I'm not sure how it works here. We have intersections where there are signs telling use not to block the intersection, but I don't know if that's because there's something legally special about the intersection, or if they've simply had a problem with that in the past.
I.e, they might be like those goofy 'No passing on double yellow lines' signs I sometimes come across. I always say 'No shit, really?' They put those up because that's a place that, apparently, people were passing on double yellow. Not because it's suddenly illegal in that area.(1)
OTOH, we do have places where a big yellow X is painted on the ground, but those aren't generally at traffic lights...they'd at places in the line for a traffic light, to let traffic into and out of side roads. (Usually parking lots for corner stores.)
I also was under the impression you're not supposed to block any intersection, and they put that paint on the ground to remind you only at certain places, but it could be there's also an additional penalty there.
1) Same with trucks that have signs saying they're not responsible for object coming up from the road. I always wondered if I could disclaim responsibility from thing just by putting up an sign. 'This vehicle not responsible for colliding with other vehicles.' Then I learned that no one is responsible for stuff their car might throw up from the road, and they just have those signs up to stop people from bitching. (That, if their vehicle is within the law, like with mudflaps on trucks. They'd be responsible if they didn't have them, like you'd be responsible if your exhaust pipe was dragging on the ground throwing up gravel.)
OTOH, people are responsible for any stuff whatsoever that falls out of their vehicle and hits yours, despite the fact that a few trucks try to disclaim responsibility for that.
But...but...if we required people to actually spend time, instead of paying fines, when in violation of the law, that would punish the rich as much as the poor!
Seriously, I'm of the opinion that no offenses, at all, should have a fine as punishment. Period.
You instead get some bullshit community service. For a $50 fine, you show up at the local courthouse, get handed a sponge and bucket, and and told to wash the mirrors in the bathroom for an hour. Doesn't really matter if you actually clean it or not, the point is you sign in, waste an hour of your life, and sign out. Total fucking busywork, and everyone knows it.
If there's no work to do, you sit quietly in a chair...and by 'sit', I mean sit, without a book or cellphone. You get a pencil to play with. (In case of emergencies, you can get the person in charge to take your calls...and it will reset your time owed if you leave.)
Of course, I have no problem with the idea of being forced to take a class, either. That works for stuff that's broad enough to offer a class in. As long as we make it clear the purpose of the class isn't to actually 'teach' people, and it shouldn't be judged by that...it's to bore the hell out of people and waste their time. So they stop breaking the law.
If we actually do need to have fines, they should be X% of your monthly income after taxes. (Or, rather, X% the amount your net worth went up, no 'Those are capital gains, not income' bullshit.) 20 over the speed limit, you get fined 5% of your monthly income. $100 for someone who makes $2000 a month after taxes. Bill Gates, OTOH, would be fined about $2500. (Assuming I've estimated his monthly income after taxes correctly at about $50,000
Before anyone would suggest this is unfair or whatever, it's already how we do bail, along with a lot of other completely subjective stuff.
This would result in, hilariously, cops following the rich around writing down every violation of the law, attempting to get them on infinitesimal 1% violations while ignoring poor people blatantly breaking the law, so there's no possibility it would ever happen. (Nor would that actually be a good idea.)
Besides, people who run a red light because they aren't paying attention are going to run the red whether there's a camera there or not.
Yeah, this has always confused me too.
Twice in my life, that I know of, I've run a red light. Both times I realized I was doing so during the event. Once when I realized I had just completely ignored the traffic light the tiny side-street had, and the other, when stopped at a red light, I misread a green turn light as a normal green light and went straight, to the annoyance of people in the other direction trying to turn left.
And once or twice I've probably hit the very very start of red light when trying to make a yellow, although I, like most people, know roughly how long a yellow lasts, and I err on the side of stopping.
The first two of those were lack-of-attention accidents, and unlikely to be deterred with cameras. Any of the latter would be deterred, but, OTOH, the lights should be timed to actually have a delay between red in one direction and green in the other...someone coming through a second late shouldn't actually endanger anyone.
Are there really people who knowingly run red lights? Or, rather, are there really people who knowingly run red lights in front of other people? (As opposed to coming across them in the middle of nowhere and not bothering to wait when there's no traffic for miles. Which, while illegal, is also probably not that dangerous.)
In other words, while many instances of running red lights is dangerous, and many people do indeed knowingly run them, that does not mean that those two sets actually overlap to any meaningful extent. Deterring every single person we can from running red lights won't stop a single accident if most accidents happen because people weren't paying attention and didn't see the light at all.
It seems like it would be more productive to do something like lengthening the 'red in all directions' time. And adding additional warning lights for upcoming traffic lights.
The real problem is that 'productive' and 'money making' are not the same thing.
Except that they gave you a ticket for running a red light, not blocking traffic, which is an entirely different offense with a different penalty, usually lower.
People who block intersections are in violation of the law and stupid, but not as stupid as the people who knowingly run red lights. Both those action place you in the intersection when the other direction has a green, but running a red light results in you *appearing* there creating a large risk you and someone else will collide, whereas blocking an intersection from the start isn't very risky until people start deciding to go around you and ending up in the wrong lanes. (Which isn't your fault.)
Anyway, you can block an intersection and it not be your fault. Perhaps someone decided to leap in front of you via turning-right-on-red. A cop wouldn't give you a ticket for getting stranded in the intersection for that (Not that they normally give tickets for blocking intersections anyway.), they'd give the other guy a ticket for failing to yield.
Or perhaps something serious happened in your lane ahead so you had to change lanes in the intersection (Which is also illegal, but, again, not running a red light), and the other lane was full.
Entering an intersection without a reasonable expectation that you can clear the other side of it is a violation of the law. But people can't predict there future, and there are plenty of 'reasonable expectation' that are wrong. And even if you broke that law, it doesn't mean you should get a ticket for breaking an entirely unrelated law.
Even if the changes are entirely natural, shifting weather patterns and rising ocean levels are, indeed, a threat to everyone.
Not that I'm entirely sure why we would even vaguely want to listen to people who spent decades denying there was any problem at all, when they show up and explain what is causing the problem they've been denying for so long.
Especially when they show up with an explanation that just happens to mean that behavior they've been arguing for decades doesn't need to change, coincidentally still doesn't need to change.
It goes without saying that David-Thin-Cock says that he has a "special" perspective on masochism...decause David-Thin-Cock wants to deprive people of dignity and autonomy. I know because I have experienced that personally.
Hey! If you're going to tell bedroom secrets I'm not going to play this game anymore!
Similarly, David-Thin-Cock enjoys watching respectable people twist and writhe.
Okay, that's it. It's over. And 'stupendous' is an idiotic safe word.
And let us not forget that every so often, David-Thin-Cock tries giving rise to mendacious, cankered whiners.
And let us not forget that sometimes those cankered whiners can't seem to get it up no matter what I do. And, no, it doesn't happen to all men.
no one would have doubted that David-Thin-Cock finds reality too difficult to swallow. Or maybe it just gets lost between the sports and entertainment pages.
Hey, it tasted weird. I'm not ashamed, plenty of people spit it out.
David-Thin-Cock wants to clear-cut ancient forest lands.
Has David-Thin-Cock ever considered what would happen if a small fraction of his time spent trying to harvest what others have sown was instead spent on something productive?
And that, folks, is why you need to sanity check your randomly generated complaint, because an anti-environmental troll just accused me of...anti-environmentalism. Heh. Oops.
Also, something appears wrong with the cut and paste. You're losing your commas or quotes or dashes or something, words are ending up stuck together like 'destructiveeven', 'saucerwho', and 'antidisestablishmentanismpenis'.
He uses the word "stereophotogrammetry" without ever having taken the time to look it up in the dictionary.
Nonsense. I'm a member in good standing of the American Society for Photogrammetry & Remote Sensing. I'm a world-renowned researcher in the field, and have developed several methods to help solve the correspondence problem. I'm currently writing my dissertation on The Use of Recursive Algorithms in Stereoscopic Photogrammetry in Correcting Satellite Imagery.
You know, it's sorta weird that you'd assert that I 'bit the bait hard', and at the same time assert that I wasn't able to do anything than refute a few trivial things.
Hey, dumbass, refuting 'Chairman Obama' in the other thread was a joke at your expense. It wasn't me falling for your troll, it was me mocking you with the idea that you were too dumb to know Obama's actual position. Same with the grammar post!
In fact, that's pretty much all I've been doing from the start, making fun of you. You showed up at a political debate to troll and the only one responding to you is mocking your choice in shoelaces. So, yeah, nice 'success' at your 'trolling'.
I haven't even been responding to the actual content of your post until now when you broke character, ya moron.
You, however, became offended when I said you were a kid and you had to 'prove' how smart you were and how much money you made.
Insecure much? I think I actually hit a nerve there.
You, the jackboot thug of the authoritarian state would want to manipulate and control what others see.
Object doubling for emphasis, while common in other languages, is not allowed in English. To make that real English, you actually need another comma: You, the jackboot thug of the authoritarian state, would want...
...I'm so far out in front of you intellectually its simply me toying with you...
You used 'its' wrong, and that's horrible grammar. I believe you meant '...I'm so far out in front of you intellectually that it's simply me toying with you...'.
Also, I don't know why you wrote in the passive voice, especially one with the subject of an undefined 'it'. What, exactly, is 'you toying with me'? The passive voice has its place, but especially don't use it where it's hard to know what the subject is.
In this case, as you were attacking me, you shouldn't have used it at all, you should have phrased it with yourself as the subject, as that's much more forceful. Here, watch:
I'm so far out in front of you intellectually that I'm simply toying with you.
See? Doesn't that sound better and more forceful? Don't overcomplicate your sentences until you have more experience.
So if I'm yanking that kind of bank and I'm 14, I must be god's gift to mankind, to pull up a chair and listen to what you seem to think is a prodigy.
Oops, prodigy, you forgot to give that sentence a verb or subject. You have a dependent clause and then the sentence 'to pull up a chair...'. Presumably, you're wanting me to pull up a chair, but I'm not even mentioned in that sentence yet! Possibly you meant 'to mankind, you need to pull up a chair...'?
Also, if you wish to be taken seriously, don't refer to how much 'bank' you're 'yanking'. That's a very silly expression. Colloquialisms have their place in writing, but using silly ones results in other people thinking you're silly, so their use needs to be weighed against that.
Now, using what we've learned, why don't you try insulting me some more? You're already ahead of the other 6th graders, let's see if we can make your already excellent writing just a little bit better.
Wasn't one of the points of his documentary "An Inconvenient Truth" that everyone needs to do their part to conserve?
No, it was not. At all. I've watched it. The point of his documentary is convince people there's a problem and that if we ignore it we'll all in trouble. Full stop.
Now, at the end of the movie, during the credits, there's a list of 27 things you can do, which is the very first time suggestions are aimed at people instead of governments. It really isn't the point of the documentary, and it isn't Al Gore saying them, and it is during the credits.
18 of them boil down to 'talk to other people and your government leaders'. That's right, even 2/3rds of the suggestions actually aimed at viewers of the movie don't have anything to do with changing people's energy usage.
As for the rest: Three are transportation suggestions, one is planting trees, one is recycling. There are only four that are vaguely applicable to houses:
'Switch to renewable sources of energy.', which Gore does, paying a premium to do so.
'Buy energy efficient appliances & lightbulbs.', which he's stated he does, at least with CFL lights, we don't know about the rest.
So what is left that he possible doesn't do:
'Change your thermostat (and use clock thermostats) to reduce energy for heating & cooling.', which we don't know if he does.
'Weatherize your house, increase insulation, get an energy audit.', which he has done, at least in the energy audit. (And as it's a new house, it's hard to imagine it's poorly insulated.)
You'll note 'live in a smaller house' is not on that list.
Al Gore has been turned into some sort of uber-strawman by the right, where they imagine he's suggested they all live in tree houses. To recap: His presentation in the movie doesn't suggest any changes for any people to make at all, and even the tack-on-to-the-credits list of things for people to do is mostly 'make other people aware of what's happening, and make politicians aware that you're aware.'
First of all, you can't predict earthquakes, except in the case of aftershocks. We aren't 'monitoring' earthquakes to predict them, we're simply studying them to see if we can predict them, and to predict tsunamis and volcanoes.
Secondly, tsunami predictions have saved quite a lot of lives. The last disastrous tsunami, in fact, was predicted in plenty of time to help people, except that there wasn't a unified warning system for the area and that the various countries hit are still mostly third world and had no way to notify their people.
Tsunamis in general are incredibly easy to predict. You just wait for an largeish earthquake, which can easily see on semographs, and then look for swelling of the ocean at that place. It is sheer stupidity we don't have some sort of global monitoring for them. Two hours after the quake that caused the last one, four hours before it hit anywhere, radar satellites picked the damn thing up. We could easily just tie together existing systems and have fair warning of these things.
And, of course, the monitoring of Mount Pinatubo saved 10-20 thousand lives when it erupted in 1991. In total, the entire monitoring of that volcano, in the decade the US had done it, came to about 15 million dollars. (Or about the cost of having one guy from AIG work for them that entire time.)
Not 'pork', but spending directed to specific projects, as opposed to going into the general budget of an executive branch agency, are what they mean by 'earmarks'.
I.e., for Christmas, you got a 50 gift card to Barnes and Noble. An earmark would require you to spend 10 dollars of that money on a specific book.
The real joke is that the Republicans are complaining about it. Removing earmarks would simply remove Congressional restrictions on spending...
...which would, of course, let Obama decide on the spending. Or, really, let his policy directives do it.(This is, incidentally, one of the legit uses of signing statements. A bill gives the president X amount of money to use on a specific project, and when he signs the bill he divides the money into amounts for various sub-projects. He could do that with an executive order, but if he does it on the bill itself it stays with the bill.)
I find it exceptionally silly they criticized his signing a bill with earmarks in it. 'Hey, you sign a bill that required you spend money in certain ways. You promised you'd only sign bills that let you spend the money however you wanted! You liar!'. Well, maybe that's exactly the way he wanted to spend the money, who knows? Or, more importantly, who cares? He could have spent that money that way anyway.
In reality, the problem with earmarks is that they are almost always outside the budget process and hence the money is added to existing funds, not set aside from money already there, and it's not accounted for in any way. Also, they're often on very stupid things, and attached to unrelated bills, which is a general problem in both houses.
In this time of war, you're either with the President or you're against him. We can endure temporary restrictions on liberty when the terrorist threat is so strong.
Incidentally, I like how, suddenly, Republicans are worried about the government being fascist. Even ignoring the financial crisis, which is just as much an emergency as 9/11, and probably much more of one...I seem to recall that Republicans were still insisting that terrorism existed as of...well, mid-January, and that it and our wars still justified everything Bush was doing.
Well, we're still fighting those wars, and I can't imagine why terrorists would have suddenly vanished with the election of Obama. (In fact, Republicans seem to think they'd be more of a threat under him.)
We only have to get behind 'war presidents' when they're Republican, is that it? Or did you guys just forget about this 'all-important and all-encompasing war that justifies everything' the second you got out of power?
Oh, you're one of those morons who thinks Al Gore is telling you to reduce your energy use, when in fact he's never suggested anything of the sort.
Gore is attempting to cause societal changes via things like mass transit and fuel efficient cars and large-scale carbon reduction by investing in alternate energy.
I love how people just imagine that Al Gore is out there frowning at their energy usage, when in reality he could give a flying fuck as to how much energy you use.
This is, of course, ignoring the fact that the idea that Gore's house is exceptional wasteful is a deliberate lie. It's not wasteful at all for a house that size in that part of the country. It is slightly larger than other houses in that part of the country, but that's simply because he works from there.
But, hey, prove me wrong. Go ahead and point to a single example of Gore stating how individual people should cut back to reduce emissions. (And when I say 'cut back', I mean it. Suggesting people switch to CFLs is the opposite of cutting back, it's spending less money for the same thing.)
I know what you're saying, but this is something that the right seems to be ignoring. They've now switched from 'no global warming' to 'global warming is natural'...which somehow means it's fine.
Yeah, and molten lava erupting from the surface of the earth is 'natural' too. Doesn't mean we shouldn't, you know, try to stop it from melting people.
Well, I can refute something in there pretty easily: We have no one in government called 'Chairman Obama'. So pretty much any statement that mentioned 'Chairman Obama' is blatantly wrong on the face of it.
Also, why'd you include links to the 2007 and 2009 budget? Obama, neither your imaginary 'Chairman Obama' nor the actual President Obama, had anything to do with those budgets. (Well, beyond the fact he was in the Senate at that time...but the House does the budget.)
Those were just the two things that it's trivially easy to disprove and not even up for debate.
Yeah, Dodd is actually the only person who even tried to limit bonuses. He didn't magically make them legal, they obviously would be legal to start with. He tried to make illegal, and succeeded in only making future ones illegal because people amended his amendment.
I wish the media would a) point this out, and b) point to the person who started this rumor as a liar.
It used to be that lying to the media was the only true unforgivable offense. Which was sorta dumb and self-centered of them, but I really really miss those days.
The most stimulating thing (Wait, that sounds wrong.), of course, is for the government to actually hire people to do work. That right there is what got us out of the Great Depression.
Although this time we should probably spend money on trains and solar panels instead of tanks.
I think you've confused socialism and communism. You just described how things (should in theory) work under communism.
Under socialism, people still own their own property and whatnot, and the government simply operates all the means of productions. The farms, the car washes, the grocery stores, everything owned by the government...but workers still get paychecks and use them to buy stuff from those stores and live in their own house.
Although obviously there's no such thing as 'pure socialism', as there would still be limited amounts of people selling direct to each other, and working for each other. There'd be a 'used' market if nothing else. But basically, all businesses that aren't flea markets or side-of-the-road fruit stands are actually the government selling goods and services, and people working at them are employed the the government.
It's not until the next step, where the government starts giving out those goods, and services, and land, for free, and thus stops paying you (Because you don't need the money anymore), that it's 'communism'.
Banks, however, are totally irrelevant to this, as they aren't a 'means of production' in any manner whatsoever. You could have private banks in pure socialism, you could have government banks in pure capitalism. (You can't have any banks in pure communism, but that's because you don't have any money.)
Frankly, the recent calls of 'socialism' against nationalizing the banks have struck me as how ignorant the Republicans are about what 'socialism' is, or possibly about what 'banks' are. Banks do not produce things! They are not means of productions! It's like calling an national park socialist!
And now that I made that joke, I'm sure Republicans have, in fact, done that too.
And that's the point - MOST of AIG's customers were buying insurance on CDOs that they didn't even own.
Which is the other way we regulate insurance. In addition to making sure companies can make the payoffs if the worse happens, we make sure customers can only purchase insurance on things that would directly harm them financially.
Usually this means it's limited to something they own, or themselves, or, rarely, employees of them. (No, I'm not talking about health insurance. That does not pay off your employer if you get sick, although there's actually no reason such insurance couldn't exist. But I'm talking stuff like movie studios insuring the star of the picture if he dies in the middle of filming.)
Why? Because insurance is only safe for society if the harm you have to suffer to get the payout is worse than the payout. If you can insure stuff you don't care about, like your neighbor's house, you've just given people incentive to insure random things and then harm them. In fact, that's the whole point of insurance fraud, you insure something that the 'appraised' value is higher than the value you hold it in, so you have no problem with destroying it. (Or, alternately, fake destroying it.)
We, as a society, have chosen to say 'No, you can only insure stuff that would harm you more than the payout...unless, of course, you're one of the big multinational banks, in which case, feel free to invent a insurance-like product and sell that to other banks without any regulation at all.'.
At least that's what Congress has assured us we've been saying.
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I'm not sure how it works here. We have intersections where there are signs telling use not to block the intersection, but I don't know if that's because there's something legally special about the intersection, or if they've simply had a problem with that in the past.
I.e, they might be like those goofy 'No passing on double yellow lines' signs I sometimes come across. I always say 'No shit, really?' They put those up because that's a place that, apparently, people were passing on double yellow. Not because it's suddenly illegal in that area.(1)
OTOH, we do have places where a big yellow X is painted on the ground, but those aren't generally at traffic lights...they'd at places in the line for a traffic light, to let traffic into and out of side roads. (Usually parking lots for corner stores.)
I also was under the impression you're not supposed to block any intersection, and they put that paint on the ground to remind you only at certain places, but it could be there's also an additional penalty there.
1) Same with trucks that have signs saying they're not responsible for object coming up from the road. I always wondered if I could disclaim responsibility from thing just by putting up an sign. 'This vehicle not responsible for colliding with other vehicles.' Then I learned that no one is responsible for stuff their car might throw up from the road, and they just have those signs up to stop people from bitching. (That, if their vehicle is within the law, like with mudflaps on trucks. They'd be responsible if they didn't have them, like you'd be responsible if your exhaust pipe was dragging on the ground throwing up gravel.)
OTOH, people are responsible for any stuff whatsoever that falls out of their vehicle and hits yours, despite the fact that a few trucks try to disclaim responsibility for that.
I don't know why any of those things would stop our government from using them for national security reasons.
But...but...if we required people to actually spend time, instead of paying fines, when in violation of the law, that would punish the rich as much as the poor!
Seriously, I'm of the opinion that no offenses, at all, should have a fine as punishment. Period.
You instead get some bullshit community service. For a $50 fine, you show up at the local courthouse, get handed a sponge and bucket, and and told to wash the mirrors in the bathroom for an hour. Doesn't really matter if you actually clean it or not, the point is you sign in, waste an hour of your life, and sign out. Total fucking busywork, and everyone knows it.
If there's no work to do, you sit quietly in a chair...and by 'sit', I mean sit, without a book or cellphone. You get a pencil to play with. (In case of emergencies, you can get the person in charge to take your calls...and it will reset your time owed if you leave.)
Of course, I have no problem with the idea of being forced to take a class, either. That works for stuff that's broad enough to offer a class in. As long as we make it clear the purpose of the class isn't to actually 'teach' people, and it shouldn't be judged by that...it's to bore the hell out of people and waste their time. So they stop breaking the law.
If we actually do need to have fines, they should be X% of your monthly income after taxes. (Or, rather, X% the amount your net worth went up, no 'Those are capital gains, not income' bullshit.) 20 over the speed limit, you get fined 5% of your monthly income. $100 for someone who makes $2000 a month after taxes. Bill Gates, OTOH, would be fined about $2500. (Assuming I've estimated his monthly income after taxes correctly at about $50,000
Before anyone would suggest this is unfair or whatever, it's already how we do bail, along with a lot of other completely subjective stuff.
This would result in, hilariously, cops following the rich around writing down every violation of the law, attempting to get them on infinitesimal 1% violations while ignoring poor people blatantly breaking the law, so there's no possibility it would ever happen. (Nor would that actually be a good idea.)
Besides, people who run a red light because they aren't paying attention are going to run the red whether there's a camera there or not.
Yeah, this has always confused me too.
Twice in my life, that I know of, I've run a red light. Both times I realized I was doing so during the event. Once when I realized I had just completely ignored the traffic light the tiny side-street had, and the other, when stopped at a red light, I misread a green turn light as a normal green light and went straight, to the annoyance of people in the other direction trying to turn left.
And once or twice I've probably hit the very very start of red light when trying to make a yellow, although I, like most people, know roughly how long a yellow lasts, and I err on the side of stopping.
The first two of those were lack-of-attention accidents, and unlikely to be deterred with cameras. Any of the latter would be deterred, but, OTOH, the lights should be timed to actually have a delay between red in one direction and green in the other...someone coming through a second late shouldn't actually endanger anyone.
Are there really people who knowingly run red lights? Or, rather, are there really people who knowingly run red lights in front of other people? (As opposed to coming across them in the middle of nowhere and not bothering to wait when there's no traffic for miles. Which, while illegal, is also probably not that dangerous.)
In other words, while many instances of running red lights is dangerous, and many people do indeed knowingly run them, that does not mean that those two sets actually overlap to any meaningful extent. Deterring every single person we can from running red lights won't stop a single accident if most accidents happen because people weren't paying attention and didn't see the light at all.
It seems like it would be more productive to do something like lengthening the 'red in all directions' time. And adding additional warning lights for upcoming traffic lights.
The real problem is that 'productive' and 'money making' are not the same thing.
Except that they gave you a ticket for running a red light, not blocking traffic, which is an entirely different offense with a different penalty, usually lower.
People who block intersections are in violation of the law and stupid, but not as stupid as the people who knowingly run red lights. Both those action place you in the intersection when the other direction has a green, but running a red light results in you *appearing* there creating a large risk you and someone else will collide, whereas blocking an intersection from the start isn't very risky until people start deciding to go around you and ending up in the wrong lanes. (Which isn't your fault.)
Anyway, you can block an intersection and it not be your fault. Perhaps someone decided to leap in front of you via turning-right-on-red. A cop wouldn't give you a ticket for getting stranded in the intersection for that (Not that they normally give tickets for blocking intersections anyway.), they'd give the other guy a ticket for failing to yield.
Or perhaps something serious happened in your lane ahead so you had to change lanes in the intersection (Which is also illegal, but, again, not running a red light), and the other lane was full.
Entering an intersection without a reasonable expectation that you can clear the other side of it is a violation of the law. But people can't predict there future, and there are plenty of 'reasonable expectation' that are wrong. And even if you broke that law, it doesn't mean you should get a ticket for breaking an entirely unrelated law.
No, sadly, you're the one confused.
Even if the changes are entirely natural, shifting weather patterns and rising ocean levels are, indeed, a threat to everyone.
Not that I'm entirely sure why we would even vaguely want to listen to people who spent decades denying there was any problem at all, when they show up and explain what is causing the problem they've been denying for so long.
Especially when they show up with an explanation that just happens to mean that behavior they've been arguing for decades doesn't need to change, coincidentally still doesn't need to change.
Strange, that.
It goes without saying that David-Thin-Cock says that he has a "special" perspective on masochism...decause David-Thin-Cock wants to deprive people of dignity and autonomy. I know because I have experienced that personally.
Hey! If you're going to tell bedroom secrets I'm not going to play this game anymore!
Similarly, David-Thin-Cock enjoys watching respectable people twist and writhe.
Okay, that's it. It's over. And 'stupendous' is an idiotic safe word.
And let us not forget that every so often, David-Thin-Cock tries giving rise to mendacious, cankered whiners.
And let us not forget that sometimes those cankered whiners can't seem to get it up no matter what I do. And, no, it doesn't happen to all men.
no one would have doubted that David-Thin-Cock finds reality too difficult to swallow. Or maybe it just gets lost between the sports and entertainment pages.
Hey, it tasted weird. I'm not ashamed, plenty of people spit it out.
David-Thin-Cock wants to clear-cut ancient forest lands.
Has David-Thin-Cock ever considered what would happen if a small fraction of his time spent trying to harvest what others have sown was instead spent on something productive?
And that, folks, is why you need to sanity check your randomly generated complaint, because an anti-environmental troll just accused me of...anti-environmentalism. Heh. Oops.
Also, something appears wrong with the cut and paste. You're losing your commas or quotes or dashes or something, words are ending up stuck together like 'destructiveeven', 'saucerwho', and 'antidisestablishmentanismpenis'.
If people like you controlled this nations money you might end up doing something stupid with it, like buying up huge swathes of unholy mortgages.
Hey, now. Mocking the really bad trolls is one thing, but comparing them to banking and insurance company executives? Way over the line.
Call them something that harms society less, like child molesters or something.
He uses the word "stereophotogrammetry" without ever having taken the time to look it up in the dictionary.
Nonsense. I'm a member in good standing of the American Society for Photogrammetry & Remote Sensing. I'm a world-renowned researcher in the field, and have developed several methods to help solve the correspondence problem. I'm currently writing my dissertation on The Use of Recursive Algorithms in Stereoscopic Photogrammetry in Correcting Satellite Imagery.
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Thank you for your time and have a nice day.
Incidentally, I actually do accuse you of phallocentrism, unilateralism, child molestation, and halitosis, although not in that order.
You know, it's sorta weird that you'd assert that I 'bit the bait hard', and at the same time assert that I wasn't able to do anything than refute a few trivial things.
Hey, dumbass, refuting 'Chairman Obama' in the other thread was a joke at your expense. It wasn't me falling for your troll, it was me mocking you with the idea that you were too dumb to know Obama's actual position. Same with the grammar post!
In fact, that's pretty much all I've been doing from the start, making fun of you. You showed up at a political debate to troll and the only one responding to you is mocking your choice in shoelaces. So, yeah, nice 'success' at your 'trolling'.
I haven't even been responding to the actual content of your post until now when you broke character, ya moron.
You, however, became offended when I said you were a kid and you had to 'prove' how smart you were and how much money you made.
Insecure much? I think I actually hit a nerve there.
You, the jackboot thug of the authoritarian state would want to manipulate and control what others see.
Object doubling for emphasis, while common in other languages, is not allowed in English. To make that real English, you actually need another comma: You, the jackboot thug of the authoritarian state, would want...
You used 'its' wrong, and that's horrible grammar. I believe you meant '...I'm so far out in front of you intellectually that it's simply me toying with you...'.
Also, I don't know why you wrote in the passive voice, especially one with the subject of an undefined 'it'. What, exactly, is 'you toying with me'? The passive voice has its place, but especially don't use it where it's hard to know what the subject is.
In this case, as you were attacking me, you shouldn't have used it at all, you should have phrased it with yourself as the subject, as that's much more forceful. Here, watch:
I'm so far out in front of you intellectually that I'm simply toying with you.
See? Doesn't that sound better and more forceful? Don't overcomplicate your sentences until you have more experience.
So if I'm yanking that kind of bank and I'm 14, I must be god's gift to mankind, to pull up a chair and listen to what you seem to think is a prodigy.
Oops, prodigy, you forgot to give that sentence a verb or subject. You have a dependent clause and then the sentence 'to pull up a chair...'. Presumably, you're wanting me to pull up a chair, but I'm not even mentioned in that sentence yet! Possibly you meant 'to mankind, you need to pull up a chair...'?
Also, if you wish to be taken seriously, don't refer to how much 'bank' you're 'yanking'. That's a very silly expression. Colloquialisms have their place in writing, but using silly ones results in other people thinking you're silly, so their use needs to be weighed against that.
Now, using what we've learned, why don't you try insulting me some more? You're already ahead of the other 6th graders, let's see if we can make your already excellent writing just a little bit better.
Wasn't one of the points of his documentary "An Inconvenient Truth" that everyone needs to do their part to conserve?
No, it was not. At all. I've watched it. The point of his documentary is convince people there's a problem and that if we ignore it we'll all in trouble. Full stop.
Now, at the end of the movie, during the credits, there's a list of 27 things you can do, which is the very first time suggestions are aimed at people instead of governments. It really isn't the point of the documentary, and it isn't Al Gore saying them, and it is during the credits.
18 of them boil down to 'talk to other people and your government leaders'. That's right, even 2/3rds of the suggestions actually aimed at viewers of the movie don't have anything to do with changing people's energy usage.
As for the rest: Three are transportation suggestions, one is planting trees, one is recycling. There are only four that are vaguely applicable to houses:
'Switch to renewable sources of energy.', which Gore does, paying a premium to do so.
'Buy energy efficient appliances & lightbulbs.', which he's stated he does, at least with CFL lights, we don't know about the rest.
So what is left that he possible doesn't do:
'Change your thermostat (and use clock thermostats) to reduce energy for heating & cooling.', which we don't know if he does.
'Weatherize your house, increase insulation, get an energy audit.', which he has done, at least in the energy audit. (And as it's a new house, it's hard to imagine it's poorly insulated.)
You'll note 'live in a smaller house' is not on that list.
Al Gore has been turned into some sort of uber-strawman by the right, where they imagine he's suggested they all live in tree houses. To recap: His presentation in the movie doesn't suggest any changes for any people to make at all, and even the tack-on-to-the-credits list of things for people to do is mostly 'make other people aware of what's happening, and make politicians aware that you're aware.'
And this is why parents need to monitor their children's internet activity, at least until they're 14 or so.
First of all, you can't predict earthquakes, except in the case of aftershocks. We aren't 'monitoring' earthquakes to predict them, we're simply studying them to see if we can predict them, and to predict tsunamis and volcanoes.
Secondly, tsunami predictions have saved quite a lot of lives. The last disastrous tsunami, in fact, was predicted in plenty of time to help people, except that there wasn't a unified warning system for the area and that the various countries hit are still mostly third world and had no way to notify their people.
Tsunamis in general are incredibly easy to predict. You just wait for an largeish earthquake, which can easily see on semographs, and then look for swelling of the ocean at that place. It is sheer stupidity we don't have some sort of global monitoring for them. Two hours after the quake that caused the last one, four hours before it hit anywhere, radar satellites picked the damn thing up. We could easily just tie together existing systems and have fair warning of these things.
And, of course, the monitoring of Mount Pinatubo saved 10-20 thousand lives when it erupted in 1991. In total, the entire monitoring of that volcano, in the decade the US had done it, came to about 15 million dollars. (Or about the cost of having one guy from AIG work for them that entire time.)
Not 'pork', but spending directed to specific projects, as opposed to going into the general budget of an executive branch agency, are what they mean by 'earmarks'.
I.e., for Christmas, you got a 50 gift card to Barnes and Noble. An earmark would require you to spend 10 dollars of that money on a specific book.
The real joke is that the Republicans are complaining about it. Removing earmarks would simply remove Congressional restrictions on spending...
I find it exceptionally silly they criticized his signing a bill with earmarks in it. 'Hey, you sign a bill that required you spend money in certain ways. You promised you'd only sign bills that let you spend the money however you wanted! You liar!'. Well, maybe that's exactly the way he wanted to spend the money, who knows? Or, more importantly, who cares? He could have spent that money that way anyway.
In reality, the problem with earmarks is that they are almost always outside the budget process and hence the money is added to existing funds, not set aside from money already there, and it's not accounted for in any way. Also, they're often on very stupid things, and attached to unrelated bills, which is a general problem in both houses.
In this time of war, you're either with the President or you're against him. We can endure temporary restrictions on liberty when the terrorist threat is so strong.
Incidentally, I like how, suddenly, Republicans are worried about the government being fascist. Even ignoring the financial crisis, which is just as much an emergency as 9/11, and probably much more of one...I seem to recall that Republicans were still insisting that terrorism existed as of...well, mid-January, and that it and our wars still justified everything Bush was doing.
Well, we're still fighting those wars, and I can't imagine why terrorists would have suddenly vanished with the election of Obama. (In fact, Republicans seem to think they'd be more of a threat under him.)
We only have to get behind 'war presidents' when they're Republican, is that it? Or did you guys just forget about this 'all-important and all-encompasing war that justifies everything' the second you got out of power?
Oh, you're one of those morons who thinks Al Gore is telling you to reduce your energy use, when in fact he's never suggested anything of the sort.
Gore is attempting to cause societal changes via things like mass transit and fuel efficient cars and large-scale carbon reduction by investing in alternate energy.
I love how people just imagine that Al Gore is out there frowning at their energy usage, when in reality he could give a flying fuck as to how much energy you use.
This is, of course, ignoring the fact that the idea that Gore's house is exceptional wasteful is a deliberate lie. It's not wasteful at all for a house that size in that part of the country. It is slightly larger than other houses in that part of the country, but that's simply because he works from there.
But, hey, prove me wrong. Go ahead and point to a single example of Gore stating how individual people should cut back to reduce emissions. (And when I say 'cut back', I mean it. Suggesting people switch to CFLs is the opposite of cutting back, it's spending less money for the same thing.)
They're 'troublesome' regardless of the cause.
I know what you're saying, but this is something that the right seems to be ignoring. They've now switched from 'no global warming' to 'global warming is natural'...which somehow means it's fine.
Yeah, and molten lava erupting from the surface of the earth is 'natural' too. Doesn't mean we shouldn't, you know, try to stop it from melting people.
Care to refute any of it...
Well, I can refute something in there pretty easily: We have no one in government called 'Chairman Obama'. So pretty much any statement that mentioned 'Chairman Obama' is blatantly wrong on the face of it.
Also, why'd you include links to the 2007 and 2009 budget? Obama, neither your imaginary 'Chairman Obama' nor the actual President Obama, had anything to do with those budgets. (Well, beyond the fact he was in the Senate at that time...but the House does the budget.)
Those were just the two things that it's trivially easy to disprove and not even up for debate.
Yeah, Dodd is actually the only person who even tried to limit bonuses. He didn't magically make them legal, they obviously would be legal to start with. He tried to make illegal, and succeeded in only making future ones illegal because people amended his amendment.
I wish the media would a) point this out, and b) point to the person who started this rumor as a liar.
It used to be that lying to the media was the only true unforgivable offense. Which was sorta dumb and self-centered of them, but I really really miss those days.
The most stimulating thing (Wait, that sounds wrong.), of course, is for the government to actually hire people to do work. That right there is what got us out of the Great Depression.
Although this time we should probably spend money on trains and solar panels instead of tanks.
I think you've confused socialism and communism. You just described how things (should in theory) work under communism.
Under socialism, people still own their own property and whatnot, and the government simply operates all the means of productions. The farms, the car washes, the grocery stores, everything owned by the government...but workers still get paychecks and use them to buy stuff from those stores and live in their own house.
Although obviously there's no such thing as 'pure socialism', as there would still be limited amounts of people selling direct to each other, and working for each other. There'd be a 'used' market if nothing else. But basically, all businesses that aren't flea markets or side-of-the-road fruit stands are actually the government selling goods and services, and people working at them are employed the the government.
It's not until the next step, where the government starts giving out those goods, and services, and land, for free, and thus stops paying you (Because you don't need the money anymore), that it's 'communism'.
Banks, however, are totally irrelevant to this, as they aren't a 'means of production' in any manner whatsoever. You could have private banks in pure socialism, you could have government banks in pure capitalism. (You can't have any banks in pure communism, but that's because you don't have any money.)
Frankly, the recent calls of 'socialism' against nationalizing the banks have struck me as how ignorant the Republicans are about what 'socialism' is, or possibly about what 'banks' are. Banks do not produce things! They are not means of productions! It's like calling an national park socialist!
And now that I made that joke, I'm sure Republicans have, in fact, done that too.
And that's the point - MOST of AIG's customers were buying insurance on CDOs that they didn't even own.
Which is the other way we regulate insurance. In addition to making sure companies can make the payoffs if the worse happens, we make sure customers can only purchase insurance on things that would directly harm them financially.
Usually this means it's limited to something they own, or themselves, or, rarely, employees of them. (No, I'm not talking about health insurance. That does not pay off your employer if you get sick, although there's actually no reason such insurance couldn't exist. But I'm talking stuff like movie studios insuring the star of the picture if he dies in the middle of filming.)
Why? Because insurance is only safe for society if the harm you have to suffer to get the payout is worse than the payout. If you can insure stuff you don't care about, like your neighbor's house, you've just given people incentive to insure random things and then harm them. In fact, that's the whole point of insurance fraud, you insure something that the 'appraised' value is higher than the value you hold it in, so you have no problem with destroying it. (Or, alternately, fake destroying it.)
We, as a society, have chosen to say 'No, you can only insure stuff that would harm you more than the payout...unless, of course, you're one of the big multinational banks, in which case, feel free to invent a insurance-like product and sell that to other banks without any regulation at all.'.
At least that's what Congress has assured us we've been saying.