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This makes me SICK...absolutey SICK! There REALLY is no hope for America if THIS is a random sample example of our educators today... Gee, thanks, Mr. Vice Principal...you may have just scared off another Abert Einstein or Stephen Hawking by your Neanderthal approach to academics... Life really is survival of the fittest, and I think I hear America's fat lady singing... Shame on you...

I haven't had a chance to test drive this, but I'd like to have a house in the mountains with an elevated room overlooking the woods with huge screened windows that open wide. I would open the windows wide ('cept for the winter) and get a slight sweet breeze and hear the sounds of birds chirping.

Funny you should mention... this is exactly where I live (and I work from home), about 35 miles SW of Denver.

Slight kink in the plans... I live at 9500 ft elevation, and it's only warm enough to have the windows open for a couple months of the year. At night they usually have to be closed, even in summer.
There is an adequate selection of birds - hummingbirds, Stellars Jays, miscellaneous robin and sparrow-like species, etc. But the squirrels make more noise than the birds. (They're little black ones about 1/2 the size of a regular squirrel - Abert's squirrel I think they are).

One of the unexpected oddities up here - it's so deadly quiet that noises you'd never notice in a city are very audible. A dog barking a mile away, Harleys on the 4-lane road 6 miles away, the bear plodding across the deck - all very audible. Whether that works for you or not depends on you. I don't care for those kind of sounds, but they're infrequent enough to not be much of a problem.

I've been known to take the laptop out on the deck a time or 10. Have to stay in the shade though because the sun's so bright. The biggest hazard is a hummingbird zipping by - scares the crap out of you for a second, at first it sounds like a condor-size bee coming after you.

Then there's the 42 inches of snow we got this weekend...

Pardon the intrusion, I just wanted to point out that 0% unemployment would be a VERY BAD thing. You don't need to be an economist to understand this, you just have to use some logic.

Bad thing for whom? Certainly NOT for the workers!

Zero percent unemployment implies that there is always a spare job out there instantly available for anyone that needs it, with each employer automatically hiring all applicants regardless of their qualifications. This sounds good on the surface. As employees we all like to have the boss desperate for our labor. But zero unemployment also means that workers are so desperate to find a new job that they will instantly grab the first one available. They aren't willing to spend time looking for the best job.

Or, alternatively, that all jobs pay equally well- and that there is no reason to be idle.

To me, zero percent unemployment sounds an awful lot like slavery. Actually worse than slavery, as the employers are equally bound in this dystopia. I don't know what the ideal unemployment rate is or even if there is one, but I know for sure it isn't zero percent. That's just fantasy.

Depends on how you think about it- slavery can be a form of freedom. Think about how much time you waste *every week* just looking for a way to live. That's a huge drain on your productivity and happiness. Now think instead if you could be assured of a way to live regardless of what mistakes you make- thus enabling you to make more mistakes. As any successfull individual knows, the secret of success is NOT BEING AFRAID TO MAKE MISTAKES!

Having said that- even socialists agree that 2%-4% unemployment is best, and while I'd like to see 0% unemployment, I say we should close our borders to new immigrants any time unemployment is above 4%. The rest will take care of itself.

If you're not their venture capitalist, or [cough] investing in their stocks, then you're not paying for their failures at all.

If you're an employee- you're betting YOUR future on THEIR success- and you're investing your time and work in their company. You're going to get hurt far more than the Venture Capitalist will when they fail. If the Venture Capitalist feels it at all- most skim enough off the top of the funds they manage for a quite comfortable lifestyle.

It's quite simple really. Their poor employees might be unemployed after the company goes belly up, but they still had their wages.

Which these days aren't even enough to live on anyway- so they go into debt working on promises from the employer that they will have future work. When that promise fails to materialize, personal bankruptcies soar.

Sidenote: criminal abberations like Enron belong to a completely different topic. Their employees were the victims of criminal acts and not victims of a non-marxist economic system.

Ah, but as I posted in my journal, Enron wasn't the abertation, but rather is the rule of how all corporations act. They were just stupid enough to get caught. And in fact, by putting profit and cost as the kings of business- Enron is the inevitable end of any publically traded corporation. GUARANTEED.

Did you mean seibert?

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