Came back from Iraq a couple weeks ago. Retiring in a couple months. So, that was my last flight, since I'll have the time to drive where I want to go, I don't want to go overseas any more, and I'm not OK with getting X-rayed or felt-up. Also not wild about having my luggage lost, sitting in a cramped seat for hours (my knee hurt for a week after the return flight from the middle east), arriving 2 hours before the flight, sitting for hours in an airport where a connection is to be made since non-stops are getting like hens teeth and expensive, paying for parking that is a 10 minute bus ride away, paying $25 for each of 2 bags both ways, being starved for lack of in-flight meals, having to pay for blankets or pillows, or possibly getting trapped on the tarmac for 7 hours. They can stick it all.
Driving from Virginia to Tucson next March. Yeah, it'll take 3 or 4 days each way, but I enjoy that. And, I'm sure I'll find some interesting stuff to visit on the way out and back.
What happens locally: We mark paper ballots with a sharpie-like ink pen, coloring in the little bubble. The counting machine devours the ballot, storing it inside and tabulating the vote. Any question about the count, just run all the ballots thru again... simple...
First, our military budget is close to $650 billion, not 1.2T, and we can't afford it either. We have a 1.5T DEFICIT. If we take that supposed $1.2T you state from the military, our only real course of action would be to use it to reduce the deficit. We'd still have $200B deficit left over, and still no money to apply to the supposed crisis of global warming.
Second,. there juist isn't that much money in "the rich" as you suppose. As Walter E. Williams shows here:
"the rich" are not the bottomless pit of money that you suppose them to be. This shows that taing absolutely ALL their wealth, earnings, and adding in coroporate profits of $400B annually, we STILL couldn't balance the budget with all the trillions we're spending. We have no choice but to stop the spending, and adding some trillions of dollars devoted to global warming is not the way to stop the spending.
You're life doesn't belong to you if you're working 1.5X as much time as you used to, which was likely in excess of 8 hours anyway. 12 hours a day for some means too tired to do things like go to the gym, have a social / sex life, etc. If you live to work, that's one thing, but most of the rest of us work to live, and probably should learn something like welding or electrician that 1) can't be outsourced and 2) is usually no more than 8 hrs a day 5 days a week.
Its never too late to do something and its already too late to do something.
Its already too late to do things like reduce CO2 because there's too much already, we can't really stop using the energy that produces the CO2, and if we could, we still couldn't afford it.
Its never too late because there are many geo-engineering approaches that could / should work that are far, far less expensive than trying to give up using coal, oil, etc.
But when anyone mentions really cheap stuff like firing sulphur particulates into the upper atmosphere via artillery, an approach that supposedly would counteract warming, and be cheap enough for a relatively wealthy individual to finance, the global warming zealots don't want to hear it, fueling the perception that the "global warming movement" is a political ploy designed more to bring down the western nations economically than anything to actually do with improving the planet. Additionally, things like this:
seem to be ignored, maybe even supressed, when they could clearly achieve the sort of CO2 reduction that proponents say is required. Again, it appears that proponents are more about financially breaking the industrialized countries, mainly the US, rather than achieving a real solution.
I believe that anyone who is REALLY interested in benefiting the planet, as opposed to simply throwing up a scarecrow designed to harm the West, and esp. the USA economically, would be interested in any and all approaches that might be helpful, and not systematically ignore things that are doable cheaply.
There are always someone after the kids. We were chased by some Mexican guy with a knife, that whas hiding in an orchard we had to pass on the way to school.
As for;public transportathion, I don't wnat to tell you where you can stick that on an open forum...
Difference between avoiding a person and an animal is what's going to make this a thing of the future for quite a while. Visual recognition software and artificial intelligence need to make the right choices when evading disaster. Hit the deer, drive into the ditch to avoid a person. Things like that. Automatic cars could have an advantage of networking with other automatic cars ahead which would inform it of people walking along the road, deer standing by the side of the road, patches of ice or deep water, etc.
The thing that will most likely keep this tech from happening: Nobody will buy it, because the software will HAVE to be set to obey the speed limits, and most drivers drive 10 - 20 mph higher than the speed limits on certain roads, like the DC beltway for instance. SL there is 55. Traffic flow is 75 - 85 quite often. A car at 55 is asking for disaster.
We desperately need this tech. Aging populations drive less well after some kinds of age-related degradations, where automatic driving mechanisms could maintain mobility for affected people. Cars could also take kids to school, and park themselves in the parking lot, making the kids much less vulnerable to child molesters and bullies, as well as freeing Mom and Dad from transportation duties.
For everyone else, automation in driving will do a better job than people that are blabbing on cell phones, eating, drinking, fiddling with the radio, changing CD's, etc. etc. If drivers don't normally do these things, then automatic driving will enable them to do so, as well as a lot of other things that might be productive, like office work or simply enjoyable things like reading the newspaper or surfing the internet.
I don't see why we can't have it both ways, you buy your digital edition, and I get paper.
And if you're involved with the PC Magazine version, you'll notice something lacking. Advertisements. Want to see what the latest Dell or Gateway or whatever is without remembering to search for it on the net, or discover a brand new company that has just what you need by seeing an ad in PC Magazine? Not gonna happen.
PC Mag went digital, subscription is up, I didn't renew. That's the way I intend to treat each magazine every time that happens. I pay money for a magazine, not a download. Do not enjoy reading on a monitor.
If I had my way, it would be private, and that would mean that crap like national speed limits would be out the window, etc. If a private enterprise wants to make a road where there are no speed limits, they can do it. Don't think its safe? Don't drive it.
But the point is that private industry COULD build roads and turn a profit, if they wanted to. There is demand for that. And, think about this: It would be a toll road, the trucks would not be navigating free, and maybe the price boost in trucking would make private rail (more) profitable, and more goods would move via rail, which is insanely efficient in moving bulk cargo. What do the ads say? Something like 453 miles per ton of cargo per gallon of diesel. That's extremely efficient, and top that off with maybe 2 - 3 guys moving 1000's of tons of freight just by pulling 1 train. But that scenario is muted somewhat by trucks that, although they burn insane amounts of energy to move comparably tiny amounts of cargo, can do so profitably only because they do so on free roads.
When a private company can do public transportation and make a buck, then, and only then, is it a good idea. If it requires gov't money to do it, then it is an expensive boondoggle that will waste huge amounts of taxpayer money for a product that only a few will use (becuase if a lot used it, it would be profitable, and wouldn't need gov't money to survive.)
>You've obviously never been to Holland, Sweden, Switzerland, Japan to name a few.
We don't live there, we live here, in the USA, and here in the USA, "Public transport is useless, its dirty, unreliable, often unsafe, overcrowded (yes i know the roads can be crowded too, but at least you have somewhere comfortable to sit in a car and can stop to take a break), doesn't run all night and is even more useless outside of large cities." is true.
Yes, this is what this envirowacko crap is ultimately all about, making anything but going to work, generating $$$ for the US treasury, and then going home and being chained to it from lack of transportation virtually impossible. Don't even start with that "bicycle" nonsense, as I am 20 miles out in the f'n country, and riding a bike on these roads also requires a death wish to do. Work is 17 miles east, town is 20 miles west. This sort of scheme would be imprisonment on this 1 acre, as they keep raising the rates until only the rich can afford to travel.
"Everywhere sales tax has been implemented, it has either been slightly, or drastically, regressive."
None of the others have ever implemented a prebate. This is a totally new invention.
"Rich only spend a small portion of their income, they invest the rest."
Now, tell me about Bill Gates $142 million house, John Kerry's $70 million yacht, and John Travolta's $32 million Boeing 737. Then there's Nick Cage making 6 movies a year, with his accountants telling him that he needs to make 7 movies a year if he wants to continue his free-spending lifestyle.
ANd you're forgetting about the ancient money rich in the country, that have either NO income, and just live on pieces of their fortune each year and therefore aren't paying a dime of income tax, and the other rich that are invested in things like municipal bonds that are not income-taxable, and so also don't contribute a dime to the US Treasury. The income taxes are like a sieve, that leak revenue at every turn, failing to tax criminals, the shadow economy, even foreign tourists that the Fair Tax all force to contribute.
You don't know s*** about the Fair Tax. The poor don't pay a penny of it because of something called the "prebate." According to House Ways and Means committee testimony by two economists that modeled it, it is actually a tax on the WEALTH of the wealthy. And, the INCOME taxes are the ones that are regressive, because for every $1 that a poor person earns, $0.153 goes to social security and medicare, and the poor ALSO pay 22% of the price of things that they buy that are manufactured in the USA because of that much embedded corporate and other income taxes that the corporation pays.
Get rid of the income taxes, and we can have prosperity again.
Yep - ignore the TEA party and keep spending. Get the debt up to 50 trillion dollars, get our credit downgraded to the basement so eventually we have to pay 10% interest on the debt, and that'll be $10 trillion a year that would have to go straight to the payment on the debt. Recovery would be impossible, and that would be the end of America. Divide it up and sell it to the creditors. But y'all just keep on spending... and spending... and spending. That's the thing to do. Listen to the liberals, they know best. The TEA party is crazy, they want a balanced budget amendment. Don't do that, it would make it harder to wreck that evil country, and send it into the pages of history forever. We need to kill the American economy so we can build the worker's paradise in its place, with free medical care, free housing, free cars, free food, free everything, paid for by:"the rich". They work, you ride for free. That's the way it should be, eh?
Obama didn't reverse it, tho, did he? No, he made it worse.
The way to fix this is to pass the Fair Tax. That results in 0% income taxes, a wildly expanding manufacturing sector, and ultimate prosperity for the American people. FT proponents believe it will result in a 3% unemployment rate in 2 years. When asked what they would do if America passed the Fair Tax, 500 foreign CEO's were split, with 400 responding that they would build their next factory in the USA, while the remaining 100 said they would move their entire company to the USA.
The income tax has been chasing jobs out of the country to shores that have less business expense either because of low wages or low taxes or both. We can't expect to have the 2nd highest corporate income tax on the planet, and the highest wage scale on the planet, and not expect industry to invest anywhere-but-here.
But we're going to continue with the income taxes, I'm afraid, even tho they're the 2nd-worst idea this country has ever had right behind slavery, and we will eventually have an economy that will be envious of the prosperity of places like Costa Rica.
The Bush Tax Cuts would be worth an additional $130 billion to $300 billion in extra income. The deficit is $1,650 billion. IOW, it ain't the Bush Tax Cuts that are doing this, it is the egregious spending that is doing this. We have to stop the spending. And Clinton had the onset of a recession in progress before GWB was even sworn in - this was December 2000, so... I'm not really impressed. Clinton just had the benefit of a tech bubblem which imploded. Plus there were a few events that necessitated an expensive military response, in spite of the unrealistic attitude that we could somehow just sit here and not respond, and absorb however many attacks the enemy cared to send our way just to save the money it takes to go kick their a****, and dismantle their terrorist organizations.
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Came back from Iraq a couple weeks ago. Retiring in a couple months. So, that was my last flight, since I'll have the time to drive where I want to go, I don't want to go overseas any more, and I'm not OK with getting X-rayed or felt-up. Also not wild about having my luggage lost, sitting in a cramped seat for hours (my knee hurt for a week after the return flight from the middle east), arriving 2 hours before the flight, sitting for hours in an airport where a connection is to be made since non-stops are getting like hens teeth and expensive, paying for parking that is a 10 minute bus ride away, paying $25 for each of 2 bags both ways, being starved for lack of in-flight meals, having to pay for blankets or pillows, or possibly getting trapped on the tarmac for 7 hours. They can stick it all.
Driving from Virginia to Tucson next March. Yeah, it'll take 3 or 4 days each way, but I enjoy that. And, I'm sure I'll find some interesting stuff to visit on the way out and back.
What happens locally: We mark paper ballots with a sharpie-like ink pen, coloring in the little bubble. The counting machine devours the ballot, storing it inside and tabulating the vote. Any question about the count, just run all the ballots thru again... simple...
Wrong on both counts.
First, our military budget is close to $650 billion, not 1.2T, and we can't afford it either. We have a 1.5T DEFICIT. If we take that supposed $1.2T you state from the military, our only real course of action would be to use it to reduce the deficit. We'd still have $200B deficit left over, and still no money to apply to the supposed crisis of global warming.
Second,. there juist isn't that much money in "the rich" as you suppose. As Walter E. Williams shows here:
http://townhall.com/columnists/walterewilliams/2011/04/13/eat_the_rich/page/full/
"the rich" are not the bottomless pit of money that you suppose them to be. This shows that taing absolutely ALL their wealth, earnings, and adding in coroporate profits of $400B annually, we STILL couldn't balance the budget with all the trillions we're spending. We have no choice but to stop the spending, and adding some trillions of dollars devoted to global warming is not the way to stop the spending.
And 1 huge disadvantage: Construction can't be outsourced.
You're life doesn't belong to you if you're working 1.5X as much time as you used to, which was likely in excess of 8 hours anyway. 12 hours a day for some means too tired to do things like go to the gym, have a social / sex life, etc. If you live to work, that's one thing, but most of the rest of us work to live, and probably should learn something like welding or electrician that 1) can't be outsourced and 2) is usually no more than 8 hrs a day 5 days a week.
Its never too late to do something and its already too late to do something.
Its already too late to do things like reduce CO2 because there's too much already, we can't really stop using the energy that produces the CO2, and if we could, we still couldn't afford it.
Its never too late because there are many geo-engineering approaches that could / should work that are far, far less expensive than trying to give up using coal, oil, etc.
But when anyone mentions really cheap stuff like firing sulphur particulates into the upper atmosphere via artillery, an approach that supposedly would counteract warming, and be cheap enough for a relatively wealthy individual to finance, the global warming zealots don't want to hear it, fueling the perception that the "global warming movement" is a political ploy designed more to bring down the western nations economically than anything to actually do with improving the planet. Additionally, things like this:
http://www.physorg.com/news199005915.html
seem to be ignored, maybe even supressed, when they could clearly achieve the sort of CO2 reduction that proponents say is required. Again, it appears that proponents are more about financially breaking the industrialized countries, mainly the US, rather than achieving a real solution.
I believe that anyone who is REALLY interested in benefiting the planet, as opposed to simply throwing up a scarecrow designed to harm the West, and esp. the USA economically, would be interested in any and all approaches that might be helpful, and not systematically ignore things that are doable cheaply.
There are always someone after the kids. We were chased by some Mexican guy with a knife, that whas hiding in an orchard we had to pass on the way to school.
As for ;public transportathion, I don't wnat to tell you where you can stick that on an open forum...
Yeah, this is well in he future. 10 - 20 years. But, if they get it to work reliably, it is huge.
Difference between avoiding a person and an animal is what's going to make this a thing of the future for quite a while. Visual recognition software and artificial intelligence need to make the right choices when evading disaster. Hit the deer, drive into the ditch to avoid a person. Things like that. Automatic cars could have an advantage of networking with other automatic cars ahead which would inform it of people walking along the road, deer standing by the side of the road, patches of ice or deep water, etc.
The thing that will most likely keep this tech from happening: Nobody will buy it, because the software will HAVE to be set to obey the speed limits, and most drivers drive 10 - 20 mph higher than the speed limits on certain roads, like the DC beltway for instance. SL there is 55. Traffic flow is 75 - 85 quite often. A car at 55 is asking for disaster.
We desperately need this tech. Aging populations drive less well after some kinds of age-related degradations, where automatic driving mechanisms could maintain mobility for affected people. Cars could also take kids to school, and park themselves in the parking lot, making the kids much less vulnerable to child molesters and bullies, as well as freeing Mom and Dad from transportation duties.
For everyone else, automation in driving will do a better job than people that are blabbing on cell phones, eating, drinking, fiddling with the radio, changing CD's, etc. etc. If drivers don't normally do these things, then automatic driving will enable them to do so, as well as a lot of other things that might be productive, like office work or simply enjoyable things like reading the newspaper or surfing the internet.
Oh, yeah, DDJ makes 2 of these that I haven't resubscribed to...
I don't see why we can't have it both ways, you buy your digital edition, and I get paper.
And if you're involved with the PC Magazine version, you'll notice something lacking. Advertisements. Want to see what the latest Dell or Gateway or whatever is without remembering to search for it on the net, or discover a brand new company that has just what you need by seeing an ad in PC Magazine? Not gonna happen.
PC Mag went digital, subscription is up, I didn't renew. That's the way I intend to treat each magazine every time that happens. I pay money for a magazine, not a download. Do not enjoy reading on a monitor.
If I had my way, it would be private, and that would mean that crap like national speed limits would be out the window, etc. If a private enterprise wants to make a road where there are no speed limits, they can do it. Don't think its safe? Don't drive it.
But the point is that private industry COULD build roads and turn a profit, if they wanted to. There is demand for that. And, think about this: It would be a toll road, the trucks would not be navigating free, and maybe the price boost in trucking would make private rail (more) profitable, and more goods would move via rail, which is insanely efficient in moving bulk cargo. What do the ads say? Something like 453 miles per ton of cargo per gallon of diesel. That's extremely efficient, and top that off with maybe 2 - 3 guys moving 1000's of tons of freight just by pulling 1 train. But that scenario is muted somewhat by trucks that, although they burn insane amounts of energy to move comparably tiny amounts of cargo, can do so profitably only because they do so on free roads.
When a private company can do public transportation and make a buck, then, and only then, is it a good idea. If it requires gov't money to do it, then it is an expensive boondoggle that will waste huge amounts of taxpayer money for a product that only a few will use (becuase if a lot used it, it would be profitable, and wouldn't need gov't money to survive.)
>You've obviously never been to Holland, Sweden, Switzerland, Japan to name a few.
We don't live there, we live here, in the USA, and here in the USA, "Public transport is useless, its dirty, unreliable, often unsafe, overcrowded (yes i know the roads can be crowded too, but at least you have somewhere comfortable to sit in a car and can stop to take a break), doesn't run all night and is even more useless outside of large cities." is true.
Yes, this is what this envirowacko crap is ultimately all about, making anything but going to work, generating $$$ for the US treasury, and then going home and being chained to it from lack of transportation virtually impossible. Don't even start with that "bicycle" nonsense, as I am 20 miles out in the f'n country, and riding a bike on these roads also requires a death wish to do. Work is 17 miles east, town is 20 miles west. This sort of scheme would be imprisonment on this 1 acre, as they keep raising the rates until only the rich can afford to travel.
...but I'm for anything that sticks it to a thief. I hate thieves...
They shouldn't have to sue these downloaders now, they should be throwing them in jail.
"Everywhere sales tax has been implemented, it has either been slightly, or drastically, regressive."
None of the others have ever implemented a prebate. This is a totally new invention.
"Rich only spend a small portion of their income, they invest the rest."
Now, tell me about Bill Gates $142 million house, John Kerry's $70 million yacht, and John Travolta's $32 million Boeing 737. Then there's Nick Cage making 6 movies a year, with his accountants telling him that he needs to make 7 movies a year if he wants to continue his free-spending lifestyle.
ANd you're forgetting about the ancient money rich in the country, that have either NO income, and just live on pieces of their fortune each year and therefore aren't paying a dime of income tax, and the other rich that are invested in things like municipal bonds that are not income-taxable, and so also don't contribute a dime to the US Treasury. The income taxes are like a sieve, that leak revenue at every turn, failing to tax criminals, the shadow economy, even foreign tourists that the Fair Tax all force to contribute.
You don't know s*** about the Fair Tax. The poor don't pay a penny of it because of something called the "prebate." According to House Ways and Means committee testimony by two economists that modeled it, it is actually a tax on the WEALTH of the wealthy. And, the INCOME taxes are the ones that are regressive, because for every $1 that a poor person earns, $0.153 goes to social security and medicare, and the poor ALSO pay 22% of the price of things that they buy that are manufactured in the USA because of that much embedded corporate and other income taxes that the corporation pays.
Get rid of the income taxes, and we can have prosperity again.
The documentation of the survey is in the Fair Tax article on Wikipedia. Other than that, you lie.
Yep - ignore the TEA party and keep spending. Get the debt up to 50 trillion dollars, get our credit downgraded to the basement so eventually we have to pay 10% interest on the debt, and that'll be $10 trillion a year that would have to go straight to the payment on the debt. Recovery would be impossible, and that would be the end of America. Divide it up and sell it to the creditors. But y'all just keep on spending... and spending... and spending. That's the thing to do. Listen to the liberals, they know best. The TEA party is crazy, they want a balanced budget amendment. Don't do that, it would make it harder to wreck that evil country, and send it into the pages of history forever. We need to kill the American economy so we can build the worker's paradise in its place, with free medical care, free housing, free cars, free food, free everything, paid for by :"the rich". They work, you ride for free. That's the way it should be, eh?
...GWB spent too much.
Obama didn't reverse it, tho, did he? No, he made it worse.
The way to fix this is to pass the Fair Tax. That results in 0% income taxes, a wildly expanding manufacturing sector, and ultimate prosperity for the American people. FT proponents believe it will result in a 3% unemployment rate in 2 years. When asked what they would do if America passed the Fair Tax, 500 foreign CEO's were split, with 400 responding that they would build their next factory in the USA, while the remaining 100 said they would move their entire company to the USA.
The income tax has been chasing jobs out of the country to shores that have less business expense either because of low wages or low taxes or both. We can't expect to have the 2nd highest corporate income tax on the planet, and the highest wage scale on the planet, and not expect industry to invest anywhere-but-here.
But we're going to continue with the income taxes, I'm afraid, even tho they're the 2nd-worst idea this country has ever had right behind slavery, and we will eventually have an economy that will be envious of the prosperity of places like Costa Rica.
The Bush Tax Cuts would be worth an additional $130 billion to $300 billion in extra income. The deficit is $1,650 billion. IOW, it ain't the Bush Tax Cuts that are doing this, it is the egregious spending that is doing this. We have to stop the spending. And Clinton had the onset of a recession in progress before GWB was even sworn in - this was December 2000, so... I'm not really impressed. Clinton just had the benefit of a tech bubblem which imploded. Plus there were a few events that necessitated an expensive military response, in spite of the unrealistic attitude that we could somehow just sit here and not respond, and absorb however many attacks the enemy cared to send our way just to save the money it takes to go kick their a****, and dismantle their terrorist organizations.
"represents future income."
Has it escaped everyone else that we are broke now?