part our tax dollars paid for was the DARPA research that made all that technology possible. The rest was financed by campaign contributions. The Obama campaign refused public funding.

This was made by Amazon.

Amazon hosted all these servers for free?

All of you should know that this was paid with campaign dollars, not government funds. To pretend otherwise is an incredible indictment of our education system and an example of the assault on k-12 civics courses.

You severely misunderstood my comment.

That was a literal question, not rhetorical or sarcastic. I'm well aware of the difference between campaign funds and tax dollars.

nness didn't make it clear as to what "This" was in his "This was made by Amazon" so I was trying to get more detail to determine if "This" was just the picture or of "This" was the entire infrastructure. I was just curious if Amazon ran this farm for free.

We have K-12 civics courses?

We used to at least. I had classes about government every year from 7th to 12th. If we don't anymore, that is very disturbing.

I attended school in USA grades 7 - 11 and I did not have a civics class. Is civics part of the standard curriculum?

Texas public school, we studied government in the 12th year.

That explains Texas in a nutshell. ;)

Yeah, with the size of government now, you need half the school day dedicated to civics K-12. The Obama crowd would love that.

CA public school. Same.

Thank you. I dropped out in the 11th grade (went to college) which explains why I missed civics in the 12th. (I went to school in California.)

I caught up recently by drilling my Aussie wife for her US Citizen civics test - she learned all 100 questions by heart.

I made her Web flash cards, too: http://www.verticalsysadmin.com/US.html

I dropped out of college, too. Now I don't have an EDUCATION section on my resume. Plenty of work experience though.

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