You really need to learn a bit more about how the real world works, because greenhouses do not use CO2 to capture heat. They use CO2 to stimulate plant growth. A greenhouse works because the translucent walls (whether glass, plastic, or some other material) allows light to pass through. When that light strikes an opaque surface some of it becomes heat. The walls do not readily allow that heat to escape.
As a matter of fact, CO2 does not work to capture heat in a greenhouse, there is just not enough room for CO2 to pay a significant role in capturing heat on the scale to which a greenhouse is built.
Except that I DO get something in exchange for rent. I get some place to live. I'm sorry, but your utopian plan is a disaster waiting to happen. What about those people who cannot get a loan to buy a house because they have mismanaged their money..or because they continue to mismanage their money?
I am done with this conversation because you do not appear to have sufficient understanding of how the world works to understand why your idea is a bad one.
So, basically what you are saying is that we should change the system so that it is better for you, you don't care about the people who get screwed over by the change, because it would be better for you (and everyone else who wants the same thing you do, even though it screws those who DON"T want the same thing you do).
You conveniently overlook the fact that there are a lot of people who do NOT want to own housing. In addition, there are those who are not going to be able to buy housing, even under your system, because they have been such bad managers of their money in the past.
The final point you overlook is that buying is not something which one undertakes on a casual whim. No matter what you do to the system, buying and selling a house is going to take a lot of effort. No one is going to want to buy a house when they will be moving again in six months to a year. If I get a job that I need to move for, I do not want to buy until I have been in the new area for long enough to figure out where I want to live in that area.
No, I mean oil companies. As a percentage of revenue oil companies have small profit margins. What distracts people is the fact that oil companies have huge revenues, which results in their profits begin very large when expressed as a dollar figure. However, when compared to the number of dollars they spend, their profit is not so large after all.
So basically, you want to turn landlords into house flippers, because that is what would result from your system. You would exchange "evil" landlords for "evil" speculators. Buying a house is an investment. If I relocate because of my job, I am going to want to spend several months renting on a short-term basis in the new area before I buy.
In addition, your scenario overlooks closing costs. People who relocate frequently would lose quite a bit of money on the closing costs...more than they would lose by renting. The fact you are overlooking is that there are a lot of people who do NOT want to buy, they prefer to rent.
Actually, there are two reasons that banks are sitting on foreclosed properties. The first is that the federal government has been pressuring them to do so in order to make it look like the housing market has fully recovered from the crash. The second is that if they sell all of those houses at what the market would bear, they would have to take the loss on their books. As long as they hold onto those houses they can pretend that they have not taken a loss on them --"We have 5,000 houses worth $200,000 each. Which means we have $1,000,000,000 in assets. " as opposed to "We have $500,000,000 in assets. (after selling those 5,000 houses for $100,000 each)."-- Of course if they put all of those foreclosed houses on the market, their return versus their booked value would be even less than that.
And that second scenario would likely result in their assets vs deposits falling below what they have to maintain to remain a FDIC insured institution. It might also lead to problems with SOX regulations as well.
You know who else gets crushed by your plan to subsidize home ownership by driving down the price of real estate? Those people who bought a property, which they then lived in, as an investment for when they needed to move into a retirement community.
There is a better answer. Stop trying to manipulate the housing market. When banks make bad loans, let them go bankrupt...but don't pressure them to make bad loans either. Undoing the mess the government has made of the housing market will take time, but the first step is to get the government to stop making it worse.
You apparently are unaware that oil companies already have some of the smallest profit margins, as a percentage of revenue, of any industry. I believe that only the restaurant industry has a smaller profit margin.
Mainly because the commenter followed the reference to Sandusky with a comment about the subject of his comment being able to see an elementary school from his front door.
You are overlooking the key part of the statement, "Hadley is a Sandusky waiting to be exposed." Perhaps you are unaware that Jerry Sandusky was a long time assistant coach at Penn State who operated a charity for young, fatherless boys. It was revealed that he had been using his position for years to get into a position to rape some of those young boys.
I switched from Google because I began to notice that their results seemed to be skewed. Certain types of results were not coming up in my searches, even when that was specifically what I was looking for. While it mostly appeared in politically loaded searches (although the nature of the skew makes it hard for me to determine the nature of the bias...I found both "liberal" and "conservative" viewpoints dropped from results) it also occurred in some searches for answers on technical issues.
While that is partly true, you are forgetting the truly benevolent devices from trusted companies/organisations which can actually help people greatly, with no privacy cost. To ignore those is shooting yourself in the foot.
I would agree with you, but even with your reminder I cannot think of any of those. In order to be "forgetting" them, I would have to be aware of them. So, would you care to enlighten me?
The only people who care about the internet of things are the people trying to tell us how awesome the internet of things will be.
You are sadly mistaken. There are a large bunch of people who care about the Internet of things because they recognize what a boon it will be to mining personal data for the corporations who get their stuff adopted first. The IoT is the smart TV which reports your viewing habits, and random videos of your living room (or wherever your TV is) to the company which made it (Samsung, and probably others). I am sure there are other such devices.
I just have trouble imagining that there is somebody with the ability to manage the world the way you imagine someone is doing, let alone believing it.
Since you seem to be slow on the uptake, I will try again. ISIS has declared that one of their goals is conquest of the United States. This means that assisting ISIS is treason as defined in the U.S. Constitution. On the other hand, the IRA never, as far as I am aware, made any kind of war against the U.S.. These two facts means that the two things you said were similar, are not actually so.
Supporting a group seeking to wrest control of a particular area of land from its current government is quite different from a group fighting to gain control of multiple countries which has a declared goal of controlling the entire world (and which has stated that it is at war against the U.S.).
Has Assad deliberately destabilized other countries, infiltrated their governments, spied on their people, interfered with their internal affairs, bombed innocent people without a declaration of war?
Why, yes he had. Or perhaps you were not paying attention to what has been going on in Lebanon and Jordan over the last few years. Jordan has remained stable and most of the damage in Lebanon was done by Assad's father, but that does not change the fact that Assad has interfered with their internal affairs.
Actually, there is a difference. As far as I am aware, the IRA never considered the conquest of the United States one of its goals. ISIS on the other hand considers conquest of the entire world to be its divinely appointed mission.
"Hey, I'm going over to Syria to kill westerners and enslave Christians for the raping and whatnot...but my car broke down Ms Librarian. Do you have a book on automotive repair?"
The laws were written to hold you responsible for helping if you provided the book and there is a reasonable argument that they should. On the other hand, if they just ask for the book without mentioning what they plan on doing as soon as the car is fixed means that you cannot be held responsible for their intentions. In addition, if you can make a believable case that you did not believe them when they said they were going to Syria to kill westerners, etc, you are also off the hook. Or if you can make the case that if you can't afford a mechanic to fix your car, you can't afford a ticket to get to Syria either.
If you can reasonably see no connection between the aid they are seeking and their criminal goals, you cannot be held responsible for providing that aid.
Well, yes, if someone is targeting my data they are more likely to get it if I host it on my own system with security I rolled myself than if I host it on Google or Amazon cloud. However, if someone is just targeting valuable data, they are more likely to target Google's or Amazon's cloud than they are the system I am hosting.
The summary says that the evidence shows that they were trading "hundreds of years earlier than previously thought." That phrasing indicates that they were thinking that they weren't trading. If it was just a matter of not having evidence the phrasing should have been "evidence that the Romans were trading in Aksum hundreds of years earlier than previously." By sticking the word "thought" on the end they are saying that no one thought they were trading that early.
I did not actually address your point about voicemail. Personally, I do not find voicemail to be a greater pain in the ass than typed messages. As a matter of fact, my experience is that people who leave bad voicemail messages are even worse when it comes to typed communication. I have found that when people call me and do not leave a voicemail, they also do not communicate the reason for their call by any other means.
The result being that small problems I could have resolved easily become big problems which require a great amount of effort to fix. I am pretty confident that this would not change if they did not have the option of leaving me a voicemail.
The fact of the matter is that there are a lot of things I call someone about that are just not important enough to me to type a message about. With significant frequency they are of greater importance to the other person.
You missed the part where I only do the follow up email and text if it is urgent. The reason I do that if it is urgent is because some people get one or the other of those even when away from their phone.
However, if it is not urgent, I don't waste my time typing the message. I can leave a voicemail in much less time than I can send a typed message and even if I couldn't, I am already connected on the phone so taking the time to open an email or text message to the person is time I would rather not spend.
Except that most of the time when I leave a voicemail message, the information I am leaving is enough to give the person on the other end a starting point on the reason I called them and an idea about how urgent it is for them to get back to me. Generally, I am calling in the first place because the topic of conversation is one that requires a lot of back and forth that takes entirely too long to resolve when done in typed messages.
If the reason for the call is urgent I will usually follow up with an email, IM, and text message (the last two depending on their availability with the person I am trying to reach).
Slashdot Mirror
You really need to learn a bit more about how the real world works, because greenhouses do not use CO2 to capture heat. They use CO2 to stimulate plant growth. A greenhouse works because the translucent walls (whether glass, plastic, or some other material) allows light to pass through. When that light strikes an opaque surface some of it becomes heat. The walls do not readily allow that heat to escape.
As a matter of fact, CO2 does not work to capture heat in a greenhouse, there is just not enough room for CO2 to pay a significant role in capturing heat on the scale to which a greenhouse is built.
Except that I DO get something in exchange for rent. I get some place to live. I'm sorry, but your utopian plan is a disaster waiting to happen. What about those people who cannot get a loan to buy a house because they have mismanaged their money..or because they continue to mismanage their money?
I am done with this conversation because you do not appear to have sufficient understanding of how the world works to understand why your idea is a bad one.
So, basically what you are saying is that we should change the system so that it is better for you, you don't care about the people who get screwed over by the change, because it would be better for you (and everyone else who wants the same thing you do, even though it screws those who DON"T want the same thing you do).
You conveniently overlook the fact that there are a lot of people who do NOT want to own housing. In addition, there are those who are not going to be able to buy housing, even under your system, because they have been such bad managers of their money in the past.
The final point you overlook is that buying is not something which one undertakes on a casual whim. No matter what you do to the system, buying and selling a house is going to take a lot of effort. No one is going to want to buy a house when they will be moving again in six months to a year. If I get a job that I need to move for, I do not want to buy until I have been in the new area for long enough to figure out where I want to live in that area.
No, I mean oil companies. As a percentage of revenue oil companies have small profit margins. What distracts people is the fact that oil companies have huge revenues, which results in their profits begin very large when expressed as a dollar figure. However, when compared to the number of dollars they spend, their profit is not so large after all.
So basically, you want to turn landlords into house flippers, because that is what would result from your system. You would exchange "evil" landlords for "evil" speculators. Buying a house is an investment. If I relocate because of my job, I am going to want to spend several months renting on a short-term basis in the new area before I buy.
In addition, your scenario overlooks closing costs. People who relocate frequently would lose quite a bit of money on the closing costs...more than they would lose by renting. The fact you are overlooking is that there are a lot of people who do NOT want to buy, they prefer to rent.
Actually, there are two reasons that banks are sitting on foreclosed properties. The first is that the federal government has been pressuring them to do so in order to make it look like the housing market has fully recovered from the crash. The second is that if they sell all of those houses at what the market would bear, they would have to take the loss on their books. As long as they hold onto those houses they can pretend that they have not taken a loss on them --"We have 5,000 houses worth $200,000 each. Which means we have $1,000,000,000 in assets. " as opposed to "We have $500,000,000 in assets. (after selling those 5,000 houses for $100,000 each)."-- Of course if they put all of those foreclosed houses on the market, their return versus their booked value would be even less than that.
And that second scenario would likely result in their assets vs deposits falling below what they have to maintain to remain a FDIC insured institution. It might also lead to problems with SOX regulations as well.
You know who else gets crushed by your plan to subsidize home ownership by driving down the price of real estate? Those people who bought a property, which they then lived in, as an investment for when they needed to move into a retirement community. There is a better answer. Stop trying to manipulate the housing market. When banks make bad loans, let them go bankrupt...but don't pressure them to make bad loans either. Undoing the mess the government has made of the housing market will take time, but the first step is to get the government to stop making it worse.
You apparently are unaware that oil companies already have some of the smallest profit margins, as a percentage of revenue, of any industry. I believe that only the restaurant industry has a smaller profit margin.
Mainly because the commenter followed the reference to Sandusky with a comment about the subject of his comment being able to see an elementary school from his front door.
You are overlooking the key part of the statement, "Hadley is a Sandusky waiting to be exposed." Perhaps you are unaware that Jerry Sandusky was a long time assistant coach at Penn State who operated a charity for young, fatherless boys. It was revealed that he had been using his position for years to get into a position to rape some of those young boys.
I switched from Google because I began to notice that their results seemed to be skewed. Certain types of results were not coming up in my searches, even when that was specifically what I was looking for. While it mostly appeared in politically loaded searches (although the nature of the skew makes it hard for me to determine the nature of the bias...I found both "liberal" and "conservative" viewpoints dropped from results) it also occurred in some searches for answers on technical issues.
While that is partly true, you are forgetting the truly benevolent devices from trusted companies/organisations which can actually help people greatly, with no privacy cost. To ignore those is shooting yourself in the foot.
I would agree with you, but even with your reminder I cannot think of any of those. In order to be "forgetting" them, I would have to be aware of them. So, would you care to enlighten me?
The only people who care about the internet of things are the people trying to tell us how awesome the internet of things will be.
You are sadly mistaken. There are a large bunch of people who care about the Internet of things because they recognize what a boon it will be to mining personal data for the corporations who get their stuff adopted first. The IoT is the smart TV which reports your viewing habits, and random videos of your living room (or wherever your TV is) to the company which made it (Samsung, and probably others). I am sure there are other such devices.
You mean like the credible reports of an ISIS training base 8 miles from the U.S. border?
I just have trouble imagining that there is somebody with the ability to manage the world the way you imagine someone is doing, let alone believing it.
The only part of your post which is accurate is that Assad is a puppet. He is a puppet of the Iranian government.
Since you seem to be slow on the uptake, I will try again. ISIS has declared that one of their goals is conquest of the United States. This means that assisting ISIS is treason as defined in the U.S. Constitution. On the other hand, the IRA never, as far as I am aware, made any kind of war against the U.S.. These two facts means that the two things you said were similar, are not actually so.
Supporting a group seeking to wrest control of a particular area of land from its current government is quite different from a group fighting to gain control of multiple countries which has a declared goal of controlling the entire world (and which has stated that it is at war against the U.S.).
Has Assad deliberately destabilized other countries, infiltrated their governments, spied on their people, interfered with their internal affairs, bombed innocent people without a declaration of war?
Why, yes he had. Or perhaps you were not paying attention to what has been going on in Lebanon and Jordan over the last few years. Jordan has remained stable and most of the damage in Lebanon was done by Assad's father, but that does not change the fact that Assad has interfered with their internal affairs.
Actually, there is a difference. As far as I am aware, the IRA never considered the conquest of the United States one of its goals. ISIS on the other hand considers conquest of the entire world to be its divinely appointed mission.
"Hey, I'm going over to Syria to kill westerners and enslave Christians for the raping and whatnot...but my car broke down Ms Librarian. Do you have a book on automotive repair?"
The laws were written to hold you responsible for helping if you provided the book and there is a reasonable argument that they should. On the other hand, if they just ask for the book without mentioning what they plan on doing as soon as the car is fixed means that you cannot be held responsible for their intentions. In addition, if you can make a believable case that you did not believe them when they said they were going to Syria to kill westerners, etc, you are also off the hook. Or if you can make the case that if you can't afford a mechanic to fix your car, you can't afford a ticket to get to Syria either. If you can reasonably see no connection between the aid they are seeking and their criminal goals, you cannot be held responsible for providing that aid.
Well, yes, if someone is targeting my data they are more likely to get it if I host it on my own system with security I rolled myself than if I host it on Google or Amazon cloud. However, if someone is just targeting valuable data, they are more likely to target Google's or Amazon's cloud than they are the system I am hosting.
The summary says that the evidence shows that they were trading "hundreds of years earlier than previously thought." That phrasing indicates that they were thinking that they weren't trading. If it was just a matter of not having evidence the phrasing should have been "evidence that the Romans were trading in Aksum hundreds of years earlier than previously." By sticking the word "thought" on the end they are saying that no one thought they were trading that early.
I did not actually address your point about voicemail. Personally, I do not find voicemail to be a greater pain in the ass than typed messages. As a matter of fact, my experience is that people who leave bad voicemail messages are even worse when it comes to typed communication. I have found that when people call me and do not leave a voicemail, they also do not communicate the reason for their call by any other means.
The result being that small problems I could have resolved easily become big problems which require a great amount of effort to fix. I am pretty confident that this would not change if they did not have the option of leaving me a voicemail.
The fact of the matter is that there are a lot of things I call someone about that are just not important enough to me to type a message about. With significant frequency they are of greater importance to the other person.
You missed the part where I only do the follow up email and text if it is urgent. The reason I do that if it is urgent is because some people get one or the other of those even when away from their phone.
However, if it is not urgent, I don't waste my time typing the message. I can leave a voicemail in much less time than I can send a typed message and even if I couldn't, I am already connected on the phone so taking the time to open an email or text message to the person is time I would rather not spend.
Except that most of the time when I leave a voicemail message, the information I am leaving is enough to give the person on the other end a starting point on the reason I called them and an idea about how urgent it is for them to get back to me. Generally, I am calling in the first place because the topic of conversation is one that requires a lot of back and forth that takes entirely too long to resolve when done in typed messages. If the reason for the call is urgent I will usually follow up with an email, IM, and text message (the last two depending on their availability with the person I am trying to reach).