Because no union has a monopoly on labor, you twit.
Price fixing is part of trust-busting laws, and it is only illegal if the price-fixers hold some significant part of the market. If some guy with 10% of the market decides to price fix with some guy with 15%, they're fine.
Strictly speaking, it's a good deal more complicated than that, they look at how the market actually works, but it basically works like that.
So I'm unsure how you think any labor union holds a significant portion of the labor market? Is there some labor union comprised of 70 million people I am unaware of? Or even 7 million people? (Please note that the AFL-CIO is not a 'labor union' and does not set 'prices', aka, wages. AFL-CIO is a political organization that labor unions belong to, just like corporations might belong to a Chamber of Commerce.)
Or perhaps you're trying to argue that they have a monopoly of labor in a very specific field. And, again, you'd have a point..if one union had 90% of all people with medical degree, or whatever, that would indeed be an anti-trust issue. Of course, in the real world, the more skilled the job, the less likely there are unions involved.
Although, legally speaking, unions are exempt from anti-trust laws specifically. (As are, strangely, sports franchises.) But that's completely irrelevant, as none of them would be in violation of the rules anyway.
(Of course, I've answered this as 'employers' and 'purchasers of goods' had some sort of identical rights, which is complete bullshit. That is the great trick in our society, to pretend that completely unrelated things should have the same 'rights ' some random purpose, when not treating them identical for other purposes. If purchasing something is the same as employing someone, why do I have the right to resell what I buy, but not the right to hire someone to do my work for me? Employing and purchasing are not even slightly related, and things can cause problems in one and solve problems in the other.)
until you consult with someone who is actually legally qualified to give legal advice.
Gee, if only the Legal Consul for the National Labor Relations Board was in some way a lawyer.
And if, being a lawyer employed for that purpose by the government, he was in some way qualified to give legal advice about employer/employee relations.
And if he had specifically reviewed this issue and issued a memo about it.
If only all that were true!
Everyone, you should listen to this Anonymous Coward! He knows much more about this issue than this 'Lafe Solomon' fellow.
I can't wrap my mind around someone with $250,000,000 having any reason to be president, unless it's to fight some great injustice.
Sadly, I've pretty clearly figured out what Romney's 'injustice' that he wants to fight is: His super-rich friends aren't quite as super-rich as they want.
Seriously, what the fuck is wrong with these people? Give me enough money that I can spend, I dunno, $1,000,000 off the bat for a nice, custom-built house here and car and a condo in Florida (Well, I'd personally rather have one in NYC or something, I hate the beach, but I'd enjoy vacations to NYC, see a show, tour places, etc. By 'the beach' I mean 'your favorite vacation spot''.), and $200,000 a year in interest after taxes. This seems to be about $10,000,000 or so.
I can't understand how people have multiple houses like Romney. You have one house, and maybe a vacation place. A small place, because you're never there. Maybe two, although I'd probably just rent hotel suites at that point. Why do you have multiple giant houses that you can only live, at most, six weeks a year? Even just having two of those means you have to have duplicates of everything you own. Which is perhaps not a problem, cost-wise, for the super-rich, but seems to be a time issue in buying that stuff.
But it's not a time issue, because they just hire people to buy stuff for their other houses, at which point we have reached absurdity. If you're going to live a week in a place you never go, with stuff picked out by other people, who cook you food and make your bed, you have officially managed to purchase your very own giant hotel suite. Congratz on that, but I must point out that renting a penthouse suite would have been a fuckload cheaper.
And why would Romney bother to run for president? I mean...just...what? Why do they bother to do anything that could even vaguely count as 'work' at that point? I would only do what I enjoy doing.
Perhaps Romney thinks he'd enjoy being president. Which brings to mind something Douglas Adams said about that subject.
Could the same be achieved with SQL... of course, two tables, each with similar structure, but one allowing null values, and then another table which links them.
Uh, no. In SQL, you store data by putting each record in a row. No one has the slightest idea what you're talking about, or why you'd need to 'store only the differences', or why you'd need three tables for that.
However, then my queries become increasingly complex for pretty simple data.
Oh noes! Complicated queries!
Compare this to what you might have to do in SQL... either store the full query string and try to get away with LIKE '%param=value%' or parse this query string each time
That sure is a complicated query. Why, it's so complicated you managed to type the important part in a slashdot post off-hand.
And while that is true in the URL sense (they are all strings), my data model clearly understands that my 'page' parameter is an integer for searches and my 'query' parameter is a string... why shouldn't my database be able to do the same thing with ease?
Yes, especially as MongoDB somehow does magically understand the types of URL parameters...oh, wait, it doesn't? You're having to parse each one as you put it in and figure out the type? Well then that hardly seems relevant to complain that SQL would also require that, does it? (Not that I have any idea why you're complaining about having to store something as a string that actually is a string. There's not any sort of loss there. If you want to treat it as a number, you can do that just as easily after you pull it from the database as before.)
In addition to this, I like a number of features such as aggregate operations. A single URL object can easily have it's click count aggregated in a single autonomous "query." No need to select the value first and then update, not to mention wrap it in a transaction to avoid the possibility of concurrency issues messing with the count.
Yes, it sure is complicated to do something like: UPDATE urltable SET counter = counter + 1
WHERE url = 'blah'; (With INSERT...ON DUPLICATE KEY if needed.)
They are JavaScript Object Notation (JSON) documents and you can query into fields of the object-document without the database having to read the whole "document" in the same way you can read rows based on some set of columns in an RDBMS.
Yes, congratulations on off-loading the 'reading the document into memory and parsing it' into an entirely different process. I'm that will make it much faster then simply keeping the document mmapped in the application that needs it, and in no way be counterproductive as data is pointlessly transferred back and forth and memory is consumed for no useful reason.
Look: Either the document is already in memory, in which case it should be in the memory of the damn program that wants to use it, or it's not in memory, and someone is going to have to read it in and parse the data fields.
And when people point out there appears to be no actual use, the NoSQL people feel the need to expand NoSQL to include completely random things like Memcache, which is not any sort of 'database' at all, and the Memcache people would be completely baffled to be included in this group.
I'm frankly surprised they haven't started claiming that filesystems are NoSQL. And everyone uses those! So everyone uses NoSQL!
And, in fact, they're correct. That's really what NoSQL is. It's a not a replacement for any sort of existing database, it's a replacement for a filesystem. If you are dealing with a massive amount of random chunks of information of differing types, then you need NoSQL because filesystems only hold so much and are not geared that hugely.
And, I should point out, that almost no one is doing that. Google, yes. Some DNA researcher, yes.
Everyone else, no. And most of the people who are...just need some sort of file replication and locking system, with smarter caching. Or memcache or something like that.
I swear, it's like the database universe got invaded with a bunch of idjits saying 'Use unstructured files instead of databases, they're much better at storing unstructured data like spreadsheets and PDFs and images'.
Yeah, thanks, we already knew that. In fact, we're pretty certain everyone already knew that, considering that was invented before databases. The fact some people with massive amounts of files have invented a sort of ultimate user-space file store for their huge amounts of data...well, good for them, but that's not actually relevant to anyone else.
(And the fact that the NoSQL people seem intent on rigging JSON or XML or whatever back on top of them, to get 'fields' in their unstructured data, is just hilarious. I keep waiting for them to also invent storing multiple rows in a single NoSQL block, and then they can even come up with a query language to search in them! Uh...guys?)
At least the Democrat's thing had some purpose, to actually pass bills in the crazy system that is a bicameral legislation.
The Republican's nonsense, OTOH, was just a 'Oh, you don't like the absurd budget we sent you! Well, we'll just close our eyes and pretend we can't hear you.'.
That said, the Republicans have absolutely no ability to claim that anyone is 'abusing' parliamentary law, not because of their stupid and pointless 'We'll just pretend we came up with a passable budget', but because of their persistent use of the pretend filibuster...the one where we just all pretend that 'debate can't end' somehow, instead of just requiring them actually keep saying random shit and taking the floor back if they stop, like how an actual filibuster works.
Please note I have no problem with occasional usages of actual filibusters, but I have rather large issues with the idea that the Senate somehow requires 60 votes to pass anything at all, and at this point I'm all for the nuclear option of having filibusters declared unconstitutional. (Strictly speaking, 51 Senators can pass bills in the Senate, period. The fact that Senate parliamentary rules requires 60 Senators to 'end debate', and that now counts as 'the vote' and is voted down so no actual vote happens, means that the Senate parliamentary rules are infringing on a constitutional right, and if 51 Senators want to take it to court, they would win.)
Really? I urge you to look closely at them the next time. They'll either seal the hole itself by melting the plastic, seal further back around the hole with glue, or they'll just have the hole outside of the sealed area to start with. Don't assume that all the plastic is the 'sealed area'. Often they will have a flat poorly-sealed area at the top, and then seal across the middle, above the product.
Now, there are a few systems that, instead of all that, just punch a 'hanging hole' in the boxes once they get over here, after their trip. Boxes designed that way used to be the normal at the start of clamshells, but that requires actual US employees, and such a thing is almost unheard of now. (And boxes designed that way are also almost unheard of. *rimshot*)
And, of course, sometimes instead of making them airtight, they'll just put silica desiccant in them instead.
I think you're right in that we'll 'have to see', although I think the outcome should be obvious.
SCOTUS needs to determine whether PPACA is or is not a tax in the sense of US law, and it will likely draw up a list of criteria to determine that.
I think the decision it's a 'tax' is a bit obvious. It's hard to see what else it could be...it doesn't bar anyone from doing things. Now, it's a 'backwards' tax, it taxes people for 'not doing things', but there's plenty of places in the tax code where that is true. For example, people are taxed for not having kids.
Of course, both sides stipulated it wasn't a tax for the purpose of allowing the suit to go forward, but stipulating something does not actually make it so.
If it passes that test, then it needs to determine whether it is the kind of tax that the federal government is empowered to impose.
I went and looked it up, because I was wondering how the hell the mortgage deduction would be allowed as a direct tax, and I was completely wrong about it being a 'direct tax'. It turns out that the Supreme Court has in general, throughout its history, considered only two things direct taxes: Taxes on people (The constitution uses the word 'Capitation', which just means 'head tax'), and taxes on land.
Nothing else besides people or land seems to count. Not even other forms of property.
Now, there was a very slight screw up with Pollock v. Farmers' Loan & Trust Co. in that they decided that a tax on rent was the same as a tax on land, which is a) probably wrong, and b) never fixed because the sixteenth amendment was passed instead, specifically to allow that sort of thing.
However, Pollock appears to only be at issue because it was about land in some sense.(1) If it had been, for example, car rental, the issue would not have arise, because no one has ever suggested the Federal government is not allowed to tax automobile ownership.
In fact, Patton v. Brady specifically said that a tax on tobacco ownership was not a direct tax. That it 'was not a tax on personal property as such, but only on specific types of personal property with specific intended uses'. (Which sounds a lot like health insurance.) Now, that decision left open the idea that taxing all property (I.e., having an 'asset tax' where you had to report all you owned and pay a percentage based on that.) might or might not be allowed. But it specifically allowed taxing certain individual kinds of 'owning stuff'.
And, of course, claiming that taxing health insurance (or the lack of health insurance) is an 'impermissible direct tax' is a bit of a Pandora's box, simply because a huge amount of tax law is actually stuff that can be reduced to 'direct tax' under that logic, and in ways much more outrageous than this. (For example, some income tax deductions can be on things you've owned for years, like owning a property on the National Register of Historic Places, whereas the mandate is at least talking about actual money you've spent that year, and hence has a much closer relationship to actual income.)
Unless someone wants to blow up the entire deduction system of income tax by claiming that taxation (or lack thereof) on the basis of owning something is a direct tax, and make income tax literally based on just income, it's hard to see how the PPACA can be argued to somehow be a direct tax, but all that other stuff is somehow allowed.
I would hope the Supreme Court would actually realize deciding that the mandate is impermissible is deciding that almost all income tax deductions are impermissible. (Including, I must point out, the health insurance deduction for employers.)
1) Ironically, the reason I looked this up, the mortgage deduction, quite possibly could be disallowed under Pollock v. Farmers' Loan & Trust Co., because it is also about real estate. But, as I said, that case was decided wrong, and would be overturned if it came back up.
I in no way argued for censoring anything. I just pointed out word 'nigger' is seen rather differently than it is today, and 'obsceniness' and 'racismness' of a word aren't really the same thing. 'Nigger' has always been the latter, it's only recently become the former.
And it didn't just change due to the fact we're unwilling to put up with racism. We're not willing to put up with other people using any racial slurs, but we don't have to run around inventing phrases like 'the n-word' to keep from saying them. (The closest is 'the c-word, but 'cunt' has always been considered obscene, or at least it's been obscene longer than anyone cared about the fact it was a slur.)
Mark Twain might have predicted a day when racial slurs would not be acceptable to use. (Although he was very cynical, so who knows?) However, it's rather unlikely that he would predict that one specific racial slur would also become so obscene that it would be taboo to even use to talk about other people saying it.
As I said elsewhere, if it is changed, it should be changed to another racial slur. Changing it to a non-slur whitewashes history and change the authorial intent, changing it to another slur at least tries to keep the impact as it originally was. I don't really think it should be changed at all, and I have no sympathy for people changing it to a non-slur, but I have a tiny amount of sympathy for those who can't deal with a book full of 'nigger' anymore than they could deal with a book full of 'fuck'. As long as that's not mistaken for the original text, whatever.
Now I'm reminded for a sci-fi story that I didn't actually read, just the summary: Because of some sort of outside event, 'change' becomes a obscene word (People start using 'alter' or something instead.), and resulting in school children giggling their way through history class.
But, if I'm understanding correctly, one of the reasons that the entire structure set ablaze so fast was because the hydrogen combusted in its entirety very quickly, transferring the heat of the reaction to almost the entire structure practically in an instant.
No one actually knows why it burned so quickly.
An interesting fact is that hydrogen does not burn at a frequency the human eye can see, except maybe shifting a bit into blue. Whereas, although you can't tell from the black and white footage, all the big flames were red. So all the flames in the footage you see are something else burning.
However, you are probably correct, in that at least the initial hydrogen burning (Which almost no eyewitnesses seemed to have noticed, and we have no footage of, as the cameras hadn't started yet.) heated up the structure of the ship to the point that the flames spread very quickly. It's pretty much the only way the flames on the skin could have spread downward, which they clearly do.
As you say a hydrogen based airship can be made safe with modern techniques, limiting the effect of any ignition that does occur and using better materials for the rest of the design too.
A major problem is that the hydrogen bags were close enough to each other to damage the next one when they exploded, and that they were confined inside the skin together. So the heat of the explosion had nowhere else to go.
Put the hydrogen in long strong 'heat-retardant barrels' with a thin-ish top, without anything above them, and direct any explosion upward. And don't coat the skin with stupid flammable paint.
Problem solved.
Seriously, this was back in the day when no one bothered to protect against fire. Five years later, 492 people would die in a nightclub fire in Boston. No one suggested that nightclubs were untenable. No, we fixed building codes, and actually started enforcing it.
But a different gas being used to impart lift would also have made the day very different.
Well, yeah. For one thing, there would have been no Hindenburg in the first place. The Germans had no helium.
Uh, not really. Word meanings and connotations changes over time.
'Nigger' was a slur, but it wasn't, as you call it, 'a terrible slur'. I point to Scout using it (And being corrected by her father.) in To Kill a Mockingbird, set in the 1930s, written in the early 60s.
It's only fairly recent that it became an obscene word that people won't say, ever. Not even in the context of reporting what other people say.
Or to look at it another way: Huck and Tom talk about 'Injun Joe' all the time, just like 'Nigger Jim'. That is also a racial slur, used in exactly the same context. And if you went around calling people 'Injun' in the modern day, well, people would rightly assume you were racist. But when they recounted the story, they would say that you said 'Injun', not 'the I-word'. And you'll notice that no one has proposed changing 'Injun' to anything in Huck Finn.
This is because at some point the taboo against 'nigger' became so strong that it managed to cross the boundary into the obscene, thus fundamentally changing how we see the word, which imparts a rather unintended impact to Huck Finn.
You can argue for that impact, but it's certainly not something Mark Twain knew was going to be there.
Actually, in the context of the literary masterpiece we are currently discussing, the adjective is technically part of the character's name.
Well, yes, but it's an adjective that describes skin color, is my point. If it is to be replaced, it must be replaced with another that describes the same skin color, not some unrelated word.
The whole 'should it be replaced' is another matter entirely, about which I completely agree with you.
But there's a whole secondary issue with the choice of 'slave' as the replacement word. That's not a synonym of 'nigger' in any sense. That is not what they are talking about.
And by rewriting it where that is what they are talking about, there's some unfortunate implications going on. Jim cannot stop being 'Nigger Jim', but he can, and in fact already had, stopped being this rewritten 'Slave Jim'. It stops being about race and is now about a silly mistake about condition of servitude, and, ha, it's been corrected at the end and we can throw back our head and laugh during the credits.
Uh, no. The problem is that society is deeply broken for Jim, and everyone with his skin color. That's not to trivialize slavery, which is obviously a bad thing and we should be happy that Jim is free...but, then again, he technically was free this entire time, but would knowing this fact have helped him at all?
No, because no one with his skin color can really be free in this society where any random 'nigger' can be captured and enslaved, because they have no rights...but, after the editors finish with it, does the same hold true for any random 'slave'?
I've been willing to give the benefit of the doubt to people who want an edited version to exist. Maybe they simply cannot read the word 'nigger' without their brain seizing up for a second, and need a different word to enjoy the book. Maybe they think everyone is that way, or the word simply makes it too difficult to teach with. I'll be reading the original, and I think they are misguided, but, okay, do whatever, I guess.
But anyone insisting on 'slave'...at some point, I've got to start questioning their motives. That is not a synonym at all, and in fact ascribes entirely different meanings. The replacement must be describing race, and, hell, it should really be a racial slur. If 'nigger' is really so bad we can never ever ever use it, well, there's always 'darkie' or something.
What the Republicans House did with the budget was simply decide to pretend that the Senate had passed the Ryan budget for the purposes of House Committee stuff. The House obviously has no power to decide what the Senate has and has not passed, but it can pretend whatever the hell it wants for its own internal rule purposes, no matter how delusional such a thing is.
So what the House did wasn't 'Deem and Pass', it's 'Let's Pretend the Senate Passed This'. Which is completely pointless because at some point the actual budget will pass, as it won't even slightly resemble what they're pretending passed. So all the committees' hypothetical work will get thrown out. Except hopefully they're smart enough not to do any.
Please note that in no way am I saying is Deem and Pass actually any sort of bad thing, just that the Republicans didn't do it. Deem and Pass is simply a way to pass two (or more!) bills at once. Granted, under standard parliamentary law, it's a bad concept, and what you should do is amend the original bill.
Except that a) the House doesn't operate under standard parliamentary law, and in fact predates it, and b) because we have a bicameral body, which requires that identical bills be passed by both houses, it's often very useful to be able to make something else pass at the same time as a bill that's been passed by the other house, without technically 'modifying' the other house's bill. Which is, indeed, what happened with the health care law.
Yes, that is how Deem and Pass works. It's usually when one bill, let's call it Bill #1, relies on Bill #2, which has not been passed. (Although it actually can be used for almost anything.)
So they simply pass #1 using a specific process that says 'We agree that by passing Bill #1 we already passed Bill #2, even though we did not actually do that'. They 'deem' Bill #2 to have passed.
So Deem and Pass sounds normally completely pointless. The way to actually do things like that would just be to pass an amendment before the end vote.
That is, until you remember that there are two houses and a reconciliation process, and any change to the other house's bill either requires the other house to pass it again, or requires reconciliation and then both houses to pass it again.
So doing it the way they did it in your example (If they did, I really wasn't paying attention.) is exactly correct.
That's how it's supposed to work. Deem and Pass lets them legally keep them as two separate bills, so one can be identical to the other house's (And thus just need the president's signature to become law) and the other can be brand new and go over to the other house.
Obama can 'insist' the PPACA is a manned moon mission for all I care.
'Penalty' doesn't actually seem to have any meaning in the law. Let's try to figure out what a 'penalty' could be.
It doesn't appear to be a fine, which is when a criminal offense is committed that has a monetary punishment. And, in fact, that would be a very oddly structured crime...a crime of not doing something?
It doesn't appear to be a tort, either. Simply because there's no trial possible.
There are 'fees' the government charges...but, again, it charges fees for government services, not 'some guy didn't do something'. So it's not a fee. (And fees are a form of tax anyway.)
The simple fact is the government outright charging people money is called a tax, period. Using a word besides 'tax' doesn't change that fact.
Wikipedia: To tax (from the Latin taxo; "I estimate") is to impose a financial charge or other levy upon a taxpayer (an individual or legal entity) by a state or the functional equivalent of a state such that failure to pay is punishable by law.
Any money you owe the government normally (As opposed to owing money as the result of a a court punishment.) is a tax. If the legislature says you owe it, it's a 'tax'. That is what a tax is. This is not some sort of debatable concept, it's not in any way vague.
Now, an argument could, in theory, be made that it is an impermissible form of tax...the only taxes allowed in the US are a) Direct proportional and head taxes, according to the constitution, b) indirect taxes, which is assumed because direct ones are explicitly banned under the constitution and they're the only other type, and c) any sort of income taxes, added by the sixteenth amendment to fixed the wrong-headed court decision that rent wouldn't count under indirect taxes.
The problem is, the PPACA is a head tax that is proportional to the population (Because it's on the population instead of each state.), and thus explicitly allowed by the constitution.
Uh, Congress isn't forcing you to buy anything. No one, at any point, is required to buy any insurance.
Does no one here actually understand how the law works?
Congress is taxing people who don't have health insurance. Or, as I believe it is phrased, Congress is taxing everyone, and then providing a rebate for people with health insurance.
Gee, I wonder if Congress has the power to tax people. If only the power to tax was somehow enshrined in the Constitution.
Yes. The only reason people died during the Hinderburg is that they didn't know what to do, and tried to jump out of the damn thing when it was too high. (Well, except for that poor slob who jumped out at the right time, survived the jump, but then had the thing land on him.)
Of course, they only tried to jump out because the structure was on fire, and they thought it would collapse on them afterwards. Again, the structure was on fire, not the hydrogen...hydrogen explodes, and it floats, obviously, so it's not like it was hanging around to cause any harm. The framework and skin was what was burning.(1)
But is it is possible to have a 100% safe hydrogen dirigible. (Well, barring collision with an airplane or it landing on someone.)
All you have to do is have like five or so separate hydrogen chambers, kept far enough apart that they can't reach each other, and in a way that any explosion is directed straight up, so that it just sorta vents a single giant flame out the top then coasts to the ground.
And build the structure out of asbestos or something.
People forget that, back then, everything caught fire and killed people. Just ask theatre-goers. Nowadays, we can actually build things with fire-stops and emergency doors and whatnot, and the hydrogen explosion and fire isn't going to kill anyone...it didn't even kill anyone back then! The entire damn airship being on fire, thus causing people to jump, is what killed people.
But if we build one correctly, the only danger would be the cabin making an emergency landing on people.
1) Some people assert that the skin was painted with some flammable paint, and I think Mythbusters did something to demonstrate it might be true. But regardless of why everything else was on fire, the fact is that the 'hydrogen' was not. Hydrogen does not sit in place on fire. There might have been holes slowly feeding hydrogen into the fire...but that, as I said, is easily fixed by building an emergency venting system to let it out the top.
Coffee makers need the time, because you can make them do something at a specific time. VCRs need the time, because you can make them do something at a specific time. Many radios need the time, because you can make them do something at a specific time. Automated thermostats need the time, because you can make them do something at a specific time.
There is no way to make a microwave do something a specific time, so NO ONE NEEDS A FUCKING CLOCK ON THEIR MICROWAVE.
This is not goddamn rocket science. This is not, has never been, and will never been the slightest reason to have a clock on a microwave. These only exist because of some sort of ego-trip that microwave makers were on when they were almost the sole device in the home controlled by microprocessor and had an LED display, so it was like LOOK AT MY FANCY COCK! I MEAN CLOCK!
Now, I have no real issue with building clocks in things that don't need clocks.(1) I mean, no car radio has any sort of alarm, so doesn't use the time, but most of them have clocks, but you don't see me complaining about this. But why the fuck do half of the microwave makers seem to assume this is some vitally important function for microwaves to perform and thus require you to set it when the power goes out? (The other half have been beaten with a cluestick and no longer require this.) I don't have to set my car radio time to use my car, or even to use my damn radio.
1) Although I have to question what sort of added power consumption in a microwave that is adding for no reason at all. Hopefully there's some sort of low-power power supply thing going on.
The real problem with cardboard containers is that you can't stick them in a poorly-seal shipping container from China. They will get damp.
Seriously, folks, they're selling us hermetically sealed containers. Think about it. Why would they do that? Look at the top of the clamshell...they seal up the fricking hole they punched in it to hang it with!
They aren't doing that just for fun, they're doing that so they can have it in environments like a dusty road out of the village sweatshop, or in a mildew-filled warehouse, or on a cargo ship for two months. Then run a quick rinse over it, and, tada, good as new.
I really have no idea how he would feel. It's entirely possible he'd say 'That is the way it was, so it will remain that way.'. Alternately, he might say 'The word has become much more vile than it was back then, which I applaud, but that now lends the wrong connotation to the text, so I will change it'.
I'm not even sure how this hypothetical works...Huck Finn was a specific book written for a specific audience for a specific reason, and Twain probably wouldn't even _care_ what modern audiences saw in it, and would be flatly astonished anyone still read it.
If he wanted to speak to modern audiences, he would presumably be writing new books, not worrying about 130 year old books. I suspect if today he wrote Huck Finn, it would be rather different. (And now I don't even know what 'Mark Twain' we're talking about...a hypothetical 180 year old man? Or a current person who, somehow, wrote books about his experiences growing up in a small town in the pre-civil war Mississippi?)
My point was actually that 'slave', despite being the most common choice of editors, is actually a utterly wrong word choice. 'Colored', 'Negro', even 'Black' would work. Or they could go with actual racial slurs that aren't as brain-freezing, like 'Darkie' or 'Spook'.
But 'Slave' actually means something completely different, and having it conflated with what Jim is being called is not a good thing.
Well, there's an excuse for health: People are only willing to do things that don't cost money.
And thanks to fucked up medical system in this country, that means that people do not go to the doctor until something is wrong.
You have to wonder how much healthier people would be if they got a free yearly checkup, or had a free STD testing, or whatever. (There's still a 'cost', time-wise, but it's much less.)
However, that reasoning shouldn't really explain anything about the police. Arresting people actually costs more money in court costs and stuff, so would be a surreal way to cut costs...and it makes the community look bad, so you'd think that local government would be trying to stop it.
The problem is, of course, that the police often get funding based on the amount of crime they stop.
Setting aside the idea of whether or not the word should be replaced at all, replacing it with 'slave' is deeply stupid.
I understand how that word can make the book hard to read, and if people want to release altered versions, whatever...but the word to substitute in is 'Negro' or 'colored', not 'slave'. 'Nigger' isn't about Jim's state of enslavement, it's about his skin-color. He will still be called that slur whether or not he is free, he will always be seen as 'other' and 'not part of society', not because of his enslavement status, but because of his pigmentation
Glossing over that is revisionist history of the worse kind, leading to a total screwed up lesson that, hey, Jim is now free, thus not a slave, and hence all those people who were so concerned about him being a nigger^Wslave will be entirely happy now, and Jim's entire life will be fluffy bunnies from now on and he'll be invited to their dinner parties.
I don't know how Mark Twain would feel about his text being altered, I suspect that he'd be happy that racial slurs are no longer accepted, and could conceivable be okay with changing the text so that people continued to read it...but I suspect he'd be rather annoyed at the new text conflating racial prejudice with slavery. (And, thus, sans slavery, everything is fine.)
Like the county being charged rental fees for property that had long been sold, paying for phone lines that had been disconnected for years, or buying stuff from a magistrate’s store.
Why does this sort of stuff just plain piss the left leaning person off? I mean, even if you are a dedicated communist shouldn't you still wish to find corruption, overspending, and waste, and squash it? Shouldn't that be something anyone from any party would rally behind?
You do realize that the reason this sort of wastes happens is because of idiots constantly reducing the budgets for things by slashing taxes, which reduces staffing, which in turn results in the government operating in a completely haphazard manner, right?
You think 'corruption', but no, the government was not deliberately paying for phone lines it didn't have as part of some clever scheme to funnel a few hundred dollars to...the phone company? Uh, no. Those lines were being paid for because no one was employed to keep track of that stuff. Lewis County KY was paying for extra stuff because their government was too small and didn't have some sort of comptroller position.
Probably because the county couldn't afford anyone to actually do that job, as Lewis County KY is very poor. Until they elected Massie, who apparently decided it was part of his job. Which I guess is fine if they actually manage to find a competent executive who can do that, but that really seems like it would be saner as a non-partisan salaried position. (Which the county presumably cannot afford, but that's where the state should step in.)
Slashdot Mirror
Because no union has a monopoly on labor, you twit.
Price fixing is part of trust-busting laws, and it is only illegal if the price-fixers hold some significant part of the market. If some guy with 10% of the market decides to price fix with some guy with 15%, they're fine.
Strictly speaking, it's a good deal more complicated than that, they look at how the market actually works, but it basically works like that.
So I'm unsure how you think any labor union holds a significant portion of the labor market? Is there some labor union comprised of 70 million people I am unaware of? Or even 7 million people? (Please note that the AFL-CIO is not a 'labor union' and does not set 'prices', aka, wages. AFL-CIO is a political organization that labor unions belong to, just like corporations might belong to a Chamber of Commerce.)
Or perhaps you're trying to argue that they have a monopoly of labor in a very specific field. And, again, you'd have a point..if one union had 90% of all people with medical degree, or whatever, that would indeed be an anti-trust issue. Of course, in the real world, the more skilled the job, the less likely there are unions involved.
Although, legally speaking, unions are exempt from anti-trust laws specifically. (As are, strangely, sports franchises.) But that's completely irrelevant, as none of them would be in violation of the rules anyway.
(Of course, I've answered this as 'employers' and 'purchasers of goods' had some sort of identical rights, which is complete bullshit. That is the great trick in our society, to pretend that completely unrelated things should have the same 'rights ' some random purpose, when not treating them identical for other purposes. If purchasing something is the same as employing someone, why do I have the right to resell what I buy, but not the right to hire someone to do my work for me? Employing and purchasing are not even slightly related, and things can cause problems in one and solve problems in the other.)
until you consult with someone who is actually legally qualified to give legal advice.
Gee, if only the Legal Consul for the National Labor Relations Board was in some way a lawyer.
And if, being a lawyer employed for that purpose by the government, he was in some way qualified to give legal advice about employer/employee relations.
And if he had specifically reviewed this issue and issued a memo about it.
If only all that were true!
Everyone, you should listen to this Anonymous Coward! He knows much more about this issue than this 'Lafe Solomon' fellow.
I can't wrap my mind around someone with $250,000,000 having any reason to be president, unless it's to fight some great injustice.
Sadly, I've pretty clearly figured out what Romney's 'injustice' that he wants to fight is: His super-rich friends aren't quite as super-rich as they want.
Seriously, what the fuck is wrong with these people? Give me enough money that I can spend, I dunno, $1,000,000 off the bat for a nice, custom-built house here and car and a condo in Florida (Well, I'd personally rather have one in NYC or something, I hate the beach, but I'd enjoy vacations to NYC, see a show, tour places, etc. By 'the beach' I mean 'your favorite vacation spot''.), and $200,000 a year in interest after taxes. This seems to be about $10,000,000 or so.
I can't understand how people have multiple houses like Romney. You have one house, and maybe a vacation place. A small place, because you're never there. Maybe two, although I'd probably just rent hotel suites at that point. Why do you have multiple giant houses that you can only live, at most, six weeks a year? Even just having two of those means you have to have duplicates of everything you own. Which is perhaps not a problem, cost-wise, for the super-rich, but seems to be a time issue in buying that stuff.
But it's not a time issue, because they just hire people to buy stuff for their other houses, at which point we have reached absurdity. If you're going to live a week in a place you never go, with stuff picked out by other people, who cook you food and make your bed, you have officially managed to purchase your very own giant hotel suite. Congratz on that, but I must point out that renting a penthouse suite would have been a fuckload cheaper.
And why would Romney bother to run for president? I mean...just...what? Why do they bother to do anything that could even vaguely count as 'work' at that point? I would only do what I enjoy doing.
Perhaps Romney thinks he'd enjoy being president. Which brings to mind something Douglas Adams said about that subject.
No. That would not work. You are still risking unexpected interactions with hardware. I.e., the Pentium math bug or F00F.
Could the same be achieved with SQL... of course, two tables, each with similar structure, but one allowing null values, and then another table which links them.
Uh, no. In SQL, you store data by putting each record in a row. No one has the slightest idea what you're talking about, or why you'd need to 'store only the differences', or why you'd need three tables for that.
However, then my queries become increasingly complex for pretty simple data.
Oh noes! Complicated queries!
Compare this to what you might have to do in SQL... either store the full query string and try to get away with LIKE '%param=value%' or parse this query string each time
That sure is a complicated query. Why, it's so complicated you managed to type the important part in a slashdot post off-hand.
And while that is true in the URL sense (they are all strings), my data model clearly understands that my 'page' parameter is an integer for searches and my 'query' parameter is a string... why shouldn't my database be able to do the same thing with ease?
Yes, especially as MongoDB somehow does magically understand the types of URL parameters...oh, wait, it doesn't? You're having to parse each one as you put it in and figure out the type? Well then that hardly seems relevant to complain that SQL would also require that, does it? (Not that I have any idea why you're complaining about having to store something as a string that actually is a string. There's not any sort of loss there. If you want to treat it as a number, you can do that just as easily after you pull it from the database as before.)
In addition to this, I like a number of features such as aggregate operations. A single URL object can easily have it's click count aggregated in a single autonomous "query." No need to select the value first and then update, not to mention wrap it in a transaction to avoid the possibility of concurrency issues messing with the count.
Yes, it sure is complicated to do something like: UPDATE urltable SET counter = counter + 1 WHERE url = 'blah'; (With INSERT...ON DUPLICATE KEY if needed.)
They are JavaScript Object Notation (JSON) documents and you can query into fields of the object-document without the database having to read the whole "document" in the same way you can read rows based on some set of columns in an RDBMS.
Yes, congratulations on off-loading the 'reading the document into memory and parsing it' into an entirely different process. I'm that will make it much faster then simply keeping the document mmapped in the application that needs it, and in no way be counterproductive as data is pointlessly transferred back and forth and memory is consumed for no useful reason.
Look: Either the document is already in memory, in which case it should be in the memory of the damn program that wants to use it, or it's not in memory, and someone is going to have to read it in and parse the data fields.
And when people point out there appears to be no actual use, the NoSQL people feel the need to expand NoSQL to include completely random things like Memcache, which is not any sort of 'database' at all, and the Memcache people would be completely baffled to be included in this group.
I'm frankly surprised they haven't started claiming that filesystems are NoSQL. And everyone uses those! So everyone uses NoSQL!
And, in fact, they're correct. That's really what NoSQL is. It's a not a replacement for any sort of existing database, it's a replacement for a filesystem. If you are dealing with a massive amount of random chunks of information of differing types, then you need NoSQL because filesystems only hold so much and are not geared that hugely.
And, I should point out, that almost no one is doing that. Google, yes. Some DNA researcher, yes.
Everyone else, no. And most of the people who are...just need some sort of file replication and locking system, with smarter caching. Or memcache or something like that.
I swear, it's like the database universe got invaded with a bunch of idjits saying 'Use unstructured files instead of databases, they're much better at storing unstructured data like spreadsheets and PDFs and images'.
Yeah, thanks, we already knew that. In fact, we're pretty certain everyone already knew that, considering that was invented before databases. The fact some people with massive amounts of files have invented a sort of ultimate user-space file store for their huge amounts of data...well, good for them, but that's not actually relevant to anyone else.
(And the fact that the NoSQL people seem intent on rigging JSON or XML or whatever back on top of them, to get 'fields' in their unstructured data, is just hilarious. I keep waiting for them to also invent storing multiple rows in a single NoSQL block, and then they can even come up with a query language to search in them! Uh...guys?)
At least the Democrat's thing had some purpose, to actually pass bills in the crazy system that is a bicameral legislation.
The Republican's nonsense, OTOH, was just a 'Oh, you don't like the absurd budget we sent you! Well, we'll just close our eyes and pretend we can't hear you.'.
That said, the Republicans have absolutely no ability to claim that anyone is 'abusing' parliamentary law, not because of their stupid and pointless 'We'll just pretend we came up with a passable budget', but because of their persistent use of the pretend filibuster...the one where we just all pretend that 'debate can't end' somehow, instead of just requiring them actually keep saying random shit and taking the floor back if they stop, like how an actual filibuster works.
Please note I have no problem with occasional usages of actual filibusters, but I have rather large issues with the idea that the Senate somehow requires 60 votes to pass anything at all, and at this point I'm all for the nuclear option of having filibusters declared unconstitutional. (Strictly speaking, 51 Senators can pass bills in the Senate, period. The fact that Senate parliamentary rules requires 60 Senators to 'end debate', and that now counts as 'the vote' and is voted down so no actual vote happens, means that the Senate parliamentary rules are infringing on a constitutional right, and if 51 Senators want to take it to court, they would win.)
Really? I urge you to look closely at them the next time. They'll either seal the hole itself by melting the plastic, seal further back around the hole with glue, or they'll just have the hole outside of the sealed area to start with. Don't assume that all the plastic is the 'sealed area'. Often they will have a flat poorly-sealed area at the top, and then seal across the middle, above the product.
Now, there are a few systems that, instead of all that, just punch a 'hanging hole' in the boxes once they get over here, after their trip. Boxes designed that way used to be the normal at the start of clamshells, but that requires actual US employees, and such a thing is almost unheard of now. (And boxes designed that way are also almost unheard of. *rimshot*)
And, of course, sometimes instead of making them airtight, they'll just put silica desiccant in them instead.
I think you're right in that we'll 'have to see', although I think the outcome should be obvious.
SCOTUS needs to determine whether PPACA is or is not a tax in the sense of US law, and it will likely draw up a list of criteria to determine that.
I think the decision it's a 'tax' is a bit obvious. It's hard to see what else it could be...it doesn't bar anyone from doing things. Now, it's a 'backwards' tax, it taxes people for 'not doing things', but there's plenty of places in the tax code where that is true. For example, people are taxed for not having kids.
Of course, both sides stipulated it wasn't a tax for the purpose of allowing the suit to go forward, but stipulating something does not actually make it so.
If it passes that test, then it needs to determine whether it is the kind of tax that the federal government is empowered to impose.
I went and looked it up, because I was wondering how the hell the mortgage deduction would be allowed as a direct tax, and I was completely wrong about it being a 'direct tax'. It turns out that the Supreme Court has in general, throughout its history, considered only two things direct taxes: Taxes on people (The constitution uses the word 'Capitation', which just means 'head tax'), and taxes on land.
Nothing else besides people or land seems to count. Not even other forms of property.
Now, there was a very slight screw up with Pollock v. Farmers' Loan & Trust Co. in that they decided that a tax on rent was the same as a tax on land, which is a) probably wrong, and b) never fixed because the sixteenth amendment was passed instead, specifically to allow that sort of thing.
However, Pollock appears to only be at issue because it was about land in some sense.(1) If it had been, for example, car rental, the issue would not have arise, because no one has ever suggested the Federal government is not allowed to tax automobile ownership.
In fact, Patton v. Brady specifically said that a tax on tobacco ownership was not a direct tax. That it 'was not a tax on personal property as such, but only on specific types of personal property with specific intended uses'. (Which sounds a lot like health insurance.) Now, that decision left open the idea that taxing all property (I.e., having an 'asset tax' where you had to report all you owned and pay a percentage based on that.) might or might not be allowed. But it specifically allowed taxing certain individual kinds of 'owning stuff'.
And, of course, claiming that taxing health insurance (or the lack of health insurance) is an 'impermissible direct tax' is a bit of a Pandora's box, simply because a huge amount of tax law is actually stuff that can be reduced to 'direct tax' under that logic, and in ways much more outrageous than this. (For example, some income tax deductions can be on things you've owned for years, like owning a property on the National Register of Historic Places, whereas the mandate is at least talking about actual money you've spent that year, and hence has a much closer relationship to actual income.)
Unless someone wants to blow up the entire deduction system of income tax by claiming that taxation (or lack thereof) on the basis of owning something is a direct tax, and make income tax literally based on just income, it's hard to see how the PPACA can be argued to somehow be a direct tax, but all that other stuff is somehow allowed.
I would hope the Supreme Court would actually realize deciding that the mandate is impermissible is deciding that almost all income tax deductions are impermissible. (Including, I must point out, the health insurance deduction for employers.)
1) Ironically, the reason I looked this up, the mortgage deduction, quite possibly could be disallowed under Pollock v. Farmers' Loan & Trust Co., because it is also about real estate. But, as I said, that case was decided wrong, and would be overturned if it came back up.
I think a lot of people missed what I was saying.
I in no way argued for censoring anything. I just pointed out word 'nigger' is seen rather differently than it is today, and 'obsceniness' and 'racismness' of a word aren't really the same thing. 'Nigger' has always been the latter, it's only recently become the former.
And it didn't just change due to the fact we're unwilling to put up with racism. We're not willing to put up with other people using any racial slurs, but we don't have to run around inventing phrases like 'the n-word' to keep from saying them. (The closest is 'the c-word, but 'cunt' has always been considered obscene, or at least it's been obscene longer than anyone cared about the fact it was a slur.)
Mark Twain might have predicted a day when racial slurs would not be acceptable to use. (Although he was very cynical, so who knows?) However, it's rather unlikely that he would predict that one specific racial slur would also become so obscene that it would be taboo to even use to talk about other people saying it.
As I said elsewhere, if it is changed, it should be changed to another racial slur. Changing it to a non-slur whitewashes history and change the authorial intent, changing it to another slur at least tries to keep the impact as it originally was. I don't really think it should be changed at all, and I have no sympathy for people changing it to a non-slur, but I have a tiny amount of sympathy for those who can't deal with a book full of 'nigger' anymore than they could deal with a book full of 'fuck'. As long as that's not mistaken for the original text, whatever.
Now I'm reminded for a sci-fi story that I didn't actually read, just the summary: Because of some sort of outside event, 'change' becomes a obscene word (People start using 'alter' or something instead.), and resulting in school children giggling their way through history class.
But, if I'm understanding correctly, one of the reasons that the entire structure set ablaze so fast was because the hydrogen combusted in its entirety very quickly, transferring the heat of the reaction to almost the entire structure practically in an instant.
No one actually knows why it burned so quickly.
An interesting fact is that hydrogen does not burn at a frequency the human eye can see, except maybe shifting a bit into blue. Whereas, although you can't tell from the black and white footage, all the big flames were red. So all the flames in the footage you see are something else burning.
However, you are probably correct, in that at least the initial hydrogen burning (Which almost no eyewitnesses seemed to have noticed, and we have no footage of, as the cameras hadn't started yet.) heated up the structure of the ship to the point that the flames spread very quickly. It's pretty much the only way the flames on the skin could have spread downward, which they clearly do.
As you say a hydrogen based airship can be made safe with modern techniques, limiting the effect of any ignition that does occur and using better materials for the rest of the design too.
A major problem is that the hydrogen bags were close enough to each other to damage the next one when they exploded, and that they were confined inside the skin together. So the heat of the explosion had nowhere else to go.
Put the hydrogen in long strong 'heat-retardant barrels' with a thin-ish top, without anything above them, and direct any explosion upward. And don't coat the skin with stupid flammable paint.
Problem solved.
Seriously, this was back in the day when no one bothered to protect against fire. Five years later, 492 people would die in a nightclub fire in Boston. No one suggested that nightclubs were untenable. No, we fixed building codes, and actually started enforcing it.
But a different gas being used to impart lift would also have made the day very different.
Well, yeah. For one thing, there would have been no Hindenburg in the first place. The Germans had no helium.
Uh, not really. Word meanings and connotations changes over time.
'Nigger' was a slur, but it wasn't, as you call it, 'a terrible slur'. I point to Scout using it (And being corrected by her father.) in To Kill a Mockingbird, set in the 1930s, written in the early 60s.
It's only fairly recent that it became an obscene word that people won't say, ever. Not even in the context of reporting what other people say.
Or to look at it another way: Huck and Tom talk about 'Injun Joe' all the time, just like 'Nigger Jim'. That is also a racial slur, used in exactly the same context. And if you went around calling people 'Injun' in the modern day, well, people would rightly assume you were racist. But when they recounted the story, they would say that you said 'Injun', not 'the I-word'. And you'll notice that no one has proposed changing 'Injun' to anything in Huck Finn.
This is because at some point the taboo against 'nigger' became so strong that it managed to cross the boundary into the obscene, thus fundamentally changing how we see the word, which imparts a rather unintended impact to Huck Finn.
You can argue for that impact, but it's certainly not something Mark Twain knew was going to be there.
Actually, in the context of the literary masterpiece we are currently discussing, the adjective is technically part of the character's name.
Well, yes, but it's an adjective that describes skin color, is my point. If it is to be replaced, it must be replaced with another that describes the same skin color, not some unrelated word.
The whole 'should it be replaced' is another matter entirely, about which I completely agree with you.
But there's a whole secondary issue with the choice of 'slave' as the replacement word. That's not a synonym of 'nigger' in any sense. That is not what they are talking about.
And by rewriting it where that is what they are talking about, there's some unfortunate implications going on. Jim cannot stop being 'Nigger Jim', but he can, and in fact already had, stopped being this rewritten 'Slave Jim'. It stops being about race and is now about a silly mistake about condition of servitude, and, ha, it's been corrected at the end and we can throw back our head and laugh during the credits.
Uh, no. The problem is that society is deeply broken for Jim, and everyone with his skin color. That's not to trivialize slavery, which is obviously a bad thing and we should be happy that Jim is free...but, then again, he technically was free this entire time, but would knowing this fact have helped him at all?
No, because no one with his skin color can really be free in this society where any random 'nigger' can be captured and enslaved, because they have no rights...but, after the editors finish with it, does the same hold true for any random 'slave'?
I've been willing to give the benefit of the doubt to people who want an edited version to exist. Maybe they simply cannot read the word 'nigger' without their brain seizing up for a second, and need a different word to enjoy the book. Maybe they think everyone is that way, or the word simply makes it too difficult to teach with. I'll be reading the original, and I think they are misguided, but, okay, do whatever, I guess.
But anyone insisting on 'slave'...at some point, I've got to start questioning their motives. That is not a synonym at all, and in fact ascribes entirely different meanings. The replacement must be describing race, and, hell, it should really be a racial slur. If 'nigger' is really so bad we can never ever ever use it, well, there's always 'darkie' or something.
Actually, no, it's not the same thing.
What the Republicans House did with the budget was simply decide to pretend that the Senate had passed the Ryan budget for the purposes of House Committee stuff. The House obviously has no power to decide what the Senate has and has not passed, but it can pretend whatever the hell it wants for its own internal rule purposes, no matter how delusional such a thing is.
So what the House did wasn't 'Deem and Pass', it's 'Let's Pretend the Senate Passed This'. Which is completely pointless because at some point the actual budget will pass, as it won't even slightly resemble what they're pretending passed. So all the committees' hypothetical work will get thrown out. Except hopefully they're smart enough not to do any.
Please note that in no way am I saying is Deem and Pass actually any sort of bad thing, just that the Republicans didn't do it. Deem and Pass is simply a way to pass two (or more!) bills at once. Granted, under standard parliamentary law, it's a bad concept, and what you should do is amend the original bill.
Except that a) the House doesn't operate under standard parliamentary law, and in fact predates it, and b) because we have a bicameral body, which requires that identical bills be passed by both houses, it's often very useful to be able to make something else pass at the same time as a bill that's been passed by the other house, without technically 'modifying' the other house's bill. Which is, indeed, what happened with the health care law.
Yes, that is how Deem and Pass works. It's usually when one bill, let's call it Bill #1, relies on Bill #2, which has not been passed. (Although it actually can be used for almost anything.)
So they simply pass #1 using a specific process that says 'We agree that by passing Bill #1 we already passed Bill #2, even though we did not actually do that'. They 'deem' Bill #2 to have passed.
So Deem and Pass sounds normally completely pointless. The way to actually do things like that would just be to pass an amendment before the end vote.
That is, until you remember that there are two houses and a reconciliation process, and any change to the other house's bill either requires the other house to pass it again, or requires reconciliation and then both houses to pass it again.
So doing it the way they did it in your example (If they did, I really wasn't paying attention.) is exactly correct.
That's how it's supposed to work. Deem and Pass lets them legally keep them as two separate bills, so one can be identical to the other house's (And thus just need the president's signature to become law) and the other can be brand new and go over to the other house.
Obama can 'insist' the PPACA is a manned moon mission for all I care.
'Penalty' doesn't actually seem to have any meaning in the law. Let's try to figure out what a 'penalty' could be.
It doesn't appear to be a fine, which is when a criminal offense is committed that has a monetary punishment. And, in fact, that would be a very oddly structured crime...a crime of not doing something?
It doesn't appear to be a tort, either. Simply because there's no trial possible.
There are 'fees' the government charges...but, again, it charges fees for government services, not 'some guy didn't do something'. So it's not a fee. (And fees are a form of tax anyway.)
The simple fact is the government outright charging people money is called a tax, period. Using a word besides 'tax' doesn't change that fact.
Wikipedia: To tax (from the Latin taxo; "I estimate") is to impose a financial charge or other levy upon a taxpayer (an individual or legal entity) by a state or the functional equivalent of a state such that failure to pay is punishable by law.
Any money you owe the government normally (As opposed to owing money as the result of a a court punishment.) is a tax. If the legislature says you owe it, it's a 'tax'. That is what a tax is. This is not some sort of debatable concept, it's not in any way vague.
Now, an argument could, in theory, be made that it is an impermissible form of tax...the only taxes allowed in the US are a) Direct proportional and head taxes, according to the constitution, b) indirect taxes, which is assumed because direct ones are explicitly banned under the constitution and they're the only other type, and c) any sort of income taxes, added by the sixteenth amendment to fixed the wrong-headed court decision that rent wouldn't count under indirect taxes.
The problem is, the PPACA is a head tax that is proportional to the population (Because it's on the population instead of each state.), and thus explicitly allowed by the constitution.
Uh, Congress isn't forcing you to buy anything. No one, at any point, is required to buy any insurance.
Does no one here actually understand how the law works?
Congress is taxing people who don't have health insurance. Or, as I believe it is phrased, Congress is taxing everyone, and then providing a rebate for people with health insurance.
Gee, I wonder if Congress has the power to tax people. If only the power to tax was somehow enshrined in the Constitution.
Yes. The only reason people died during the Hinderburg is that they didn't know what to do, and tried to jump out of the damn thing when it was too high. (Well, except for that poor slob who jumped out at the right time, survived the jump, but then had the thing land on him.)
Of course, they only tried to jump out because the structure was on fire, and they thought it would collapse on them afterwards. Again, the structure was on fire, not the hydrogen...hydrogen explodes, and it floats, obviously, so it's not like it was hanging around to cause any harm. The framework and skin was what was burning.(1)
But is it is possible to have a 100% safe hydrogen dirigible. (Well, barring collision with an airplane or it landing on someone.)
All you have to do is have like five or so separate hydrogen chambers, kept far enough apart that they can't reach each other, and in a way that any explosion is directed straight up, so that it just sorta vents a single giant flame out the top then coasts to the ground.
And build the structure out of asbestos or something.
People forget that, back then, everything caught fire and killed people. Just ask theatre-goers. Nowadays, we can actually build things with fire-stops and emergency doors and whatnot, and the hydrogen explosion and fire isn't going to kill anyone...it didn't even kill anyone back then! The entire damn airship being on fire, thus causing people to jump, is what killed people.
But if we build one correctly, the only danger would be the cabin making an emergency landing on people.
1) Some people assert that the skin was painted with some flammable paint, and I think Mythbusters did something to demonstrate it might be true. But regardless of why everything else was on fire, the fact is that the 'hydrogen' was not. Hydrogen does not sit in place on fire. There might have been holes slowly feeding hydrogen into the fire...but that, as I said, is easily fixed by building an emergency venting system to let it out the top.
Indeed.
Coffee makers need the time, because you can make them do something at a specific time. VCRs need the time, because you can make them do something at a specific time. Many radios need the time, because you can make them do something at a specific time. Automated thermostats need the time, because you can make them do something at a specific time.
There is no way to make a microwave do something a specific time, so NO ONE NEEDS A FUCKING CLOCK ON THEIR MICROWAVE.
This is not goddamn rocket science. This is not, has never been, and will never been the slightest reason to have a clock on a microwave. These only exist because of some sort of ego-trip that microwave makers were on when they were almost the sole device in the home controlled by microprocessor and had an LED display, so it was like LOOK AT MY FANCY COCK! I MEAN CLOCK!
Now, I have no real issue with building clocks in things that don't need clocks.(1) I mean, no car radio has any sort of alarm, so doesn't use the time, but most of them have clocks, but you don't see me complaining about this. But why the fuck do half of the microwave makers seem to assume this is some vitally important function for microwaves to perform and thus require you to set it when the power goes out? (The other half have been beaten with a cluestick and no longer require this.) I don't have to set my car radio time to use my car, or even to use my damn radio.
1) Although I have to question what sort of added power consumption in a microwave that is adding for no reason at all. Hopefully there's some sort of low-power power supply thing going on.
The real problem with cardboard containers is that you can't stick them in a poorly-seal shipping container from China. They will get damp.
Seriously, folks, they're selling us hermetically sealed containers. Think about it. Why would they do that? Look at the top of the clamshell...they seal up the fricking hole they punched in it to hang it with!
They aren't doing that just for fun, they're doing that so they can have it in environments like a dusty road out of the village sweatshop, or in a mildew-filled warehouse, or on a cargo ship for two months. Then run a quick rinse over it, and, tada, good as new.
I really have no idea how he would feel. It's entirely possible he'd say 'That is the way it was, so it will remain that way.'. Alternately, he might say 'The word has become much more vile than it was back then, which I applaud, but that now lends the wrong connotation to the text, so I will change it'.
I'm not even sure how this hypothetical works...Huck Finn was a specific book written for a specific audience for a specific reason, and Twain probably wouldn't even _care_ what modern audiences saw in it, and would be flatly astonished anyone still read it.
If he wanted to speak to modern audiences, he would presumably be writing new books, not worrying about 130 year old books. I suspect if today he wrote Huck Finn, it would be rather different. (And now I don't even know what 'Mark Twain' we're talking about...a hypothetical 180 year old man? Or a current person who, somehow, wrote books about his experiences growing up in a small town in the pre-civil war Mississippi?)
My point was actually that 'slave', despite being the most common choice of editors, is actually a utterly wrong word choice. 'Colored', 'Negro', even 'Black' would work. Or they could go with actual racial slurs that aren't as brain-freezing, like 'Darkie' or 'Spook'.
But 'Slave' actually means something completely different, and having it conflated with what Jim is being called is not a good thing.
Well, there's an excuse for health: People are only willing to do things that don't cost money.
And thanks to fucked up medical system in this country, that means that people do not go to the doctor until something is wrong.
You have to wonder how much healthier people would be if they got a free yearly checkup, or had a free STD testing, or whatever. (There's still a 'cost', time-wise, but it's much less.)
However, that reasoning shouldn't really explain anything about the police. Arresting people actually costs more money in court costs and stuff, so would be a surreal way to cut costs...and it makes the community look bad, so you'd think that local government would be trying to stop it.
The problem is, of course, that the police often get funding based on the amount of crime they stop.
Setting aside the idea of whether or not the word should be replaced at all, replacing it with 'slave' is deeply stupid.
I understand how that word can make the book hard to read, and if people want to release altered versions, whatever...but the word to substitute in is 'Negro' or 'colored', not 'slave'. 'Nigger' isn't about Jim's state of enslavement, it's about his skin-color. He will still be called that slur whether or not he is free, he will always be seen as 'other' and 'not part of society', not because of his enslavement status, but because of his pigmentation
Glossing over that is revisionist history of the worse kind, leading to a total screwed up lesson that, hey, Jim is now free, thus not a slave, and hence all those people who were so concerned about him being a nigger^Wslave will be entirely happy now, and Jim's entire life will be fluffy bunnies from now on and he'll be invited to their dinner parties.
I don't know how Mark Twain would feel about his text being altered, I suspect that he'd be happy that racial slurs are no longer accepted, and could conceivable be okay with changing the text so that people continued to read it...but I suspect he'd be rather annoyed at the new text conflating racial prejudice with slavery. (And, thus, sans slavery, everything is fine.)
Like the county being charged rental fees for property that had long been sold, paying for phone lines that had been disconnected for years, or buying stuff from a magistrate’s store.
Why does this sort of stuff just plain piss the left leaning person off? I mean, even if you are a dedicated communist shouldn't you still wish to find corruption, overspending, and waste, and squash it? Shouldn't that be something anyone from any party would rally behind?
You do realize that the reason this sort of wastes happens is because of idiots constantly reducing the budgets for things by slashing taxes, which reduces staffing, which in turn results in the government operating in a completely haphazard manner, right?
You think 'corruption', but no, the government was not deliberately paying for phone lines it didn't have as part of some clever scheme to funnel a few hundred dollars to...the phone company? Uh, no. Those lines were being paid for because no one was employed to keep track of that stuff. Lewis County KY was paying for extra stuff because their government was too small and didn't have some sort of comptroller position.
Probably because the county couldn't afford anyone to actually do that job, as Lewis County KY is very poor. Until they elected Massie, who apparently decided it was part of his job. Which I guess is fine if they actually manage to find a competent executive who can do that, but that really seems like it would be saner as a non-partisan salaried position. (Which the county presumably cannot afford, but that's where the state should step in.)