If you have property on someone else's property, they do not have to just let you walk up and take it. Even if they agree it's your property, they are not required to let you just walk up and take it.
If you want to recover the property, you must contact the police, and they will maybe recover it for you, or you can schedule a time to recover it, or have a police escort, or all sorts of things.
You cannot just walk up and take it if you've been barred from that location, even if it's yours. You must deal with the police and, if they can't work something out, the courts.(1)
I assure people, setting this up would take much longer than a 24 or even 72 hour ban.
1) Of course, if it does make it to the courts, the judge will probably fine the person who refused to cooperate utterly in giving your property back. But it doesn't ever get that far.
It's more like he finished signing the paperwork to buy his car, and then started dancing on chairs and running around insulting people and moving desks around. And he got banned and removed from the lot before he could get to his new car, still on their lot, to drive away.
In the real world, he'd have to file paperwork with the police to schedule a time to be escorted to recover his car from Ford's lot, or file paperwork designating someone else to take possession of his car, and Ford would have to agree to it, or if not a judge would have to step in, blah blah blah...which I assure you would take much much much longer than a day or two.
$1200 is an absurd amount of money to spend for a gaming computer. Here is the normal computer list:
$120 for a nice monitor
$80 on a hard drive.
$150 for motherboard, CPU, memory.
$80 on a case and PSU.
$50 for a DVD.
That is about $480 dollars, that's roughly what I remember prices being. Buy it prepackaged, you can get an OS out of the deal.
To make it into a perfectly functional game computer, you need to spend $100-$150 to add a video card, although $200 is possible if you have some extra cash laying around.
And you need to replace the PSU with something better, so another $100, although if you were smart you just bought the overpowered one to start with, so it was just $120 for the case and PSU.
Starting from scratch, that's about $650, which is what everyone tries to pretend it is. But it's not, which is my point. It's $170, or maybe $220, to upgrade an existing computer. Because the odds are you already have a computer.
I managed to buy a 'right under high end' system for about $400 sans monitor and hard drive and DVD (I was switching from AGP to PCI-E, and just went with a new case and PSU.), adding those in back in would be $570, and it worked with every bell and whistle turned on in computer games for the next four years. (It has stopped, now things are sometimes not defaulting to 'high', so roughly now it's time to upgrade the video card. This year, maybe, or maybe next.)
I don't even know how you spend $1200 on a computer unless you're buying a $700 video card or something. I know such things exist premade, but I've never actually figured out what parts they could be using, and I assume they're something like Monster cables in that they have imaginary tweaks like 'straight bus pathways' and 'solid gold fans'!
It's more like he bought a refrigerator and finished paying for it, and then started a fight before he could get the provided handtruck and get it to his car,and now they won't loan him a handtruck as they escort him out.
Look, I'm sorry people, if you act like an ass, companies can deny you access their property. If you have stuff on their property that can't be trivially handed to you on the way out, guess what? They just denied you access to your stuff. In fact, it doesn't matter if you just bought it there, or were carrying your damn fridge to a Fridge Show.
Sounds crazy, but act badly enough in certain places and they will throw you off your property...and sucks to be you if that's where your car was.
Same with rental units. Rent one, put stuff in there, and then spay-paint the walls. See if they don't ban you from the place. 'But all my stuff's there!' Tough shit.
They can't deny you access permanently, they will eventually have to give it back to you or someone designed as a representative of yours, but if you didn't want to be temporarily blocked from it, perhaps you shouldn't chosen to disregard the rules badly enough to get blocked from a place where you have left some of your property, you idjit.
In the real world, you'd actually have to file paperwork with the police and schedule some sort of pickup with both them and the property owner, and I assure people that would take more than 24 or 72 hours.
Yeah, this is like if he went into a store, and bought a refrigerator or something he couldn't carry out, but planned to come back later for with a truck, and then as he was leaving after paying, he acted like an ass and got thrown out. (To be fair, he actually went to the park next door and started acting like an ass, but that park was owned by the store and he got thrown out of both.)
He's lucky they have a 24 hour ban on him instead of just permanently banning him from their property and refunding his money and telling him to take a hike. (Because they are sole supplier of that sort of fridge, I think.)
I agree that he should be able to get his money back if the thing won't activate, on purpose. In fact, I think anyone should be able to get their money back before activation. But that's not related to the issue here, which is that stores really can throw people out, even if they've already purchased something and are incapable of carrying it.
And the person can demand that such a thing get returned to them...eventually.
Hell, they actually can throw you out and keep you away from your stuff even if you didn't purchase it there. You behave badly enough at a mall, you'll get escorted off their property...even if you drove there. You've got to send someone else for your car, or demand they tow it to where you can get to it.
But you probably can't demand that it get returned immediately if that's impractical in any way, and not, say, a bag sitting over there by the wall. You can't demand they carry your fridge to your house. 24 hours is fine.
If you don't want to wait 24 hours for stuff, then don't own stuff located where other people can deny you access to it, and if you do, don't fucking piss them off badly enough to be throw off their property so you can't walk in and get it.
The OCR systems aren't as good as people think. It's not reading the whole address.
They mainly read the postal code (In the US, it's called a ZIP code, don't know about Sweden.), and then sanity check the city and state against it, allowing a rather high margin of error on those. It reads 10101, looks up the name 'Cityville MN' in the DB, sees 'C1tvvllle NN', shrugs, figures close enough, and sends it along.
Once it gets to the right post office, the machines try to sort it by carrier route, but it doesn't work as well as people think unless the extended zip is there. (The extended zip is actually the carrier route) Luckily, letter carriers look at each handwritten address before going out.
I'm not Swedish, but I presume over there junk mail uses automated stamping machines and pay the post office in bulk, just like all businesses do in America.
Even if they don't, surely they'd just buy stamps and use them.
This system is for people who have to mail out two checks, and one letter to the single person on the planet without email, once a month and can never find any stamps on hand. No one who sends more than ten letters a week would possibly use this system instead of going to the post office and buying a roll of stamps.
I don't think your 1 in 3 can possibly be true. Most computer sold are desktop, if only because of the business community buying them.
Maybe you mean only 1 in 3 computers sold to consumers, which is possible, I guess.
Of course, laptops can actually be decent gaming platforms, but you have to spec them in advance, so can't just upgrade, and it's probably $200 more, not $100.
Buying one of those instead of a normal laptop is still cheaper than buying a console or an extra desktop computer, though. And buying an extra desktop is still cheaper than a PS3, and about the same price as an X-Box 360. (And now you have another computer with a bigger hard drive to store things on.)
Of course, there are plenty of non-price reasons why a console might be better to 18-25 year-olds, but I'm just talking fiscally.
There's a much larger difference between a SD TV and a HD TV than between anti-aliasing set at 8x instead of 16x.
I run at full resolution of my monitor. I run at whatever the game suggests, which is generally full graphic features except a couple of them, which are backed off slightly.
But the fact I don't see the need to spend another $120 to see some trees a mile away, or have shinier water. I'd rather have two more games. I'll probably upgrade the next time there's an actual new technology that I need, but right now my card supports DX11 just fine.
And that doesn't really have anything to do with my point, which is that now people can just spend $120 dollars and have the computer that everyone already owns turn into one that is entirely functional at playing games, even if after 5 years they have to start dialing down the graphics a tiny bit or spend another $120. That is the price comparison to a console, not the entire computer.
Not necessarily. It could be their employer's computer.
I think the sane assumption is 'Everyone on slashdot either owns a computer or is near-homeless, in which case they're not going to buy a game console either.'.
The rest of my PC I _already have_, and would already have even if I didn't use it for gaming at all.
Yeah, this is a point that almost always get skipped.
Every single person on slashdot owns a computer, to within statistical margin of error. Everyone hear debating is debating via a computer they own.
And in general, I would be astonished if more than 1% of households with consoles in them did not have a computer. And 90% of that 1% of households probably have a Wii, which is not really what we're talking about here. All gamers have a computer.(Please do not think I'm dissing Wiis, which are amazing ideas, an epic win for Nintendo. You got my mom to buy a game console! My mom! You broke the entire damn product market. But they aren't really in this discussion.)
Now, so all households with gamers own a computer. Maybe 20% of those households do not have one that 'could have been' a gaming computer...they only have Macs or laptops or something.
But for the other 80%, the question isn't 'What is the price of a console compared to a reasonably powerful computer?'. Everything thinks that, but it's not right.
The question is 'What is the price of a console compared to simply purchasing a $100 video card and maybe another gig of memory?'. They already have a computer. Everyone already has a damn computer. This is 2011!
Now, there are other reasons to get a console, but the comparison isn't '$200-$300 PC' vs the console price...it's a $100 video card for the PC you probably already have vs. the console price. Unless you only have laptops or Macs or something, then, sure, you'd have to build a whole computer, but that's not normally true.
And $100 is plenty fine for a video card, you do not need to spend $250 or whatever 'half a PS2' is.;) I always go somewhere between $100 and $150 when buying a new one, which I have to do about three times a decade.
Indeed. I don't actually check requirements anymore, even though I should. I don't buy a lot of games, but I didn't even consider the requirements for Fallout: New Vegas and Civ V, the last two 'graphic intensive' games I bought.
And my machine is about five years old, I'm pretty certain I got it in 2006. It started with Vista, so 2006 or 2007. (It is now W7, of course.) It's starting to show its age, the built-in network starting being weird so I had to stick a PCI card in, but brand-new games still run fine.
Man, I remember when a machine five years old wouldn't run anything. Try playing Doom the year it came out with a five-year old machines.
Now days I just install stuff, and it runs. Sure, when I first got it, games wanted to max everything, and now they've backed off one notch, so I suppose I could get better graphics if I upgraded video cards...but why?
And this wasn't some super expensive high-end thing then, either. The whole thing was about $300, IIRC. (I had to start from scratch because my last system was AGP, so the only thing I wouldn't need to buy was a hard drive...but I bought one of those anyway so I could use the old computer as a HDPC.)
Hilariously, I eventually had exactly the same Phenom problem on ME2 that the other poster mentioned. ME2 did not like three-CPU processors or something. Easy enough to fix.
We pull money now from the general fund for Social Security and CBO is projecting that we'll continued to do so for the indefinite future, unless Social Security is fixed of course.
No we do not. Thanks to the payroll tax holiday, Social Security pulls money from Social Security's reserve.
Social Security does not pull money from the general fund. It has no actual way to do that, although admittedly if things got that bad we'd probably pass a law allowing it to do so.
Public debt per GDP declined under Nixon. It also declined under Eisenhower.
Yes, if you make random measurements you can find ways in which it declined.
Of course, the GDP then declined under Carter, which I guess made all added debt that Nixon put on there his fault? Or, perhaps, GDP is utterly unrelated to debt. The debt is a long-term problem, and growing it less than you grow the GDP is not relevant to anything.
Who on the Democrat side at the federal level is serious about cutting spending? Obama threw in a budget that was more than a trillion over. Most of the Democrat survivors drove the spending in the last Congress. So yes, the Republicans with their ever so awesome record are the only game in town when it comes to federal spending reduction.
Yes, the people who keep increasing the budget massively while cutting microscopic amounts are the only game in town.
What other mockery could I be talking about? Bankruptcy court was adequate for that task. And no, it didn't save the industry (probably doomed Ford too). We still have three crippled auto manufacturers who will go under next time this happens.
Uh, you need to read something that's actually looked at the issue since the bailout. The auto industry is doing very well. (In a recession!) Smart money is on stock prices getting high enough for the government to sell their stock at a profit in two or three years, although they'll have to sell it slowly.
And of course, $30 billion is trivial. That's spending $100k or so per job "created or saved", most which I might add, would have been "created or saved" anyway in a bankruptcy.
Holy fuck, it was that productive? That's like ten time more productive than the stimulus, and fifth times more productive than tax cuts.
I wasn't insane as you confirmed.
..except you didn't address the fact that 'new offshore drilling jobs' is utter nonsense. There are only 55 offshore drilling platforms, and maybe three or four put in a year, with a grand total of thirty people on them, so we get maybe 100 added jobs each year...and that's not including the fact it's new permits, which translate into actual drilling and actual jobs five years later. Nationwide, that's not even worth measuring. The BP spill itself created more jobs than the entirety of offshore drilling has ever done.
EPA is directed by Obama.
You do realize that the Surpreme Court, in Massachusetts v. EPA (Which I should point out, was under Bush, so the case was defended), ordered the EPA to look at carbon dioxide as a possibly pollutant, right? And said that the only decision they could make is if 'carbon dioxide either caused or contributed to air pollution in ways that endangered public health'.
The only answer possible to that is 'yes', and thus the EPA is required by the courts to regulate carbon dioxide.
The law, existing since the creation of the EPA, requires to EPA to regulate that sort of stuff, and the court decision forces them to follow the law. Obama doesn't get any blame or credit for that at all, unless you think he should have appointed someone who say 'Fuck the Supreme Court, I'm doing whatever I want!'.
Let's go over a few items.
If you want to attack Obama from the left, I have no problem with it. He is governing a lot farther to the right than he appeared to be during election.
A vast number of people with authority who weren't appoin
While I don't get the letter, I often enjoy reading the non-vapid articles they write, which used to be full of actual libertarian thought about freedom.
The libertarians, and Glenn Greenwald, seem to be the only people who will attack the government for detaining people without charges, regardless of party.
Sadly, almost all libertarian institutions are actually funded by the Koch bothers and other superrich, so they've now started writing, and have writers for writing, articles about how taxes are infringement of liberty and we need less of them. Or health care, or whatever.
To rephrase an _honest_ libertarian in a discussion I was having with him the other day:
'I'm not a fan of the health care law, and I actually think forcing people to purchase insurance from a private company does have constitutional issues, so I wish the law had been single payer or something. However, this is an idiotic thing to worry about, considering we're in two unending wars and the government asserts the right to snatch people off the streets and detain them, the war on drugs is still going on along with the patently unconstitutional seizure of property, and as Wikileaks has shown, we're often in bed with dictators and have massive amounts of information classified the American people should know about, just to name three random things more important than _money_. I'll get around to how the government taxes me for health care in 2050 or so, after all that's fixed.'
I don't know about that.. I think the meth crowd is a lot different than the pot crowd. Meth addicts tend to like staying up all night pulling copper plumbing out of foreclosed houses. Potheads like to play video games and eat cheetos.
Yes, they behave differently currently, I'm just not sure there's a market for new users of meth. Maybe there is, I don't know, but meth seems like a weird drug to start if you can get others, unless you're a college student who wants to stay up all night or something.
Actually, cocaine abuse is at fault for a good deal of the Great Recession. Bankers with lots of money, doing lots of coke, and taking ridiculously stupid risks with the bank's money.
Do not blame poor innocent cocaine for that behavior.
which indicates you either don't know or don't care about the true state of the US budget.
Considering that social security has not caused a single dime of debt so far, and in fact reduced to by a rather large amount due to lack of interest payments, perhaps we should work on the things that actually cause deficit now instead of pretending that it's an emergency that someday in the future, if no one does anything, we'll run out of money in the fund and might hypothetically pull money from general revenue.
Don't get me wrong. President Bush was a embarrassment for the Republicans and put lie to the claim that Republicans of that time were in any way serious about reducing spending.
Just like, um, Reagan, and Bush I. And Nixon.
You don't get to pretend all Republicans have been exceptionally bad at spending, and yet also claim the Republicans are the only people serious about it.
Some of it went to special interests (lot of unions did well by the ARRA),
Only on the right are unions 'special interests'. In the rest of the population, money going to 'unions' is actually 'money paid to workers who are in unions'.
Damn those 'special interests' human beings working a job.
some went to China
[citation needed]
and the bill created at least two significant disincentives to new hiring (increasing COBRA benefits, unemployment health insurance to be paid by the employer and later reimbursed, maybe, by government)
Erm, do you even know what CORBA is? Employers do not pay it. Unemployed workers do. It is a way for them to continue their work insurance for a set amount of time, paying the entire cost, including the employer part.
and the mockery of law that went on in the GM and Chrysler takeovers by the Obama administration.
You mean the 'mockery' that's eventually going to cost us, oh, maybe $30 billion dollars? (Which, for viewers at home, is trivial, as I've pointed out.) And save an entire industry that employs hundreds of thousand of Americans.
But thanks for reminding me, I knew I left something off my list of how Obama was trying to help with jobs. Keeping the auto industry from going under is definitely one of those things.
The Obama administration also has a long history of obstruction of business such as the unofficial ban on off-shore oil drilling,
Um, are you insane? Firstly, there is no ban, offshore drilling started up again, second, there never was a ban on existing drilling, it was for new drilling.
And, most importantly, the drilling industry total has 60,000 jobs...and only 3% of drills are offshore. Only 55 of them. That's about 1800 jobs total offshore drilling jobs in the country, so there's about 30 on each drill.
The 'new drill moratorium' that existed temporarily maybe stopped the creation of 60 jobs in some sort of hypothetical universe where there were two new drills ready to start instantly. It's utterly insane to pretend that had any effect on job creation.
several provisions in Obamacare which drive up the cost of employer health insurance (and operation of business in general),
Yes, these unnamed 'several provisions'.
Perhaps we should name them. Things like 'Not dropping people who get sick', those sorts of things?
classifying carbon dioxide as a pollutant (and efforts to create a cap and trade market in carbon dioxide),
Except Obama didn't do that. The EPA did.
the continual thumbing of the nose at law and the Constitution, frequent lying that shames prior administrations,
Other random made up shit...
and a sullen disrespect for the concerns of business (such as Obama whining about people making too much money while ignoring that he benefited from some pretty sweet deals himself).
Ah, yes, 'disrespect'. How dare he! If we've nicer to businesses maybe they'll hire people!
I don't think we should allow any profit on cocaine, PCP, or meth, or any recreational drug more addictive than caffeine or alcohol. (Or, let's say, any drug that can kill you with withdrawal.) Or allow any branding, or anything.
You want to buy them, you go to a free clinic or something, and convince them you're addicted. Then you go to a pharmacy, which will sell it to you at the cost the government supplies it to them. That's it. No profit. In fact, the pharmacy is actually out some employee time. (That is just the cost of being a licensed pharmacy, tough.)
The clinic visit will be free, BTW, but is there to make it harder to start drugs. If you want to read up on the symptoms of cocaine addiction and fake them so you can get a prescription to start taking cocaine, go right ahead, but hopefully that will stop at least some people.
Likewise, you could fake the addiction, and then sell it to other people who aren't addicted to try to get them hooked...but that's a pretty stupid business model, because once they get hooked they will hopefully be smart enough to go get it from the government.
Please state the actual problems that heroin addition causes that happy is guaranteed a continual supply of heroin:
...
Oh, that's right, there aren't any. In fact, a lot of soldiers got addicted to heroin, given as a painkiller, in WWI and managed to go decades by just, you know, buying heroin and taking it every day. Not saying it's a good thing, but it's hardly going to destroy society.
LSD? No known health effects, and, incidentally, flashbacks are a myth.
Ecstasy? You can dehydrate easily, but this could be easily solved just by requiring it be distributed in a rehydration solution, like Gator-aid. Esctasy-aid.
So we've got, what, cocaine, meth, and PCP as the hard drugs that actually cause problems? (Namely, they all cause dementia and/or paranoia.)
PCP almost dead, anyway, and no one really took 'it', it was just mixed in with pot.
And meth and crack are essentially replacements drug dealers invented to replace the lack of pot. How many people do you think would start taking meth if they could get pot? Almost no one.
So Meth, PCP, and crack were all inventions by drug dealers to stretch out or replace lack of pot. Sure, current addicts will have to stick with them, but it's hard to see why anyone would choose them over pot or booze.
Straight cocaine, OTOH, was massively abused by the rich in the 80s...and yet society didn't blow up.
I'm confused as to how this would be any sort of disaster, anyway. There are 20 million people in the US who abuse alcohol, that's about 7% of the total population, and yet we appear to keep functioning.
What that statistic, in addition to the fact that the population switched en mass to hard liquor from beer, doesn't mention is that prohibition resulted in vastly more women and children drinking. Before, it was essentially unthinkable for women to drink in public. Afterward, check out any picture of a speakeasy.
Prohibition is an interesting story, but it's important to realize it wasn't about 'drinking' per se. Prohibition was about the fact that men would get blackout drunk, and fail to support their family, and even beat their wife.
Solution: Make them stop drinking.
It's obviously a fucking stupid solution, but there it is. And the thing is...it worked. Spousal abuse went down, people spending all their money on booze went down. Seriously, that part did work to some extent, although not to the extent that the 'beer stats' would indicate.
Of course, it introduced a whole host of new problems, like for the first time in American history women started drinking in large amounts, as did children. And all the violence associated with the criminal element. And the outright flaunting of the law caused problems too. At its height, it made heros of bank robbers and other criminals. John Dillinger, Bonnie and Clyde, hell, watch a production of 'Anything Goes', which satirizes this in the titular song. We have crappy attractive teenager singers as superstars, they had attractive criminals instead. (Actually, they didn't really care what they looked like, they were just fuzzy newspaper pictures.)
Meanwhile, the actual problems were solved by having public drunkenness laws, no-fault divorce, women being able to earn money, women being able to get custody of their children, and spousal abuse laws. And even the existence of contraceptives.
Turns out the problem wasn't 'demon rum', after all, the problem was utter asshole men, who felt, and had the law on their side, that they could do anything they wanted and their wife had no possibility to complain. Give women some power, any power, and suddenly all the problems go away, or at least become completely unacceptable behavior.
Likewise, we're using the same sort of justification for drug abuse, although they're on even thinner ice, if that's possible. While alcohol was, in theory, causing the problems prohibition was supposed to stop (Even though it was really 'treat women as property' that was doing it.), it's pretty obvious that almost all the problems of 'drugs' are being caused by prohibition itself.
There's really no arguing that. Taking pot has probably never caused anyone to shoot anyone else, or at least it's in the single digits every decade. Ownership of pot, OTOH, seems to be often decided by violence.
Other drugs do actually make people violent, like PCP, but a) there's a question of how many people would be taking that if other drugs were available cheaply, and b) alcohol is pretty famous for causing violence also, a certain percentage of the population seems to be an 'angry drunk'. (I'm not sure how we managed to forget that, considering, as I said, that was the basis of Prohibition in the first place.)
If all drugs were magically 100% legal tomorrow, we'd end up with a bunch of new problems, but it would be hard to claim they were worse than what we have now.
Of course, 100% legal isn't the ideal solution either, surely we need some sort of regulations, but when 'removing all the laws about this thing' seems likely to give you a better outcome, something is very very wrong.
Erm, the War on Poverty was from President Lyndon B. Johnson, not Woodrow Wilson.
And it's sorta silly to pretend it's just the left that uses 'war' now. Nixon invented 'War on Drugs'. Also 'War on Cancer' for some reason. (This was back when we thought all cancer might be caused by a single virus, instead of the dozens of things that cause it.)
The War on (some) Drugs and War on Terror are the only militarized 'Wars'...the War on Poverty was just the idea we should put as many resources towards ending poverty as we do a real war.
Geeks have a predilection toward the libertarian view.
I think you're confusing correlation with causality.
Poorly-socialized people, who think they're smarter than everyone else and that if other people weren't stopping them they'd basically rule the world...have a predilection towards the libertarian view. (Unless they're poor, then they usually become criminals, instead.)
Read what you will about 'geeks' from that.;)
I can say that, I used to be a libertarian. (And am a geek.) Then I realized I pretty lucky in life and not as smart as I thought. I'm intelligent, but I can't out-clever the world. No one has enough knowledge to never be conned. No one can be smart enough or aware enough to keep all unscrupulous people from harming them. No one can see the future to always predict every disaster, and even if they could, they often couldn't deal with it even if they knew in advance.
Once you get into the actual world and start interacting with society, you realize just how vapid libertarian thought is, or at least how those people understand libertarian thought, which is basically 'Smart people don't need protection or safety nets, and I'm a smart people! I should get to choose what I'm protected from, and never have to spend any money on taxes to cover me in case something bad happens!'.
There are, indeed, non-vapid libertarians, actual libertarians, out there, and the test is currently 'Do you care more about a) the government forcing you to be insured, or b) the fact the military is forcing an unconvicted Bradley Manning to sleep in the nude?'. If you said B, this post is not about you, even if you intend, at some point, to get around to dealing with A.
But almost every libertarian I've met in real life, including me when I was one, and about half the 'libertarian writers' online, are incredibly vapid and shallow and whose entire idea of freedom is 'People should be able to sell things that are dangerous, and not pay taxes to cover them if they happen to buy things that are dangerous', instead of, you know,actual freedoms, like a right to a trial. They are as I described in the first paragraph of this post.
You failed to take into account future liabilities. Social Security will only be "revenue neutral" (a state it currently isn't in BTW) in the long term with significant cuts in service. I personally think the whole program is an idiotic redistribution of wealth that helps undermine US workers so I wouldn't mind seeing the whole thing dismantled, but I recognize that won't happen, at least for some time to come.
No, I don't fail to take anything into account, you idjit.
Social security operates completely independent of general revenues. It can neither add to or reduce the deficit, in any manner whatsoever, as it currently set up. (Actually, this is wrong, as borrowing from it has reduced interest on the deficit, but that's not important.)
The only way that social security can start costing the government money is if someone passes a law allowing it to get access to general revenue.
Everyone hinting that social security 'might become a budget problem' is a fucking liar. Social security might become a problem in the same way that the post office might become a budget problem...if we pass a law to give it a huge sum of money. Of course, anything might be a problem by that logic...you might be a problem by that logic, perhaps we should get rid of you.
And yes, Republicans are somewhat lackluster in cutting spending and have obvious blind spots like Social Security and defense. It still remains that the Republicans are far more serious about spending than the Democrats.
Yes, if you utterly ignore the $0.7 trillion dollars spent on Iraq. And the $2.9 trillion in tax cuts from 2000-2010.
Feel free to respond with anything either Clinton or Obama did.
*crickets*
Good to know Republicans are 'serious' about the issue. They're currently running around cutting $100 billion out of the budget, as they promised...if they can do that. Of course, they just forced renewal of the giant tax cuts, so they've still made negative progress.
I haven't seen any serious addressing of jobs, economy, and spending by Democrats.
How about the fucking stimulus? Duh. You know, that thing that the Republicans made a good portion of be inexplicable tax cuts (Which don't help during a recession at all. People who do not have jobs do not need tax cuts, they are not paying taxes.), and yet still managed to create millions of jobs.
Oh, and there's the unemployment benefits that the Republicans don't want to pass and the Democrats do. Guess that doesn't count either.
And of course the Democrats aren't address spending. It's a goddamn made up issue by the Republicans. You don't fucking worry about spending in a recession, that makes things worse.(Of course, the the Republicans are counting on things to get worse to elected in 2012.)
If the Republicans cared about spending, perhaps they should have addressed it while they were in charge during an economic boom, instead of always become desperate about it when they're out of power after blowing up the damn economy.
Currently, US voters are to a considerable degree worried about the level of spending at the federal and state levels.
Currently, Americans are, first and foremost, worried about jobs and the economy. (I don't think 'US voters' differ from that, but haven't seen a poll of just them.)
Then they're worried about spending.
Currently, the only serious impetus to cutting spending is among the Republicans.
Yeah, those serious Republicans, yammering constantly about cutting...social security? Which doesn't have anything to do with spending? Hrm. Anytime anyone mentions social security, which pays its own way, as somehow being related to 'spending', they just obviously dishonest. Same with people who list Medicare.
Both those are trust funds, both those have nothing to do with our budget shortfall because they are spending only the money they've taken in, and both those are the first thing Republicans attack WRT spending. It's inherent dishonestly on the whole issue from starting premises. (Obviously, at some point, both those need fixing, because they either are, or near the point of, spending more than they currently are taking in, and operating off their reserves, and at some point will run out of money, but that's not relevant to the actual budget.)
The actual spending problem is that the Republicans refuse, and have scared the Democrats into being unable to do so (The Democrats are spineless cowards who faint at their own shadow), to cut defense spending, which is the gigantic elephant in the room.
Instead, the Republicans run around trying to cut out microscopic levels of spending, like $27 million to help communities run poison control centers. That's about how much it costs us to operate one nuclear sub for a year. So, keep three million people out of the emergency rooms...or have a nuclear sub to play around with to 'export freedom'...wait, who are we even fighting that we need nuclear subs against?
You can claim the Republicans are 'serious' about spending when they acknowledge that the military is costlier than all other militaries on the planet, combined, and maybe we should do something about that.
In fact, I have seen Republicans point that out...and then get ignored by the rest of their party. Ron Paul is an idiot on many things, but at least he's honest and consistent, and has pointed out our military spending is insane.
They might as well attack the coal plants we have now.
Indeed, I wonder if all the people worried about 'blowing up nuclear plants' have an idea what would happen with some C-4 dropped into a coal ash containment unit. Or, you know, them just failing by themselves.
Blowing up the actual coal itself would also be a workable plan.
The nice thing about thorium is that you can't steal it and make a nuke with either it or its waste.
Yes, that is what I was saying, sorry. Didn't sum up my conclusion.
Unless there's a specific law about GPS trackers, like the laws that cover abandoned cars, the FBI has clearly abandoned their tracker.
Depending on the state, the FBI might still be able to demand it back within some reasonable amount of time, but until they do so, the finder can treat it as if it's their own property, including dismantling it and/or selling it. (Unlike lost or misplaced property, which the finder must hold, without damage, and wait some amount of time for the owner to claim it first.)
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No it wouldn't.
If you have property on someone else's property, they do not have to just let you walk up and take it. Even if they agree it's your property, they are not required to let you just walk up and take it.
If you want to recover the property, you must contact the police, and they will maybe recover it for you, or you can schedule a time to recover it, or have a police escort, or all sorts of things.
You cannot just walk up and take it if you've been barred from that location, even if it's yours. You must deal with the police and, if they can't work something out, the courts.(1)
I assure people, setting this up would take much longer than a 24 or even 72 hour ban.
1) Of course, if it does make it to the courts, the judge will probably fine the person who refused to cooperate utterly in giving your property back. But it doesn't ever get that far.
It's more like he finished signing the paperwork to buy his car, and then started dancing on chairs and running around insulting people and moving desks around. And he got banned and removed from the lot before he could get to his new car, still on their lot, to drive away.
In the real world, he'd have to file paperwork with the police to schedule a time to be escorted to recover his car from Ford's lot, or file paperwork designating someone else to take possession of his car, and Ford would have to agree to it, or if not a judge would have to step in, blah blah blah...which I assure you would take much much much longer than a day or two.
$1200 is an absurd amount of money to spend for a gaming computer. Here is the normal computer list:
$120 for a nice monitor
$80 on a hard drive.
$150 for motherboard, CPU, memory.
$80 on a case and PSU.
$50 for a DVD.
That is about $480 dollars, that's roughly what I remember prices being. Buy it prepackaged, you can get an OS out of the deal.
To make it into a perfectly functional game computer, you need to spend $100-$150 to add a video card, although $200 is possible if you have some extra cash laying around.
And you need to replace the PSU with something better, so another $100, although if you were smart you just bought the overpowered one to start with, so it was just $120 for the case and PSU.
Starting from scratch, that's about $650, which is what everyone tries to pretend it is. But it's not, which is my point. It's $170, or maybe $220, to upgrade an existing computer. Because the odds are you already have a computer.
I managed to buy a 'right under high end' system for about $400 sans monitor and hard drive and DVD (I was switching from AGP to PCI-E, and just went with a new case and PSU.), adding those in back in would be $570, and it worked with every bell and whistle turned on in computer games for the next four years. (It has stopped, now things are sometimes not defaulting to 'high', so roughly now it's time to upgrade the video card. This year, maybe, or maybe next.)
I don't even know how you spend $1200 on a computer unless you're buying a $700 video card or something. I know such things exist premade, but I've never actually figured out what parts they could be using, and I assume they're something like Monster cables in that they have imaginary tweaks like 'straight bus pathways' and 'solid gold fans'!
It's more like he bought a refrigerator and finished paying for it, and then started a fight before he could get the provided handtruck and get it to his car,and now they won't loan him a handtruck as they escort him out.
Look, I'm sorry people, if you act like an ass, companies can deny you access their property. If you have stuff on their property that can't be trivially handed to you on the way out, guess what? They just denied you access to your stuff. In fact, it doesn't matter if you just bought it there, or were carrying your damn fridge to a Fridge Show.
Sounds crazy, but act badly enough in certain places and they will throw you off your property...and sucks to be you if that's where your car was.
Same with rental units. Rent one, put stuff in there, and then spay-paint the walls. See if they don't ban you from the place. 'But all my stuff's there!' Tough shit.
They can't deny you access permanently, they will eventually have to give it back to you or someone designed as a representative of yours, but if you didn't want to be temporarily blocked from it, perhaps you shouldn't chosen to disregard the rules badly enough to get blocked from a place where you have left some of your property, you idjit.
In the real world, you'd actually have to file paperwork with the police and schedule some sort of pickup with both them and the property owner, and I assure people that would take more than 24 or 72 hours.
Yeah, this is like if he went into a store, and bought a refrigerator or something he couldn't carry out, but planned to come back later for with a truck, and then as he was leaving after paying, he acted like an ass and got thrown out. (To be fair, he actually went to the park next door and started acting like an ass, but that park was owned by the store and he got thrown out of both.)
He's lucky they have a 24 hour ban on him instead of just permanently banning him from their property and refunding his money and telling him to take a hike. (Because they are sole supplier of that sort of fridge, I think.)
I agree that he should be able to get his money back if the thing won't activate, on purpose. In fact, I think anyone should be able to get their money back before activation. But that's not related to the issue here, which is that stores really can throw people out, even if they've already purchased something and are incapable of carrying it.
And the person can demand that such a thing get returned to them...eventually.
Hell, they actually can throw you out and keep you away from your stuff even if you didn't purchase it there. You behave badly enough at a mall, you'll get escorted off their property...even if you drove there. You've got to send someone else for your car, or demand they tow it to where you can get to it.
But you probably can't demand that it get returned immediately if that's impractical in any way, and not, say, a bag sitting over there by the wall. You can't demand they carry your fridge to your house. 24 hours is fine.
If you don't want to wait 24 hours for stuff, then don't own stuff located where other people can deny you access to it, and if you do, don't fucking piss them off badly enough to be throw off their property so you can't walk in and get it.
The OCR systems aren't as good as people think. It's not reading the whole address.
They mainly read the postal code (In the US, it's called a ZIP code, don't know about Sweden.), and then sanity check the city and state against it, allowing a rather high margin of error on those. It reads 10101, looks up the name 'Cityville MN' in the DB, sees 'C1tvvllle NN', shrugs, figures close enough, and sends it along.
Once it gets to the right post office, the machines try to sort it by carrier route, but it doesn't work as well as people think unless the extended zip is there. (The extended zip is actually the carrier route) Luckily, letter carriers look at each handwritten address before going out.
Why the hell would junk mailers use SMS codes?
I'm not Swedish, but I presume over there junk mail uses automated stamping machines and pay the post office in bulk, just like all businesses do in America.
Even if they don't, surely they'd just buy stamps and use them.
This system is for people who have to mail out two checks, and one letter to the single person on the planet without email, once a month and can never find any stamps on hand. No one who sends more than ten letters a week would possibly use this system instead of going to the post office and buying a roll of stamps.
I don't think your 1 in 3 can possibly be true. Most computer sold are desktop, if only because of the business community buying them.
Maybe you mean only 1 in 3 computers sold to consumers, which is possible, I guess.
Of course, laptops can actually be decent gaming platforms, but you have to spec them in advance, so can't just upgrade, and it's probably $200 more, not $100.
Buying one of those instead of a normal laptop is still cheaper than buying a console or an extra desktop computer, though. And buying an extra desktop is still cheaper than a PS3, and about the same price as an X-Box 360. (And now you have another computer with a bigger hard drive to store things on.)
Of course, there are plenty of non-price reasons why a console might be better to 18-25 year-olds, but I'm just talking fiscally.
There's a much larger difference between a SD TV and a HD TV than between anti-aliasing set at 8x instead of 16x.
I run at full resolution of my monitor. I run at whatever the game suggests, which is generally full graphic features except a couple of them, which are backed off slightly.
But the fact I don't see the need to spend another $120 to see some trees a mile away, or have shinier water. I'd rather have two more games. I'll probably upgrade the next time there's an actual new technology that I need, but right now my card supports DX11 just fine.
And that doesn't really have anything to do with my point, which is that now people can just spend $120 dollars and have the computer that everyone already owns turn into one that is entirely functional at playing games, even if after 5 years they have to start dialing down the graphics a tiny bit or spend another $120. That is the price comparison to a console, not the entire computer.
Not necessarily. It could be their employer's computer.
I think the sane assumption is 'Everyone on slashdot either owns a computer or is near-homeless, in which case they're not going to buy a game console either.'.
The rest of my PC I _already have_, and would already have even if I didn't use it for gaming at all.
Yeah, this is a point that almost always get skipped.
Every single person on slashdot owns a computer, to within statistical margin of error. Everyone hear debating is debating via a computer they own.
And in general, I would be astonished if more than 1% of households with consoles in them did not have a computer. And 90% of that 1% of households probably have a Wii, which is not really what we're talking about here. All gamers have a computer.(Please do not think I'm dissing Wiis, which are amazing ideas, an epic win for Nintendo. You got my mom to buy a game console! My mom! You broke the entire damn product market. But they aren't really in this discussion.)
Now, so all households with gamers own a computer. Maybe 20% of those households do not have one that 'could have been' a gaming computer...they only have Macs or laptops or something.
But for the other 80%, the question isn't 'What is the price of a console compared to a reasonably powerful computer?'. Everything thinks that, but it's not right.
The question is 'What is the price of a console compared to simply purchasing a $100 video card and maybe another gig of memory?'. They already have a computer. Everyone already has a damn computer. This is 2011!
Now, there are other reasons to get a console, but the comparison isn't '$200-$300 PC' vs the console price...it's a $100 video card for the PC you probably already have vs. the console price. Unless you only have laptops or Macs or something, then, sure, you'd have to build a whole computer, but that's not normally true.
And $100 is plenty fine for a video card, you do not need to spend $250 or whatever 'half a PS2' is. ;) I always go somewhere between $100 and $150 when buying a new one, which I have to do about three times a decade.
Indeed. I don't actually check requirements anymore, even though I should. I don't buy a lot of games, but I didn't even consider the requirements for Fallout: New Vegas and Civ V, the last two 'graphic intensive' games I bought.
And my machine is about five years old, I'm pretty certain I got it in 2006. It started with Vista, so 2006 or 2007. (It is now W7, of course.) It's starting to show its age, the built-in network starting being weird so I had to stick a PCI card in, but brand-new games still run fine.
Man, I remember when a machine five years old wouldn't run anything. Try playing Doom the year it came out with a five-year old machines.
Now days I just install stuff, and it runs. Sure, when I first got it, games wanted to max everything, and now they've backed off one notch, so I suppose I could get better graphics if I upgraded video cards...but why?
And this wasn't some super expensive high-end thing then, either. The whole thing was about $300, IIRC. (I had to start from scratch because my last system was AGP, so the only thing I wouldn't need to buy was a hard drive...but I bought one of those anyway so I could use the old computer as a HDPC.)
Hilariously, I eventually had exactly the same Phenom problem on ME2 that the other poster mentioned. ME2 did not like three-CPU processors or something. Easy enough to fix.
We pull money now from the general fund for Social Security and CBO is projecting that we'll continued to do so for the indefinite future, unless Social Security is fixed of course.
No we do not. Thanks to the payroll tax holiday, Social Security pulls money from Social Security's reserve.
Social Security does not pull money from the general fund. It has no actual way to do that, although admittedly if things got that bad we'd probably pass a law allowing it to do so.
Public debt per GDP declined under Nixon. It also declined under Eisenhower.
Yes, if you make random measurements you can find ways in which it declined.
Of course, the GDP then declined under Carter, which I guess made all added debt that Nixon put on there his fault? Or, perhaps, GDP is utterly unrelated to debt. The debt is a long-term problem, and growing it less than you grow the GDP is not relevant to anything.
Who on the Democrat side at the federal level is serious about cutting spending? Obama threw in a budget that was more than a trillion over. Most of the Democrat survivors drove the spending in the last Congress. So yes, the Republicans with their ever so awesome record are the only game in town when it comes to federal spending reduction.
Yes, the people who keep increasing the budget massively while cutting microscopic amounts are the only game in town.
What other mockery could I be talking about? Bankruptcy court was adequate for that task. And no, it didn't save the industry (probably doomed Ford too). We still have three crippled auto manufacturers who will go under next time this happens.
Uh, you need to read something that's actually looked at the issue since the bailout. The auto industry is doing very well. (In a recession!) Smart money is on stock prices getting high enough for the government to sell their stock at a profit in two or three years, although they'll have to sell it slowly.
And of course, $30 billion is trivial. That's spending $100k or so per job "created or saved", most which I might add, would have been "created or saved" anyway in a bankruptcy.
Holy fuck, it was that productive? That's like ten time more productive than the stimulus, and fifth times more productive than tax cuts.
I wasn't insane as you confirmed.
EPA is directed by Obama. You do realize that the Surpreme Court, in Massachusetts v. EPA (Which I should point out, was under Bush, so the case was defended), ordered the EPA to look at carbon dioxide as a possibly pollutant, right? And said that the only decision they could make is if 'carbon dioxide either caused or contributed to air pollution in ways that endangered public health'.
The only answer possible to that is 'yes', and thus the EPA is required by the courts to regulate carbon dioxide.
The law, existing since the creation of the EPA, requires to EPA to regulate that sort of stuff, and the court decision forces them to follow the law. Obama doesn't get any blame or credit for that at all, unless you think he should have appointed someone who say 'Fuck the Supreme Court, I'm doing whatever I want!'.
Let's go over a few items.
If you want to attack Obama from the left, I have no problem with it. He is governing a lot farther to the right than he appeared to be during election.
A vast number of people with authority who weren't appoin
While I don't get the letter, I often enjoy reading the non-vapid articles they write, which used to be full of actual libertarian thought about freedom.
The libertarians, and Glenn Greenwald, seem to be the only people who will attack the government for detaining people without charges, regardless of party.
Sadly, almost all libertarian institutions are actually funded by the Koch bothers and other superrich, so they've now started writing, and have writers for writing, articles about how taxes are infringement of liberty and we need less of them. Or health care, or whatever.
To rephrase an _honest_ libertarian in a discussion I was having with him the other day:
'I'm not a fan of the health care law, and I actually think forcing people to purchase insurance from a private company does have constitutional issues, so I wish the law had been single payer or something. However, this is an idiotic thing to worry about, considering we're in two unending wars and the government asserts the right to snatch people off the streets and detain them, the war on drugs is still going on along with the patently unconstitutional seizure of property, and as Wikileaks has shown, we're often in bed with dictators and have massive amounts of information classified the American people should know about, just to name three random things more important than _money_. I'll get around to how the government taxes me for health care in 2050 or so, after all that's fixed.'
I don't know about that.. I think the meth crowd is a lot different than the pot crowd. Meth addicts tend to like staying up all night pulling copper plumbing out of foreclosed houses. Potheads like to play video games and eat cheetos.
Yes, they behave differently currently, I'm just not sure there's a market for new users of meth. Maybe there is, I don't know, but meth seems like a weird drug to start if you can get others, unless you're a college student who wants to stay up all night or something.
Actually, cocaine abuse is at fault for a good deal of the Great Recession. Bankers with lots of money, doing lots of coke, and taking ridiculously stupid risks with the bank's money.
Do not blame poor innocent cocaine for that behavior.
which indicates you either don't know or don't care about the true state of the US budget.
Considering that social security has not caused a single dime of debt so far, and in fact reduced to by a rather large amount due to lack of interest payments, perhaps we should work on the things that actually cause deficit now instead of pretending that it's an emergency that someday in the future, if no one does anything, we'll run out of money in the fund and might hypothetically pull money from general revenue.
Don't get me wrong. President Bush was a embarrassment for the Republicans and put lie to the claim that Republicans of that time were in any way serious about reducing spending.
Just like, um, Reagan, and Bush I. And Nixon.
You don't get to pretend all Republicans have been exceptionally bad at spending, and yet also claim the Republicans are the only people serious about it.
Some of it went to special interests (lot of unions did well by the ARRA),
Only on the right are unions 'special interests'. In the rest of the population, money going to 'unions' is actually 'money paid to workers who are in unions'.
Damn those 'special interests' human beings working a job.
some went to China
[citation needed]
and the bill created at least two significant disincentives to new hiring (increasing COBRA benefits, unemployment health insurance to be paid by the employer and later reimbursed, maybe, by government)
Erm, do you even know what CORBA is? Employers do not pay it. Unemployed workers do. It is a way for them to continue their work insurance for a set amount of time, paying the entire cost, including the employer part.
and the mockery of law that went on in the GM and Chrysler takeovers by the Obama administration.
You mean the 'mockery' that's eventually going to cost us, oh, maybe $30 billion dollars? (Which, for viewers at home, is trivial, as I've pointed out.) And save an entire industry that employs hundreds of thousand of Americans.
But thanks for reminding me, I knew I left something off my list of how Obama was trying to help with jobs. Keeping the auto industry from going under is definitely one of those things.
The Obama administration also has a long history of obstruction of business such as the unofficial ban on off-shore oil drilling,
Um, are you insane? Firstly, there is no ban, offshore drilling started up again, second, there never was a ban on existing drilling, it was for new drilling.
And, most importantly, the drilling industry total has 60,000 jobs...and only 3% of drills are offshore. Only 55 of them. That's about 1800 jobs total offshore drilling jobs in the country, so there's about 30 on each drill.
The 'new drill moratorium' that existed temporarily maybe stopped the creation of 60 jobs in some sort of hypothetical universe where there were two new drills ready to start instantly. It's utterly insane to pretend that had any effect on job creation.
several provisions in Obamacare which drive up the cost of employer health insurance (and operation of business in general),
Yes, these unnamed 'several provisions'.
Perhaps we should name them. Things like 'Not dropping people who get sick', those sorts of things?
classifying carbon dioxide as a pollutant (and efforts to create a cap and trade market in carbon dioxide),
Except Obama didn't do that. The EPA did.
the continual thumbing of the nose at law and the Constitution, frequent lying that shames prior administrations,
Other random made up shit...
and a sullen disrespect for the concerns of business (such as Obama whining about people making too much money while ignoring that he benefited from some pretty sweet deals himself).
Ah, yes, 'disrespect'. How dare he! If we've nicer to businesses maybe they'll hire people!
I don't think we should allow any profit on cocaine, PCP, or meth, or any recreational drug more addictive than caffeine or alcohol. (Or, let's say, any drug that can kill you with withdrawal.) Or allow any branding, or anything.
You want to buy them, you go to a free clinic or something, and convince them you're addicted. Then you go to a pharmacy, which will sell it to you at the cost the government supplies it to them. That's it. No profit. In fact, the pharmacy is actually out some employee time. (That is just the cost of being a licensed pharmacy, tough.)
The clinic visit will be free, BTW, but is there to make it harder to start drugs. If you want to read up on the symptoms of cocaine addiction and fake them so you can get a prescription to start taking cocaine, go right ahead, but hopefully that will stop at least some people.
Likewise, you could fake the addiction, and then sell it to other people who aren't addicted to try to get them hooked...but that's a pretty stupid business model, because once they get hooked they will hopefully be smart enough to go get it from the government.
A disaster? Why?
Please state the actual problems that heroin addition causes that happy is guaranteed a continual supply of heroin:
Oh, that's right, there aren't any. In fact, a lot of soldiers got addicted to heroin, given as a painkiller, in WWI and managed to go decades by just, you know, buying heroin and taking it every day. Not saying it's a good thing, but it's hardly going to destroy society.
LSD? No known health effects, and, incidentally, flashbacks are a myth.
Ecstasy? You can dehydrate easily, but this could be easily solved just by requiring it be distributed in a rehydration solution, like Gator-aid. Esctasy-aid.
So we've got, what, cocaine, meth, and PCP as the hard drugs that actually cause problems? (Namely, they all cause dementia and/or paranoia.)
PCP almost dead, anyway, and no one really took 'it', it was just mixed in with pot.
And meth and crack are essentially replacements drug dealers invented to replace the lack of pot. How many people do you think would start taking meth if they could get pot? Almost no one.
So Meth, PCP, and crack were all inventions by drug dealers to stretch out or replace lack of pot. Sure, current addicts will have to stick with them, but it's hard to see why anyone would choose them over pot or booze.
Straight cocaine, OTOH, was massively abused by the rich in the 80s...and yet society didn't blow up.
I'm confused as to how this would be any sort of disaster, anyway. There are 20 million people in the US who abuse alcohol, that's about 7% of the total population, and yet we appear to keep functioning.
What that statistic, in addition to the fact that the population switched en mass to hard liquor from beer, doesn't mention is that prohibition resulted in vastly more women and children drinking. Before, it was essentially unthinkable for women to drink in public. Afterward, check out any picture of a speakeasy.
Prohibition is an interesting story, but it's important to realize it wasn't about 'drinking' per se. Prohibition was about the fact that men would get blackout drunk, and fail to support their family, and even beat their wife.
Solution: Make them stop drinking.
It's obviously a fucking stupid solution, but there it is. And the thing is...it worked. Spousal abuse went down, people spending all their money on booze went down. Seriously, that part did work to some extent, although not to the extent that the 'beer stats' would indicate.
Of course, it introduced a whole host of new problems, like for the first time in American history women started drinking in large amounts, as did children. And all the violence associated with the criminal element. And the outright flaunting of the law caused problems too. At its height, it made heros of bank robbers and other criminals. John Dillinger, Bonnie and Clyde, hell, watch a production of 'Anything Goes', which satirizes this in the titular song. We have crappy attractive teenager singers as superstars, they had attractive criminals instead. (Actually, they didn't really care what they looked like, they were just fuzzy newspaper pictures.)
Meanwhile, the actual problems were solved by having public drunkenness laws, no-fault divorce, women being able to earn money, women being able to get custody of their children, and spousal abuse laws. And even the existence of contraceptives.
Turns out the problem wasn't 'demon rum', after all, the problem was utter asshole men, who felt, and had the law on their side, that they could do anything they wanted and their wife had no possibility to complain. Give women some power, any power, and suddenly all the problems go away, or at least become completely unacceptable behavior.
Likewise, we're using the same sort of justification for drug abuse, although they're on even thinner ice, if that's possible. While alcohol was, in theory, causing the problems prohibition was supposed to stop (Even though it was really 'treat women as property' that was doing it.), it's pretty obvious that almost all the problems of 'drugs' are being caused by prohibition itself.
There's really no arguing that. Taking pot has probably never caused anyone to shoot anyone else, or at least it's in the single digits every decade. Ownership of pot, OTOH, seems to be often decided by violence.
Other drugs do actually make people violent, like PCP, but a) there's a question of how many people would be taking that if other drugs were available cheaply, and b) alcohol is pretty famous for causing violence also, a certain percentage of the population seems to be an 'angry drunk'. (I'm not sure how we managed to forget that, considering, as I said, that was the basis of Prohibition in the first place.)
If all drugs were magically 100% legal tomorrow, we'd end up with a bunch of new problems, but it would be hard to claim they were worse than what we have now.
Of course, 100% legal isn't the ideal solution either, surely we need some sort of regulations, but when 'removing all the laws about this thing' seems likely to give you a better outcome, something is very very wrong.
Erm, the War on Poverty was from President Lyndon B. Johnson, not Woodrow Wilson.
And it's sorta silly to pretend it's just the left that uses 'war' now. Nixon invented 'War on Drugs'. Also 'War on Cancer' for some reason. (This was back when we thought all cancer might be caused by a single virus, instead of the dozens of things that cause it.)
The War on (some) Drugs and War on Terror are the only militarized 'Wars'...the War on Poverty was just the idea we should put as many resources towards ending poverty as we do a real war.
Geeks have a predilection toward the libertarian view.
I think you're confusing correlation with causality.
Poorly-socialized people, who think they're smarter than everyone else and that if other people weren't stopping them they'd basically rule the world...have a predilection towards the libertarian view. (Unless they're poor, then they usually become criminals, instead.)
Read what you will about 'geeks' from that. ;)
I can say that, I used to be a libertarian. (And am a geek.) Then I realized I pretty lucky in life and not as smart as I thought. I'm intelligent, but I can't out-clever the world. No one has enough knowledge to never be conned. No one can be smart enough or aware enough to keep all unscrupulous people from harming them. No one can see the future to always predict every disaster, and even if they could, they often couldn't deal with it even if they knew in advance.
Once you get into the actual world and start interacting with society, you realize just how vapid libertarian thought is, or at least how those people understand libertarian thought, which is basically 'Smart people don't need protection or safety nets, and I'm a smart people! I should get to choose what I'm protected from, and never have to spend any money on taxes to cover me in case something bad happens!'.
There are, indeed, non-vapid libertarians, actual libertarians, out there, and the test is currently 'Do you care more about a) the government forcing you to be insured, or b) the fact the military is forcing an unconvicted Bradley Manning to sleep in the nude?'. If you said B, this post is not about you, even if you intend, at some point, to get around to dealing with A.
But almost every libertarian I've met in real life, including me when I was one, and about half the 'libertarian writers' online, are incredibly vapid and shallow and whose entire idea of freedom is 'People should be able to sell things that are dangerous, and not pay taxes to cover them if they happen to buy things that are dangerous', instead of, you know,actual freedoms, like a right to a trial. They are as I described in the first paragraph of this post.
You failed to take into account future liabilities. Social Security will only be "revenue neutral" (a state it currently isn't in BTW) in the long term with significant cuts in service. I personally think the whole program is an idiotic redistribution of wealth that helps undermine US workers so I wouldn't mind seeing the whole thing dismantled, but I recognize that won't happen, at least for some time to come.
No, I don't fail to take anything into account, you idjit.
Social security operates completely independent of general revenues. It can neither add to or reduce the deficit, in any manner whatsoever, as it currently set up. (Actually, this is wrong, as borrowing from it has reduced interest on the deficit, but that's not important.)
The only way that social security can start costing the government money is if someone passes a law allowing it to get access to general revenue.
Everyone hinting that social security 'might become a budget problem' is a fucking liar. Social security might become a problem in the same way that the post office might become a budget problem...if we pass a law to give it a huge sum of money. Of course, anything might be a problem by that logic...you might be a problem by that logic, perhaps we should get rid of you.
And yes, Republicans are somewhat lackluster in cutting spending and have obvious blind spots like Social Security and defense. It still remains that the Republicans are far more serious about spending than the Democrats.
Yes, if you utterly ignore the $0.7 trillion dollars spent on Iraq. And the $2.9 trillion in tax cuts from 2000-2010.
Feel free to respond with anything either Clinton or Obama did.
*crickets*
Good to know Republicans are 'serious' about the issue. They're currently running around cutting $100 billion out of the budget, as they promised...if they can do that. Of course, they just forced renewal of the giant tax cuts, so they've still made negative progress.
I haven't seen any serious addressing of jobs, economy, and spending by Democrats.
How about the fucking stimulus? Duh. You know, that thing that the Republicans made a good portion of be inexplicable tax cuts (Which don't help during a recession at all. People who do not have jobs do not need tax cuts, they are not paying taxes.), and yet still managed to create millions of jobs.
Oh, and there's the unemployment benefits that the Republicans don't want to pass and the Democrats do. Guess that doesn't count either.
And of course the Democrats aren't address spending. It's a goddamn made up issue by the Republicans. You don't fucking worry about spending in a recession, that makes things worse .(Of course, the the Republicans are counting on things to get worse to elected in 2012.)
If the Republicans cared about spending, perhaps they should have addressed it while they were in charge during an economic boom, instead of always become desperate about it when they're out of power after blowing up the damn economy.
Currently, US voters are to a considerable degree worried about the level of spending at the federal and state levels.
Currently, Americans are, first and foremost, worried about jobs and the economy. (I don't think 'US voters' differ from that, but haven't seen a poll of just them.)
Then they're worried about spending.
Currently, the only serious impetus to cutting spending is among the Republicans.
Yeah, those serious Republicans, yammering constantly about cutting...social security? Which doesn't have anything to do with spending? Hrm. Anytime anyone mentions social security, which pays its own way, as somehow being related to 'spending', they just obviously dishonest. Same with people who list Medicare.
Both those are trust funds, both those have nothing to do with our budget shortfall because they are spending only the money they've taken in, and both those are the first thing Republicans attack WRT spending. It's inherent dishonestly on the whole issue from starting premises. (Obviously, at some point, both those need fixing, because they either are, or near the point of, spending more than they currently are taking in, and operating off their reserves, and at some point will run out of money, but that's not relevant to the actual budget.)
The actual spending problem is that the Republicans refuse, and have scared the Democrats into being unable to do so (The Democrats are spineless cowards who faint at their own shadow), to cut defense spending, which is the gigantic elephant in the room.
Instead, the Republicans run around trying to cut out microscopic levels of spending, like $27 million to help communities run poison control centers. That's about how much it costs us to operate one nuclear sub for a year. So, keep three million people out of the emergency rooms...or have a nuclear sub to play around with to 'export freedom'...wait, who are we even fighting that we need nuclear subs against?
You can claim the Republicans are 'serious' about spending when they acknowledge that the military is costlier than all other militaries on the planet, combined, and maybe we should do something about that.
In fact, I have seen Republicans point that out...and then get ignored by the rest of their party. Ron Paul is an idiot on many things, but at least he's honest and consistent, and has pointed out our military spending is insane.
They might as well attack the coal plants we have now.
Indeed, I wonder if all the people worried about 'blowing up nuclear plants' have an idea what would happen with some C-4 dropped into a coal ash containment unit. Or, you know, them just failing by themselves.
Blowing up the actual coal itself would also be a workable plan.
The nice thing about thorium is that you can't steal it and make a nuke with either it or its waste.
Yes, that is what I was saying, sorry. Didn't sum up my conclusion.
Unless there's a specific law about GPS trackers, like the laws that cover abandoned cars, the FBI has clearly abandoned their tracker.
Depending on the state, the FBI might still be able to demand it back within some reasonable amount of time, but until they do so, the finder can treat it as if it's their own property, including dismantling it and/or selling it. (Unlike lost or misplaced property, which the finder must hold, without damage, and wait some amount of time for the owner to claim it first.)
And in many states the FBI can't even do that.