And it's to keep from having to unload the dishwashers immediately. As we all know, there are basically two ways to operate a dishwasher...you either unload them after the wash, and load dirty dishes as you go, or you put it off and then have to keep the dirty dishes somewhere until you unload.
However, the theory is wrong, as I noticed when I first read about this house. (All this stuff is incredibly old. Slashdot's motto: Olds For Nerds. Stuff that People Wrote Several Years Ago.)
Two dishwashers only works if you have exactly one load of dishes, and always finished them up exactly at once, i.e, you don't run out of bowls and need another before you run out of plates. You'll end up having to unload half stuff anyway, because dish use is inconsistent.
You really need three dishwashers for it to to work. You start with dishes in #1, and you put the dirty ones #2, when #2 is full, you turn it on. Now you use dishes from #1 when you can, and #2 if you run out, and put them in #3.
At some point, #3 is full, and you can turn it on, and hopefully by then you've emptied out #1 and can start using it to place dirty dishes in. (By then, even if #1 isn't completely empty, it should be very close to it. If there's anything left, it's stuff like pans you haven't used for a week. It's a lot closer than if you just had two.)
While multiple dishwashers is obviously a somewhat wasteful plan, I can't help but think that multiple trays might be a workable idea, with sliding them in and out of the dishwasher.
Perhaps some sort of system right next to the dishwasher, where you can pull out a shelf and lay the dishwasher tray on it, and then grab another shelf and stick that in.
I always thought a clever idea would be to have trays for specific things, with the ability to just have that single tray washed in the dishwasher. A segmented dishwasher, if you will, or even a bunch of single dishwashers designed to do one thing.
Like the plase dishwasher has two plate trays. The clean tray goes on the counter, the dirty one in the dishwasher. When you're running low on plates, you wash the one in the dishwasher, pull it out, move one or two of the clean plates to it, and stick the old 'clean' tray in the dishwasher.
Likewise, the silverware tray could just pop into the dishwasher, swapping out for a tray there that you organize the dirty silverware in.
That would probably add a lot to the cost of a dishwasher, though.
In almost every single bank failure I've ever heard of, they were acquired by new bank that covered every single checking and saving deposit in its entirety, without even calling in the FDIC.
The amount of failures that actually required the FDIC to step in and actually send FDIC payouts is, like one of ten, and as you said it works with new banks to get them to cover amounts over that. (And amounts under that, if it can.)
Likewise, the dead bank still owes whatever money FDIC insurance or the new bank didn't cover, and creditor will get it back in bankrupcy, if it's left.
But having $145,000 in a 'bank account' is just stupid, period. Not just because of the FDIC limit, but because that's a stupid way to invest.
Of course, he could have had bank CDs, which also count towards the deposit limit...but all those CDs at the same bank shows either he had an epic bank that somehow imploded, or that he didn't bother shopping for interest rates.
If I had $145,000, I'd be walking into other banks with $50,000 and trying to dictate terms to them on an investment. They can either give me an extra percentage point of interest on my CD or I can walk down the street to a competitor. Letting them keep $50,000 of my money for a year is around the point I can start doing that, or at least around the point I'd try it with some of the smaller banks, I have no idea if it would worked.
My point was that tax brackets stop rather abruptly.
I have no idea why you complained about what you complained then, and not about there being more tax brackets.
You just stated that voters attempting to tax the rich didn't want to tax poor, hand-to-mouth, small business owners, or at least people who sound like those to voters.You'll have to forgive me for reacting when you sounded _exactly_ like a Republican bitching about how poor people making $80,000 were being taxed.
Incidentally, only about 20% of US household make over $80,000, and someone who owns a small business and taking that much in actual income is, frankly, rich. Owning a small business doing that well puts them way ahead of the game, and even a total collapse of the market hits them very slowly, as they always have business assets to sell off if they're making that much money. They probably have a six month buffer for economic downturns, as opposed to their staff, who have maybe two weeks, so the idea that they have special 'saving' requirements is absurd. The people with the special saving requirements is the clerk at the register without health insurance, not the guy in the back who, in the end, owns the damn building and can sell that to live.
Although it is a good point that voters are morons and don't know that. But next time, how about you mention that their belief is wrong, instead of just repeating 'Here what is going on, according to the voters.'? Unless you want to, quite understandable, sound exactly like the people who taught the voters that?
There is no such thing as value besides perceived future value for investments, so I have no idea what your point is. About the only inherent value of stock is you can vote it.
The fact is, there are disasters that can ruin companies. Usually not by 30%, but it can happen. But I will point out that 30% of Nokia's plants didn't explode or half their stock eaten by alligators or whatever. The actual value, which is 'predicted productivity over X years plus assets' did not change by 30%.
The actual company-ruining disasters are nowhere near as the stock market makes them out to be, and they do not happen then unhappen and then happen again like some sort of crazy yo-yo. BP managed to recover from the fucking oil spill.
The reason stock prices go up and down like they do is solely because people think stock prices are going to change. It has nothing to do with future value of the company, and everything to do with future value of the stock, which has become utterly disconnected from actual company valuation.
Indeed, and the stockholders they do care about are in it for one thing: To watch their stock price rise, so they can dump it and make a profit.
So CEO, brought in by the board (who are large stockholders) do crazy manipulations, like laying off half the workforce, that bring the stock price up. So board members can sell. Then these idiot manipulations catch up as the company loses value, and the stock price drops, and they let the CEO out the door with a million dollar parachute for doing the job he was hired. New stock holders come in, and old board members buy more stock, and they hire a new CEO to do the same fucking thing.
And the thing is, it's not even a 'conspiracy'. It doesn't require any conscious action at all, all it requires is a board that cares more about short-term stock price movement than the company.
In an actual functioning business universe, stockholders would be in it for the dividends, and stock prices would literally be rock solid-stable, at least between quarterly projections and barring disasters. They would simply be a reflection of value of company/amount of stock issued, and would only change if those things changed. There is no reason at all for stock prices to change on a hourly or even weekly basis. How would a multimillion dollar corporation change 30% in value over a week and then back?!?!
Instead, we've turned the stock market into a lottery. Now, I don't mind a fucking lottery, I have no problem with horse racing, if people want to do that I have no objection. What I don't like is the fact we've apparently connected this lottery straight to our economy to the extent that we're operating out economy for the lottery.
I say you get to buy stock once a quarter. That's it. Each new quarter, a company issue dividends for the last quarter, and projections for the next quarter, and whether it will issue more stock or not, and a week later on a certain day you put in buy or sell orders for the stock, which are all resolved at the same time, at the end of the day, and you own the stock all quarter.
Period. You want to buy a fucking company, you have to, you know, actually commit to owning it longer than a damn can of frozen orange juice.
This is such a blatantly obvious and sane way to treat stock ownership, and yet it never gets considered. Instead, the markets work more and more to make it faster to sell and buy stock, which is not the slightest bit useful for actual company ownership (Which is what stocks are supposed to be.), but is very useful for the lottery they're operating. Which uses corporations, which employ almost everyone and produce almost everything, as fucking toys.
Perhaps you should learn how tax brackets work. Someone making $80,000 is not paying any more taxes.
A hypothetical person making $100,000 would be paying a slightly higher tax percent on $20,000 dollars.
I have no idea what state you're talking about, but let's assume that the top bracket pays 15%, instead of 10% lower brackets pay. That would mean, under the law you are speaking of, someone who made $100,000 would pay an extra 5% on the $20,000, which is $1000.
Yeah, how dare we add $0 to the tax burden of someone making $80,000, and $1000 to the tax burden of someone making $100,000? How dare we take another 1% of their money in taxes to try to keep everything functioning in a recession! That's crazy!
People like you, who can't understand basic math, and the media that refuses to explain tax differences using examples, and instead yammers about 'higher taxes on people making $80,000', are the reason this country and 49 states are out of money.
Also, your example is retarded in an completely different way. I'm sure your 'hardware store owner' was part of the false claim that 'small business owners have a lot of money go through their hands but don't keep much of it, but have to pay income tax on it'.
That claim is idiotic, no small business owner who had that much money going through their hands would have a business structured that was in the first place. That is an exceedingly stupid way to operate a business that is larger than 'selling knickknacks on the side of the road'.
Anyone who has a business structured that way who makes enough money to live off of is already paying an astonishing amount of unneeded taxes, up to three times as much taxes as they would pay if they'd put their business under the correct part of the tax code! If they did that, if they actually filed some simple paperwork and made their business an actual separate entity from themselves, 'income tax' would have no bearing on anything except money they take home, instead of it being all money their business takes in.
And I'm astonished that somehow small business owners, who at least have the assets of their business to sell off when it collapses, somehow need the money more than, I dunno, laid off workers. I guess in your universe people can't get laid off 'next year'.
It's not just iTunes. It took years to get any metadata standard for wav files, and absolutely no one supports the official standard, because it breaks playback in some players that don't support it. Some players support APE tags at the end of the file, which is not any sort of official thing, but at least is backwards compatible. It's a total mess. If you really really what to do it, the easiest thing is to keep it as 'CD' and have the information in the.cue file which references the.wav files, but good luck finding a tagger to do that.
And if you're using iTunes I would recommend going to Apple Lossless instead of FLAC. Apple Lossless is well enough reverse engineered that you'll be able to convert out of that if need be, and iTunes support it. If you insist on using crappy iTunes, that is.;)
I had a nice system. I'd rip them to WAVs. When one CD finished, I'd start on the next, and drop the first folder on the flac converter, and then I'd run it through MusicBrainz and label them, comparing it to the actual CD in my hand I just took from the tray. Repeat.
When I was done ripping for a while, I'd put them all in foobar2000, select them all, and run replaygain over the entire thing, which required no help for me. FLAC files done. Burn them to DVD. And then I'd would drag that entire folder to the lame encoder dropper, encode them all, and delete the FLACs. And move that to the music library.
I think iTunes can do all that in a more automated form, but it's really not much more work. And I rather loathe using iTunes so have no idea.
And, yes, we did have to convert because of size considerations. But frankly, at this point, if I ripped a CD (Pretending I did that anymore.), I would simply rip to FLAC, keep it as FLAC on my computer, and let Media Monkey transcode it when copying it to my iPhone.
I mean, I have enough storage space for entire TV series. 170+ episodes of DS9, just so I can flip through them and find one to watch if nothing is on TV. 60 gigs. And that's just one series. I have 500 gigs of 'reruns' that I can flip through and find something interesting.
One album in FLAC is somewhere between 200-400 megs, about the size of a TV 350meg TV episode. Worrying about the size of audio files on computers makes absolutely no sense anymore. Spend 50 dollars, get 1 terabyte USB hard drive to stick them on, you're done unless you somehow have three thousand CDs. The only reason I haven't gone back and pulled my FLACs off the DVDs and replaced the MP3s with them is that I'm lazy.
The only place MP3s really still make any sense is on portable devices.
Because you can't put tags in raw WAV files, at least not in any well-supported manner. And tagging them before storing them is pretty important, in my book.
Yes, yes, tagging preferences can change, I won't claim that the MP3 files I have are still labeled identically to the backed up FLACs, but that's generally stuff like genres and grouping as 'Various Artists' and whatnot. You can at least have a starting place, instead of just unlabeled tracks.
Now, obviously, the name can hold some info, and encoders can stick that in the right tags, so if you think you can get away with putting all the information in the file names, go for it. Make a standard like Artist-Album-Num-Track.wav and keep with it.
But I find FLAC easier. You can always encode at the fastest setting.
And if you're actually keeping the FLACs on a _hard drive_, you can just change the tags in that and regenerate the other files. In fact, if you're just transcoding for portable, and playing the FLAC on your computer, it will happen automatically. (I keep my FLACs on DVDs, though.)
The 'majority' of people aren't discussing what players they use, and aren't even aware there's an option. They aren't choosing to do anything at all.
I have no idea what the damn point is you're trying to make. It has nothing to do with people here, who do know what's going on.
Saying 'the vast majority of people just keep the defaults' is not actually an argument that the defaults are the best choice.
I assure you, no one is suggesting that the vast majority of people somehow get taught how to rip into FLAC, and yet not get taught how to transcode that to their phone. No one is talking about the vast majority of people doing anything, and, if they were, surely it would be some sort of general education thing about formats and rippers instead 'We're going to fuck them up so they end up with FLAC files that they then can't play'. I can't even conceive of how that would be the end result of any discussion here.
People here are talking about their own behavior. Everyone in this discussion knows how to rip into different formats and how to use something besides iTunes to get music on an iPhone. There's not some idiot going 'Well, I ripped to FLAC, and now I'm screwed because I can't play my music on my iPhone.'.
Also, if your computer can't transcode faster than it can copy the file into flash memory, your computer is too slow.
The ability to re-compress stuff you ripped 15 years ago in the latest LAME encoder, for the player you're using now, is a great thing. That's a 10 minute setup and some off-line crunching if you have FLAC rips of your music; it's potentially months of random CD ripping if you don't.
Indeed, I was starting to think I was the only person who did that.
This whole 'FLAC' discussion is pointless. Everyone should rip and label to FLAC, and burn those to a DVD somewhere so you can get them later.
Then, if they have the space, sure, if they want, keep them around in their computer, if their portable media device has the space and can play them, use them there too. Or keep them on their computer, and transcode to the portable device.
Of, instead, or batch encode them to MP3s or Oggs or whatever on their computer and delete the FLACs. This takes no added time, as you mentioned....it's a batch process, just run it overnight. (We're long past the point where people would have to convert in the middle of this because the uncompressed audio files were taking up too much space.)
FLAC is to save the trouble of reripping and relabeling every time you want to try something else, and it lets you put 20+ albums on a DVD as a backup instead of having to duplicate 20 CDs and kept those as backup.
Anything after that is a matter of storage space and personal taste. For me, it varies by the band whether or not my computer has the FLACs or MP3, and all FLACs are transcoded when put on my iPhone to MP3s.
iTunes is not the only way to put music on iPhones and iPods. Plenty of music players can do it. foobar2000 and MediaMonkey, for two.
I have no idea what you mean by 'the majority of people'. The majority of people using iPhone are probably using iTune to sync...but, OTOH, they're probably using iTune to rip too, which means FLAC is a non-option for them anyway.
The actual people who know how to rip to FLAC, who actually understand that a media player and ripper and how it rips are things they have a choice over, are probably already using something besides iTunes, which is a pretty limited mp3 player.
And both foobar2000 and MediaMonkey will transcode files into whatever format you want before syncing them with the iPhone.
I put them there right after I rip everything off them into whatever format I like best, and they will sit there until such a time as I need to make a new copy from my master.
Why don't you just rip them to FLAC, once, label them, once, and then store that on DVDs? You can fit about 20-25 CDs that way on a single DVD, and you make a copy of a CD without having to go downstairs. (Which, of course, you could still keep.)
Granted, doing that for an existing collection is very annoying, but it's pretty easy on new stuff. Instead of ripping to MP3, you rip to FLAC, and label as FLAC, then you convert it to whatever you want.
Then label a DVD with the artist's name, burn the FLACs to it, and delete them from your hard drive, and tada. If you have other CDs by that artist, or that could logically be grouped together, go get that, and rerip it and burn FLACs also.
Keep a file on your hard drive that has a directory listing of the DVDs if they aren't immediately logical. But as a DVD can store at least 20 FLAC albums, and very few artists have ever released that many, a single DVD per artist, with another DVD containing all the artists you only have one CD of, would be sane.
You're right about the inability for the music industry to innovate, though. Hell, they aren't even being non-innovative, they're just standing in place...how long did it take them to come out with the remastered Beatles tracks?
You rip to FLAC and label it correctly, once.
Then you burn all FLACs onto a DVD, and file it away, and now you never have to rip a CD again, ever.
Then you take those FLACs and drop them onto your mp3 or ogg encoder.
If you want to change the format or encoding rate, you can get the 'original' music, already labeled and organized, by pulling out the 'music DVD' from your stack of original DVDs, where you keep that Windows DVD and Office DVD, the DVDs you never use but have to keep.
FLAC isn't for listening unless you really want to. It's for doing the time consuming part of ripping music to, which is 'ripping and labeling', and then storing that before you do the irreversible part of lossy encoding.
And, as a bonus, now you have a backup of the CD. Granted, many people already have that and play that instead of the original, but many of us do not, and either don't play CDs that much, or don't make backups of all of them. This way, if one of the original CDs does get damaged, you can recreate it.
Actually, a lot of binge drinking idiots do die from alcohol poisoning. Either along or by stupidly taking pot at the same time, which keeps them from vomiting the alcohol back up. (Nice side effect on chemotherapy, very bad while overdosing on alcohol. You're supposed to throw up when you have too much alcohol, just like you're supposed to throw up when you've been food poisoned.)
And another subset die from what is technically suffocation when their mouth fills with vomit while passed out from alcohol, which should probably count as 'alcohol poisoning' as there is literally no other factor but alcohol, it's just the death was more convoluted.
Heavy metal poisoning is still considered heavy metal poisoning if it kills your kidneys and you technically die from toxic buildup because your kidneys don't work anymore. It's not some mysterious 'kidney failure', it's 'heavy metal poisoning leading to kidney failure'.
Likewise vomiting caused by your body trying to get rid of excess alcohol, and choking on it because your body is passed out because of excess alcohol, should probably be considered 'death by excess alcohol', and death by 'excessive' anything is normally called 'poisoning'. It's 'alcohol poisoning leading to suffocation', which is, admittedly, a weird way for poisoning to kill you, but still.
Unlike drunk driving, where they choose to drink and chose to drink. That, like all LSD deaths, additionally requires behaving stupidly. That is not solely due to the substance.
Incidentally, 'deaths by stupid behavior while on LSD' are probably in the double digits in the entire history of LSD. The 'jumping out a window', for example, was basically invented from a single event that probably did not happen that way. Even the few real documented actual deaths are people wandering into traffic or falling down stairs or accidentally badly cutting themselves through carelessness and not getting medical attention, inattentive stuff like that, not crazy freakouts when they leap through windows.
Although some low number of that is simply because almost no one makes actual LSD anymore, and never really has since 1980. A lot of the 'acid' out there, and even some of the stuff explicitly labeled as 'LSD', is DOB or DOI.
Yes, because we know the government requires a shitload of money to infringe rights. No, wait. The amount of money the government has is utterly unrelated to how much it infringes rights.
There is absolutely no way to defund a fucking investigation of Twitter. It's not like it's some giant money-sink to search for posts on Twitter. One law enforcement employee of the executive branch could be doing that.
So unless you're trying to suggest we literally have no Federal law enforcement at all, or that we defund the courts (Which would seem to result in a reduction of freedoms.), or that we remove all Federal laws including leaking classified government information', you and your conservative fantasies about 'defunding' can fuck off. There is no way to 'defund' something like this, you idjit.
We have laws on the book that can be vaguely applied towards this, and we have a working legal system. There's no more discussion there. Either we remove all laws about classified information, or we defund the working legal system. That's the only way to stop this by reducing something.
Or, if we aren't moron and want to stop investigations like this, we could ban investigations into things like this. Which is more law, and requires more staff to enforce it, like an inspector general.
Oh, wait, the DOJ inspector general office is busy looking for 'health care fraud' because the right keeps yammering about it and Obama is a fucking coward who won't tell them to shut up.
Not only will they order basically any book in print for you, the website will let you track down books not in print and order them used from someone.
Because, you see, they have a secret plan to make money, which is, they buy books using a special deal with bookmakers to buy them cheap, and then they sell them for more money. So they make money on all their book sales.
And, when they promote one book over another, it's not because it fits some ideological bias of theirs, it's because it's either going to make them more money on each copy sold, or they think they can lure you in with it and buy other books and stuff. Hence Twilight release parties. Sneaky, I know.
Which is also why they let you read for free, because being nice to customers means they have customers, and customers buy things. It's why they help you purchase out-of-print books they don't carry, from other places. They're hoping you'll also buy something from them, those selfish bastards.
It's a giant conspiracy, I tell you! Someone should write an expose about it. But I bet B&N wouldn't sell it. Well, they'd sell it, but no one would fucking buy it, because everyone already knows how companies operate, except apparently crazy conspiracy theorists, who've decided that B&N are on some ideological mission and not the standard 'making money by selling things to customers that customers want to buy' mission they are actually on.
Do you have an actual thing you're complaining about? Because it sounds like you're complaining about Barnes & Noble, except not what they actually do, what they might in some hypothetical future might do.
That's the reason I don't like sushi restaurant down the street. At some point in the future they might start making people take off their clothes and masturbate to come inside, and, let me tell you, such hypothetical behavior is outrageous!
What you are actually opposed to is private libraries, so maybe you should direct your anger at people promoting those, and not a completely innocent bookstore that currently has, as you pointed out, fairly lax policies, and has nothing to do with privatizing libraries at all?
And, BTW, Barnes and Nobles sells pretty much every book that's in print. They obviously can't fit all those in a single store, so most of it's online, or you can order at the store and have it sent there and pick it up later. The online store even lets you find used copies of books not in print.
I'm sure it's some great sin for a store to fill their shelves with the stuff that people actually buy, though, which is how Barnes and Nobles, just like every store that exists, determines their shelf usage. And not some wacked out conspiracy is an attempt to deny you access to books.
Seriously, I'm as anti-corporate as they come, but what the fuck has Barnes and Noble ever done to anyone?
I'm sure someone is about to claim that they 'drive independent bookstores out of existence', at which point I will preemptively respond: Bullshit. 90% of this country does not have these independent new bookstores people claim exist. 90% of the county never had any bookstore until the chains showed up, except a used bookstore that maybe got 20 new books a month.
Well, that's a good analogy, but I was trying to stay away from actual illegal things. (Although I did say 'spray painted' with the storage unit, but the same thing applies if you, for example, set up drums in the storage unit and decide to practice your drumming there and refuse to stop.)
Let's just say if you buy a beer, and then decide that you should run around hovering over other patrons and mocking them, in a way that is entirely legal but very rude, yup, they'll throw you out.:)
And, of course, your beer is probably in a glass you don't own, and in many places you can't walk around with an open container of beer on the streets even if it was in a bottle, so it is probably illegal to actually take the beer with you even if you are holding it when they kick you out.
In reality, I think there's actually a law about consumables people leave behind, and that they can be thrown out at closing, but even if there's no such law and they have to hold your beer for you, it's going to be very hard to recover that property.
People, businesses have property rights. You can't just do whatever the fuck you want there.
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Damn time-traveling hippies stealing my ideas again.
And it's to keep from having to unload the dishwashers immediately. As we all know, there are basically two ways to operate a dishwasher...you either unload them after the wash, and load dirty dishes as you go, or you put it off and then have to keep the dirty dishes somewhere until you unload.
However, the theory is wrong, as I noticed when I first read about this house. (All this stuff is incredibly old. Slashdot's motto: Olds For Nerds. Stuff that People Wrote Several Years Ago.)
Two dishwashers only works if you have exactly one load of dishes, and always finished them up exactly at once, i.e, you don't run out of bowls and need another before you run out of plates. You'll end up having to unload half stuff anyway, because dish use is inconsistent.
You really need three dishwashers for it to to work. You start with dishes in #1, and you put the dirty ones #2, when #2 is full, you turn it on. Now you use dishes from #1 when you can, and #2 if you run out, and put them in #3.
At some point, #3 is full, and you can turn it on, and hopefully by then you've emptied out #1 and can start using it to place dirty dishes in. (By then, even if #1 isn't completely empty, it should be very close to it. If there's anything left, it's stuff like pans you haven't used for a week. It's a lot closer than if you just had two.)
While multiple dishwashers is obviously a somewhat wasteful plan, I can't help but think that multiple trays might be a workable idea, with sliding them in and out of the dishwasher.
Perhaps some sort of system right next to the dishwasher, where you can pull out a shelf and lay the dishwasher tray on it, and then grab another shelf and stick that in.
I always thought a clever idea would be to have trays for specific things, with the ability to just have that single tray washed in the dishwasher. A segmented dishwasher, if you will, or even a bunch of single dishwashers designed to do one thing.
Like the plase dishwasher has two plate trays. The clean tray goes on the counter, the dirty one in the dishwasher. When you're running low on plates, you wash the one in the dishwasher, pull it out, move one or two of the clean plates to it, and stick the old 'clean' tray in the dishwasher.
Likewise, the silverware tray could just pop into the dishwasher, swapping out for a tray there that you organize the dirty silverware in.
That would probably add a lot to the cost of a dishwasher, though.
In almost every single bank failure I've ever heard of, they were acquired by new bank that covered every single checking and saving deposit in its entirety, without even calling in the FDIC.
The amount of failures that actually required the FDIC to step in and actually send FDIC payouts is, like one of ten, and as you said it works with new banks to get them to cover amounts over that. (And amounts under that, if it can.)
Likewise, the dead bank still owes whatever money FDIC insurance or the new bank didn't cover, and creditor will get it back in bankrupcy, if it's left.
But having $145,000 in a 'bank account' is just stupid, period. Not just because of the FDIC limit, but because that's a stupid way to invest.
Of course, he could have had bank CDs, which also count towards the deposit limit...but all those CDs at the same bank shows either he had an epic bank that somehow imploded, or that he didn't bother shopping for interest rates.
If I had $145,000, I'd be walking into other banks with $50,000 and trying to dictate terms to them on an investment. They can either give me an extra percentage point of interest on my CD or I can walk down the street to a competitor. Letting them keep $50,000 of my money for a year is around the point I can start doing that, or at least around the point I'd try it with some of the smaller banks, I have no idea if it would worked.
My point was that tax brackets stop rather abruptly.
I have no idea why you complained about what you complained then, and not about there being more tax brackets.
You just stated that voters attempting to tax the rich didn't want to tax poor, hand-to-mouth, small business owners, or at least people who sound like those to voters.You'll have to forgive me for reacting when you sounded _exactly_ like a Republican bitching about how poor people making $80,000 were being taxed.
Incidentally, only about 20% of US household make over $80,000, and someone who owns a small business and taking that much in actual income is, frankly, rich. Owning a small business doing that well puts them way ahead of the game, and even a total collapse of the market hits them very slowly, as they always have business assets to sell off if they're making that much money. They probably have a six month buffer for economic downturns, as opposed to their staff, who have maybe two weeks, so the idea that they have special 'saving' requirements is absurd. The people with the special saving requirements is the clerk at the register without health insurance, not the guy in the back who, in the end, owns the damn building and can sell that to live.
Although it is a good point that voters are morons and don't know that. But next time, how about you mention that their belief is wrong, instead of just repeating 'Here what is going on, according to the voters.'? Unless you want to, quite understandable, sound exactly like the people who taught the voters that?
There is no such thing as value besides perceived future value for investments, so I have no idea what your point is. About the only inherent value of stock is you can vote it.
The fact is, there are disasters that can ruin companies. Usually not by 30%, but it can happen. But I will point out that 30% of Nokia's plants didn't explode or half their stock eaten by alligators or whatever. The actual value, which is 'predicted productivity over X years plus assets' did not change by 30%.
The actual company-ruining disasters are nowhere near as the stock market makes them out to be, and they do not happen then unhappen and then happen again like some sort of crazy yo-yo. BP managed to recover from the fucking oil spill.
The reason stock prices go up and down like they do is solely because people think stock prices are going to change. It has nothing to do with future value of the company, and everything to do with future value of the stock, which has become utterly disconnected from actual company valuation.
Indeed, and the stockholders they do care about are in it for one thing: To watch their stock price rise, so they can dump it and make a profit.
So CEO, brought in by the board (who are large stockholders) do crazy manipulations, like laying off half the workforce, that bring the stock price up. So board members can sell. Then these idiot manipulations catch up as the company loses value, and the stock price drops, and they let the CEO out the door with a million dollar parachute for doing the job he was hired. New stock holders come in, and old board members buy more stock, and they hire a new CEO to do the same fucking thing.
And the thing is, it's not even a 'conspiracy'. It doesn't require any conscious action at all, all it requires is a board that cares more about short-term stock price movement than the company.
In an actual functioning business universe, stockholders would be in it for the dividends, and stock prices would literally be rock solid-stable, at least between quarterly projections and barring disasters. They would simply be a reflection of value of company/amount of stock issued, and would only change if those things changed. There is no reason at all for stock prices to change on a hourly or even weekly basis. How would a multimillion dollar corporation change 30% in value over a week and then back?!?!
Instead, we've turned the stock market into a lottery. Now, I don't mind a fucking lottery, I have no problem with horse racing, if people want to do that I have no objection. What I don't like is the fact we've apparently connected this lottery straight to our economy to the extent that we're operating out economy for the lottery.
I say you get to buy stock once a quarter. That's it. Each new quarter, a company issue dividends for the last quarter, and projections for the next quarter, and whether it will issue more stock or not, and a week later on a certain day you put in buy or sell orders for the stock, which are all resolved at the same time, at the end of the day, and you own the stock all quarter.
Period. You want to buy a fucking company, you have to, you know, actually commit to owning it longer than a damn can of frozen orange juice.
This is such a blatantly obvious and sane way to treat stock ownership, and yet it never gets considered. Instead, the markets work more and more to make it faster to sell and buy stock, which is not the slightest bit useful for actual company ownership (Which is what stocks are supposed to be.), but is very useful for the lottery they're operating. Which uses corporations, which employ almost everyone and produce almost everything, as fucking toys.
Perhaps you should learn how tax brackets work. Someone making $80,000 is not paying any more taxes.
A hypothetical person making $100,000 would be paying a slightly higher tax percent on $20,000 dollars.
I have no idea what state you're talking about, but let's assume that the top bracket pays 15%, instead of 10% lower brackets pay. That would mean, under the law you are speaking of, someone who made $100,000 would pay an extra 5% on the $20,000, which is $1000.
Yeah, how dare we add $0 to the tax burden of someone making $80,000, and $1000 to the tax burden of someone making $100,000? How dare we take another 1% of their money in taxes to try to keep everything functioning in a recession! That's crazy!
People like you, who can't understand basic math, and the media that refuses to explain tax differences using examples, and instead yammers about 'higher taxes on people making $80,000', are the reason this country and 49 states are out of money.
Also, your example is retarded in an completely different way. I'm sure your 'hardware store owner' was part of the false claim that 'small business owners have a lot of money go through their hands but don't keep much of it, but have to pay income tax on it'.
That claim is idiotic, no small business owner who had that much money going through their hands would have a business structured that was in the first place. That is an exceedingly stupid way to operate a business that is larger than 'selling knickknacks on the side of the road'.
Anyone who has a business structured that way who makes enough money to live off of is already paying an astonishing amount of unneeded taxes, up to three times as much taxes as they would pay if they'd put their business under the correct part of the tax code! If they did that, if they actually filed some simple paperwork and made their business an actual separate entity from themselves, 'income tax' would have no bearing on anything except money they take home, instead of it being all money their business takes in.
And I'm astonished that somehow small business owners, who at least have the assets of their business to sell off when it collapses, somehow need the money more than, I dunno, laid off workers. I guess in your universe people can't get laid off 'next year'.
'This is Suck that we have gotten from Bank of America. It is not general Suck, it is Bank of America Suck.'
It's not just iTunes. It took years to get any metadata standard for wav files, and absolutely no one supports the official standard, because it breaks playback in some players that don't support it. Some players support APE tags at the end of the file, which is not any sort of official thing, but at least is backwards compatible. It's a total mess. If you really really what to do it, the easiest thing is to keep it as 'CD' and have the information in the .cue file which references the .wav files, but good luck finding a tagger to do that.
And if you're using iTunes I would recommend going to Apple Lossless instead of FLAC. Apple Lossless is well enough reverse engineered that you'll be able to convert out of that if need be, and iTunes support it. If you insist on using crappy iTunes, that is. ;)
I had a nice system. I'd rip them to WAVs. When one CD finished, I'd start on the next, and drop the first folder on the flac converter, and then I'd run it through MusicBrainz and label them, comparing it to the actual CD in my hand I just took from the tray. Repeat.
When I was done ripping for a while, I'd put them all in foobar2000, select them all, and run replaygain over the entire thing, which required no help for me. FLAC files done. Burn them to DVD. And then I'd would drag that entire folder to the lame encoder dropper, encode them all, and delete the FLACs. And move that to the music library.
I think iTunes can do all that in a more automated form, but it's really not much more work. And I rather loathe using iTunes so have no idea.
And, yes, we did have to convert because of size considerations. But frankly, at this point, if I ripped a CD (Pretending I did that anymore.), I would simply rip to FLAC, keep it as FLAC on my computer, and let Media Monkey transcode it when copying it to my iPhone.
I mean, I have enough storage space for entire TV series. 170+ episodes of DS9, just so I can flip through them and find one to watch if nothing is on TV. 60 gigs. And that's just one series. I have 500 gigs of 'reruns' that I can flip through and find something interesting.
One album in FLAC is somewhere between 200-400 megs, about the size of a TV 350meg TV episode. Worrying about the size of audio files on computers makes absolutely no sense anymore. Spend 50 dollars, get 1 terabyte USB hard drive to stick them on, you're done unless you somehow have three thousand CDs. The only reason I haven't gone back and pulled my FLACs off the DVDs and replaced the MP3s with them is that I'm lazy.
The only place MP3s really still make any sense is on portable devices.
Because you can't put tags in raw WAV files, at least not in any well-supported manner. And tagging them before storing them is pretty important, in my book.
Yes, yes, tagging preferences can change, I won't claim that the MP3 files I have are still labeled identically to the backed up FLACs, but that's generally stuff like genres and grouping as 'Various Artists' and whatnot. You can at least have a starting place, instead of just unlabeled tracks.
Now, obviously, the name can hold some info, and encoders can stick that in the right tags, so if you think you can get away with putting all the information in the file names, go for it. Make a standard like Artist-Album-Num-Track.wav and keep with it.
But I find FLAC easier. You can always encode at the fastest setting.
And if you're actually keeping the FLACs on a _hard drive_, you can just change the tags in that and regenerate the other files. In fact, if you're just transcoding for portable, and playing the FLAC on your computer, it will happen automatically. (I keep my FLACs on DVDs, though.)
The 'majority' of people aren't discussing what players they use, and aren't even aware there's an option. They aren't choosing to do anything at all.
I have no idea what the damn point is you're trying to make. It has nothing to do with people here, who do know what's going on.
Saying 'the vast majority of people just keep the defaults' is not actually an argument that the defaults are the best choice.
I assure you, no one is suggesting that the vast majority of people somehow get taught how to rip into FLAC, and yet not get taught how to transcode that to their phone. No one is talking about the vast majority of people doing anything, and, if they were, surely it would be some sort of general education thing about formats and rippers instead 'We're going to fuck them up so they end up with FLAC files that they then can't play'. I can't even conceive of how that would be the end result of any discussion here.
People here are talking about their own behavior. Everyone in this discussion knows how to rip into different formats and how to use something besides iTunes to get music on an iPhone. There's not some idiot going 'Well, I ripped to FLAC, and now I'm screwed because I can't play my music on my iPhone.'.
Also, if your computer can't transcode faster than it can copy the file into flash memory, your computer is too slow.
The ability to re-compress stuff you ripped 15 years ago in the latest LAME encoder, for the player you're using now, is a great thing. That's a 10 minute setup and some off-line crunching if you have FLAC rips of your music; it's potentially months of random CD ripping if you don't.
Indeed, I was starting to think I was the only person who did that.
This whole 'FLAC' discussion is pointless. Everyone should rip and label to FLAC, and burn those to a DVD somewhere so you can get them later.
Then, if they have the space, sure, if they want, keep them around in their computer, if their portable media device has the space and can play them, use them there too. Or keep them on their computer, and transcode to the portable device.
Of, instead, or batch encode them to MP3s or Oggs or whatever on their computer and delete the FLACs. This takes no added time, as you mentioned....it's a batch process, just run it overnight. (We're long past the point where people would have to convert in the middle of this because the uncompressed audio files were taking up too much space.)
FLAC is to save the trouble of reripping and relabeling every time you want to try something else, and it lets you put 20+ albums on a DVD as a backup instead of having to duplicate 20 CDs and kept those as backup.
Anything after that is a matter of storage space and personal taste. For me, it varies by the band whether or not my computer has the FLACs or MP3, and all FLACs are transcoded when put on my iPhone to MP3s.
iTunes is not the only way to put music on iPhones and iPods. Plenty of music players can do it. foobar2000 and MediaMonkey, for two.
I have no idea what you mean by 'the majority of people'. The majority of people using iPhone are probably using iTune to sync...but, OTOH, they're probably using iTune to rip too, which means FLAC is a non-option for them anyway.
The actual people who know how to rip to FLAC, who actually understand that a media player and ripper and how it rips are things they have a choice over, are probably already using something besides iTunes, which is a pretty limited mp3 player.
And both foobar2000 and MediaMonkey will transcode files into whatever format you want before syncing them with the iPhone.
I put them there right after I rip everything off them into whatever format I like best, and they will sit there until such a time as I need to make a new copy from my master.
Why don't you just rip them to FLAC, once, label them, once, and then store that on DVDs? You can fit about 20-25 CDs that way on a single DVD, and you make a copy of a CD without having to go downstairs. (Which, of course, you could still keep.)
Granted, doing that for an existing collection is very annoying, but it's pretty easy on new stuff. Instead of ripping to MP3, you rip to FLAC, and label as FLAC, then you convert it to whatever you want.
Then label a DVD with the artist's name, burn the FLACs to it, and delete them from your hard drive, and tada. If you have other CDs by that artist, or that could logically be grouped together, go get that, and rerip it and burn FLACs also.
Keep a file on your hard drive that has a directory listing of the DVDs if they aren't immediately logical. But as a DVD can store at least 20 FLAC albums, and very few artists have ever released that many, a single DVD per artist, with another DVD containing all the artists you only have one CD of, would be sane.
You're right about the inability for the music industry to innovate, though. Hell, they aren't even being non-innovative, they're just standing in place...how long did it take them to come out with the remastered Beatles tracks?
FLAC isn't for listening to.
You rip to FLAC and label it correctly, once. Then you burn all FLACs onto a DVD, and file it away, and now you never have to rip a CD again, ever.
Then you take those FLACs and drop them onto your mp3 or ogg encoder.
If you want to change the format or encoding rate, you can get the 'original' music, already labeled and organized, by pulling out the 'music DVD' from your stack of original DVDs, where you keep that Windows DVD and Office DVD, the DVDs you never use but have to keep.
FLAC isn't for listening unless you really want to. It's for doing the time consuming part of ripping music to, which is 'ripping and labeling', and then storing that before you do the irreversible part of lossy encoding.
And, as a bonus, now you have a backup of the CD. Granted, many people already have that and play that instead of the original, but many of us do not, and either don't play CDs that much, or don't make backups of all of them. This way, if one of the original CDs does get damaged, you can recreate it.
Actually, a lot of binge drinking idiots do die from alcohol poisoning. Either along or by stupidly taking pot at the same time, which keeps them from vomiting the alcohol back up. (Nice side effect on chemotherapy, very bad while overdosing on alcohol. You're supposed to throw up when you have too much alcohol, just like you're supposed to throw up when you've been food poisoned.)
And another subset die from what is technically suffocation when their mouth fills with vomit while passed out from alcohol, which should probably count as 'alcohol poisoning' as there is literally no other factor but alcohol, it's just the death was more convoluted.
Heavy metal poisoning is still considered heavy metal poisoning if it kills your kidneys and you technically die from toxic buildup because your kidneys don't work anymore. It's not some mysterious 'kidney failure', it's 'heavy metal poisoning leading to kidney failure'.
Likewise vomiting caused by your body trying to get rid of excess alcohol, and choking on it because your body is passed out because of excess alcohol, should probably be considered 'death by excess alcohol', and death by 'excessive' anything is normally called 'poisoning'. It's 'alcohol poisoning leading to suffocation', which is, admittedly, a weird way for poisoning to kill you, but still.
Unlike drunk driving, where they choose to drink and chose to drink. That, like all LSD deaths, additionally requires behaving stupidly. That is not solely due to the substance.
Incidentally, 'deaths by stupid behavior while on LSD' are probably in the double digits in the entire history of LSD. The 'jumping out a window', for example, was basically invented from a single event that probably did not happen that way. Even the few real documented actual deaths are people wandering into traffic or falling down stairs or accidentally badly cutting themselves through carelessness and not getting medical attention, inattentive stuff like that, not crazy freakouts when they leap through windows.
Although some low number of that is simply because almost no one makes actual LSD anymore, and never really has since 1980. A lot of the 'acid' out there, and even some of the stuff explicitly labeled as 'LSD', is DOB or DOI.
Yes, there are plenty of alternatives that can supply maybe 20% of the power we need! WOW!
Yes, because we know the government requires a shitload of money to infringe rights. No, wait. The amount of money the government has is utterly unrelated to how much it infringes rights.
There is absolutely no way to defund a fucking investigation of Twitter. It's not like it's some giant money-sink to search for posts on Twitter. One law enforcement employee of the executive branch could be doing that.
So unless you're trying to suggest we literally have no Federal law enforcement at all, or that we defund the courts (Which would seem to result in a reduction of freedoms.), or that we remove all Federal laws including leaking classified government information', you and your conservative fantasies about 'defunding' can fuck off. There is no way to 'defund' something like this, you idjit.
We have laws on the book that can be vaguely applied towards this, and we have a working legal system. There's no more discussion there. Either we remove all laws about classified information, or we defund the working legal system. That's the only way to stop this by reducing something.
Or, if we aren't moron and want to stop investigations like this, we could ban investigations into things like this. Which is more law, and requires more staff to enforce it, like an inspector general.
Oh, wait, the DOJ inspector general office is busy looking for 'health care fraud' because the right keeps yammering about it and Obama is a fucking coward who won't tell them to shut up.
If erections last longer than Eternal September, please consult a doctor.
That's because the Japanese are honorary white people, and not poor, so of course we'll help.
If you aid people in disasters, they won't learn to stop having disasters. Right?
My theory is that those were being carried by the planes, which fell out of the sky independently of the quake.
Not only will they order basically any book in print for you, the website will let you track down books not in print and order them used from someone.
Because, you see, they have a secret plan to make money, which is, they buy books using a special deal with bookmakers to buy them cheap, and then they sell them for more money. So they make money on all their book sales.
And, when they promote one book over another, it's not because it fits some ideological bias of theirs, it's because it's either going to make them more money on each copy sold, or they think they can lure you in with it and buy other books and stuff. Hence Twilight release parties. Sneaky, I know.
Which is also why they let you read for free, because being nice to customers means they have customers, and customers buy things. It's why they help you purchase out-of-print books they don't carry, from other places. They're hoping you'll also buy something from them, those selfish bastards.
It's a giant conspiracy, I tell you! Someone should write an expose about it. But I bet B&N wouldn't sell it. Well, they'd sell it, but no one would fucking buy it, because everyone already knows how companies operate, except apparently crazy conspiracy theorists, who've decided that B&N are on some ideological mission and not the standard 'making money by selling things to customers that customers want to buy' mission they are actually on.
Do you have an actual thing you're complaining about? Because it sounds like you're complaining about Barnes & Noble, except not what they actually do, what they might in some hypothetical future might do.
That's the reason I don't like sushi restaurant down the street. At some point in the future they might start making people take off their clothes and masturbate to come inside, and, let me tell you, such hypothetical behavior is outrageous!
What you are actually opposed to is private libraries, so maybe you should direct your anger at people promoting those, and not a completely innocent bookstore that currently has, as you pointed out, fairly lax policies, and has nothing to do with privatizing libraries at all?
And, BTW, Barnes and Nobles sells pretty much every book that's in print. They obviously can't fit all those in a single store, so most of it's online, or you can order at the store and have it sent there and pick it up later. The online store even lets you find used copies of books not in print.
I'm sure it's some great sin for a store to fill their shelves with the stuff that people actually buy, though, which is how Barnes and Nobles, just like every store that exists, determines their shelf usage. And not some wacked out conspiracy is an attempt to deny you access to books.
Seriously, I'm as anti-corporate as they come, but what the fuck has Barnes and Noble ever done to anyone?
I'm sure someone is about to claim that they 'drive independent bookstores out of existence', at which point I will preemptively respond: Bullshit. 90% of this country does not have these independent new bookstores people claim exist. 90% of the county never had any bookstore until the chains showed up, except a used bookstore that maybe got 20 new books a month.
Well, that's a good analogy, but I was trying to stay away from actual illegal things. (Although I did say 'spray painted' with the storage unit, but the same thing applies if you, for example, set up drums in the storage unit and decide to practice your drumming there and refuse to stop.)
Let's just say if you buy a beer, and then decide that you should run around hovering over other patrons and mocking them, in a way that is entirely legal but very rude, yup, they'll throw you out. :)
And, of course, your beer is probably in a glass you don't own, and in many places you can't walk around with an open container of beer on the streets even if it was in a bottle, so it is probably illegal to actually take the beer with you even if you are holding it when they kick you out.
In reality, I think there's actually a law about consumables people leave behind, and that they can be thrown out at closing, but even if there's no such law and they have to hold your beer for you, it's going to be very hard to recover that property.
People, businesses have property rights. You can't just do whatever the fuck you want there.