And you are making the assumption that because they don't pay it, it doesn't cost them anything. That is not true. If they don't pay that tax, then that means that they've still spent most of that money on a whole roomful of tax lawyers and accountants that have directed company operations to make sure that it does the most tax deductable thing at every opportunity. Not only are these lawyers and accountants hideously expensive, but the things that they direct to be done to avoid the tax are usually more expensive than the least expensive way to do the same thing, so ALSO cost the company more $$$.
Untax US industry, and say goodbye to this recession overnight. Prosperity would return with a vengence. But if you want to continue to enslave the American workforce, just keep the income taxes, let them do their work, and we will have a Zimbabwe-like economic landscape in another decade or 2.
Don't know any engineers that work 9:00 AM to 2:00 AM here. Maybe there are some game programmers that do that, but not your average engineer. Exaggeration is not helpful.
OTOH, I don't know ANY engineers that approach $190K. None. Haven't heard of any. If that sort of pay scale existed here, we wouldn't have an engineer shortage at all. Pay scales are closer to this:
There's graphs for both starting salary and average pay. Petroleum engineers may touch $190K. Dunno. But what's happening here is a race to the bottom in pay scale, as the powers that be have determined that the best way to keep everyone working at all is to make US workers earn less than Indian and Chinese workers. Meanwhile, the 2nd-highest corporate tax rate in the world, here in the US, is the real culprit that is pauperizing the entire society, ever so slowly like boiling a frog, so nobody really notices it as the actual problem.
Greed isn't the problem, its the feature. The playing field simply has to be set up to take advantage of it. That is, we have to make the USA the best place to do business that produces the highest profit. Nevermind the work-for-peanuts drones overseas, the labor cost isn't that big of a component of manufacturing nowdays, not with automation. What _is_ the big component that is royally screwing the USA is the US corporate income tax rate of 35%, when combined with the average state income tax at around 4.5%, makes the US the 2nd-highest corporate income tax nation on the planet. That is what is screwing us.
Pass the Fair Tax, repeal the 16th amendment, never tolerate income taxes again. The income taxes are the 2nd biggest mistake that this country has ever made, right behind slavery. Continue with these job-killing taxes, and watch the USA sink to 3rd-world status. The process is underway right now. It will complete, and we will be screwed, if we don't do the right thing. The right thing is to repeal the income taxes, every last one of them.
We have the drug war because the religious bunch thinks that fun is a sin and anything that shortcuts ways to fun, like drugs, is a sin, and they have the abominable habit attempting to outlaw anything that is a sin.
The solution is to legalize _ALL_ the D drugs, and put these monsters back in a position of looking for work picking tomatoes. What we're doing is insane. And yes, it _is_ our fault.
You attack the one that was shooting at our airplanes every day, had attacked a neighbor in the recent past that required our action to avert that leader's cornering the world market in oil, is a certifiable thug, is quite likely insane, etc.
Natural gas is much greater than that. We are beginning to now mine our landfills for natural gas. The landfills will provide vast quantities of renewable natural gas to augment the near-inexhaustible deposits that have grown several-fold from the newer extraction techniques. And it will certainly last long enough for solar-thermal plants to be built to generate electricity for 100% of our needs. When we get that built, the total electrical energy solution will have arrived, as it is fairly lo-tech, requires no exotic components, and is inexhaustible.
Would almost be worth it to see a Saddam-supplied anthrax attack that took out about a million people on the east coast. No, he didn't have it, but could have, hated our guts, and probably would have made a deal with terrorists to do exactly that. Everyone has 20-20 hindsight, and can easily criticize what really was the safest course of action.
We are "The Saudi Arabia" of natural gas. We can use that. We can use that pretty much exclusively if we want to, but we have vast reservse of coal and oil, too.
As for "the environment", nothing we can do will please the environmentalists, they'll whine about keeping nuclear, they'll whine about building more gas or coal or oil fired electrical generating plants to replace the nukes. So, we have nothing to lose by just doing what is best for our pocketbooks, and buy earplugs for the whining.
Everyone in the US _does_ need to go to college, only some can't afford it, and some aren't smart enough to be able to take advantage of it.
The cure is to bring back manufacturing jobs. A crackerjack welder can make really good money without going to college, as can a good tool and die maker, machinist, electrician, pipefitter, millwright, etc.
But our factories, which create these jobs, are overseas. Why? No, its not high labor rates or unions. It is the 35% Federal income taxes for businesses. Zeroize these taxes, and US manufacturing will take off, make / keep the US as the #1 manufacturer of the planet, and make the US population prosperous again.
How to do this? Pass the Fair Tax. Its that simple. The Fair Tax will create 10 million new jobs in the 1st 2 years, resulting in a 3% unemployment rate. There's no need for this decades-long recession, which is what it's going to be with the current recovery rate of approx 3% GDP growth. One needs a 7% - 8% GDP growth to get out of a recession, but the 3% figure is just status quo.
Hey, I can't explain it, and it might not be logical, but when I sit there and watch, stuff like Crouching piss me off, while stuff like Spiderman and Batman entertain me. I have yet to figure out why I feel that way, but have noticed years ago that I find it easier to forgive nonsense in some movies, but not others. My "reasons" are simply speculation about why this is so, but I don't really know. I only do know that I have yet to find a videogame associated movie that I liked.
And, additionally, this all supports the very, very wrong view, in my opinion, that the USA is evil as a country. Why WOULDN'T Superman want to be associated with the USA, its gov't, its people, etc? That is the thing that really has me steamed, the DC writers are buying into this idea that the USA is generally wrong, is a bully, and should be brought down, or at least that is what a lot of people seem to think, most of them being on the left. I vehemently disagree.
Yeah, the starless good movie is always a possibility, too. See "The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo," which is Swedish with subtitles and everything, unless you get the DVD with the English dub on it, and... it is fantastically engrossing, an excellent story. It is also really, really RAW, with 2 rape scenes and a severe sexual abuse scene in it, as well as other violence, attempted violence, and just plain serious conflict. I loved it, and never had a clue of these actors before.
I didn't like Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon, mostly because of the flying martial artists. Impossible is impossible, and I have to ask myself what I'm doing sitting there watching such nonsense. You know the outcome of any contest / conflict within the movie is not obeying any known framework of rules, so its outcome will be purely what the moviemaker wants it to be, rather than what you can logically conclude from the presented situation that one or the other contestants / combatants was more skillful.
Spiderman and Batman are patently impossible, but the difference is that you know that the moviemakers know that they're dealing in fantasy. The game movies attempt to show heroic exploits of the protagonists, but they then have to violate the rules to allow him to do it. Spiderman - hey, a super-strong guy bitten by a radioactive spider... of course its fantasy, so anything he does that violates more laws of science doesn't bother me so much. Batman... almost believable, a guy that trains physically for maybe 8 hours a day building his muscles and skills, and in possession of incredible military technology from the company he owns - you can go a long way with that and keep it at least somewhat believable.
There's no other way to interpret the Superman thing than as a slap at this Great Nation. And, I'm not sending money towards any group that does that.
No, I know BHO was born in Hawaii, Bill O'Reilly's research department found the birth announcement in 2 Hawaiian newspapers of that era years ago, so it was proven in my mind, no birth certificate required.
Fast 5 is no Academy Award candidate, for sure. But at least things seem to happen ALMOST for real. No, they couldn't do what they did with that train. And ripping a vault out of its concrete mount and dragging it down the road for miles is totally impossible,but using it as a weapon against the cops that are chasing them was just FUN. But they'd have needed a pair of Caterpillar tractors to drag the thing, much more slowly.
But I'm thinking of a video game movie lately, can't remember the name, but was full of zombies, and the whole thing just didn't make sense, at all. And I think I remember some big galoot with a large hammer in the thing, now where the H did that come from? And never mind the zombies that are impossible, as is their continued survival.
Then there's the other stuff in video game movies, where the hero(s) fall or jump some godawful height and land on 1 foot, 1 knee, and 1 hand in a crouch. Naw, they woulda splattered. That kinda stuff. And then in video game movies, things happen not because its a good idea for the story, but because that is a task that the game designer wants the player to have in a subsequent game based on the movie, or that _is_ a task already in a game that the movie is based on.
I just find movies that are associated with a video game more frustrating than anything else.
Silent Hill? I never saw that come thru my local movie theater. I've seen lots of titles in these replies of movies I never saw on the marquee at my local theater. Maybe they came thru during late '07 - early '08, when I was in Iraq? OBTW, I mostly only look at new movies that come thru theaters. Don't rent movies, don't steal 'em off the net either, and mostly can't stand watching anything on commercial TV 'cuz of, well, the commercials. Even on DVR, its generally not worth the annoyance of having to fast foward thru 6 minutes of commercials for every 8 - 9 minutes of story. But hey, I'm ancient at age 63, and enjoy the way things were, once upon a time, I guess.
As a moviegoer that "sees everything that is not too dumb for words" I avoid movies that have anything to do with videogames because, so far, they universally suck. There's nothing remotely believable about the movies, the are all computer video effects and no real story that makes much of any sense. Everything is simply game-play on the screen, and I don't get to have any fun with it.
Coming in a close second is "movies having anything to do with existent toys", which would mean things like the transformer series. Saw a trailer for the upcoming transformers movie last night. Nope, gonna miss that one, too.
Wanna sell me a movie ticket? Tell me a story, preferably with MOVIE STARS in it, not some bozo I've never heard of before that, incidentally, doesn't know squat about acting. Last night's movie for me was Fast Five. At least we have a star or 2, and some fun car chases. Yeah, its terminally stupid, too, but at least fun to look at.
Best movie in the theater at the moment? The Conspirator. Now, THAT tells a story. Water for Elephants, 2nd best, and ditto, tells a story.
Surprisingly, the comic book series have proved very entertaining, although any new movie having anything to do with anything from DC comics is getting a pass as long as the writers think that Superman should somehow be ashamed of being a US citizen, and wishes to renounce that citizenship. They can all go pound sand...
It is the USA itself that is toxic to workers. If anything can be outsourced, it will be, and anything that can be outsourced is a bad career choice. You're better off as "Restauranteur" rather than "Scientist" because people have to eat, and they are here.
The culprit in all this is corporate income taxes. We have the 2nd highest in the world (or by far the highest if the Bush Tax Cuts go away) and a cost of living that drives a demand for high wages too, making manufacturing here a bad idea.
Now, the reason that the furriners can come into the USA and do well is because they don't have the burden of paying for retiree pensions. The Detroit manufacturers have a huge pool of retirees that they have to provide beneifits for. That makes the labor cost Detroit about $78 an hour. Foreign mfgrs labor rates are around $45, while Detroit pays its workers $30 / hr and the foreigners $28.
The taxes? Well, the income tax bite on stuff manufactured here, in the USA, is about 22% of its selling price, and includes everything from the added costs of employing people due to their individual income tax and medicare/SS, to the "matching" medicare/SS and corporate income taxes. If corporate income taxes are recovered, the price of goods manufactured here could fall about 11%. Would that be competititve? Sure. But, as long as people think that taxing corporations is somehow "instead" of taxing them, without realizing that they pay it anyway in higher prices of goods, lower wages to themselves, lower dividend disbursements of the companies which affects their retirement savings, and finally the creation of all those unemployed people when jobs flee the high taxes, then there will still likely be misery and want in the USA.
So how long does it take the big 3 to build a car? About 30 - 33 man-hours. At $78 / hr, that's about $2500 for labor costs. And those taxes? Still 22% of the price, which for a $30,000 car, would be $6,600, which we could lower by about half if the income taxes went away. What sells better, a $25,000 Jeep Liberty, or a $22,250 Jeep Liberty? Yeah, that's right...
All we have to do is kill the income taxes dead... all of them... and we can have prosperity. There are other ways to tax that don't involve making our corporations uncompetitive.
Ghandhi was willing to risk and lose everything including his life for his cause. We are not willing to risk and lose our country just to avoid kicking their asses, which also works.
"a) What did all those lies about WMDs have to do with 'defence'? How many Taliban terrorist cells were based in Iraq?"
There were no lies, and the defense started in 1991 when the tyrant in question began his quest to corner the middle east market in oil. Had we not acted, he would have invaded Saudi Arabia, etc. and after that, could have had us paying $7 a gallon. The 2003 action was just a continuation of the 1991 action. The fatal flaw was not in 2003, but in 1991 when we didn't finish the job.
BTW, $7 a gallon isn't just an incomvenience, it would wreck us. Just 'cuz the Euros can pay it, and drive around their geographically compact countries that are festooned with alternatives in public transporation doesn't mean we can do it in a country 3000 miles "wide" and about 2000 miles "high" that doesn't have much more than freight rail except for some extremely limited passenger rail that is totally inadequate to service the population in place of even air travel. When the city of Chicago was virtually shut down with snow last winter, I checked the AmTrak train schedules on Sunday and they were sold out thru Friday. We just don't have that sort of service, and won't, because it won't make a buck and would be far too expensive to lay new, non-freight rail to actually make fast trains work. And, people won't ride the slow trains except in dire situations.
Anyway, every major intelligence agency on the planet thought that this kook had WMD, and that he would be at least capable and desrious of having it used in the USA, and would do so if he found the right terrorists delivery methods. Taking him out was unavoidable if we didn't want to live day-to-day under a threat of attack that could kill 100's of thousands, not simply 3K people and a couple buildings.
"b) How often has a war against an ideal ever resulted in victory? Martyrs usually make ideals stronger. Are there more or less Taliban now than in 2001?"
We don't have to be victorious, we just have to remove their capability to attack us.
"Clue: We're not saying you should do nothing. We're saying you're doing it very wrong."
Yes, you are, you are sayng we have to do it without kicking their asses. We absolutely, positively have to kick their asses, or they will simply do it again, and again, over and over until we physically stop them.
I'm sure you want something you consider innocuous, like the Iraqi economic sanctions that killed 100,000 Iraqi children per year it was in effect from basic things like not being able to buy chlorine on the open market, and therefore rendering the Iraqis unable to purify their water so their kids got sick and died, but of course your sort would have kittens if a cluster bomb killed 3 kids while knocking down a couple dozen terrorists. I know where your coming from, and it is not enlightmenment, it is all emotion and gut reaction, and it is wrong.
"Why are we squandering such a resource on fuel? Why are we burning it and wasting it?"
Because... there's exactly 1 way to get a car or truck down a highway right now, that doesn't involve huge up-front expenditure, and that is gasoline. Gasoline is the only way to get a car down a highway and do it all day, day after day, if you want to drive from, say, DC to St. Louis.
You can dream of pie-in-the-sky solutions all day and it won't change a thing until someone with actual scientific understanding and capability INVENTS something that works. The best minds on the planet have so far come up with 1 fairly expensive vehicle, the Chevy Volt, that will do DC to St. Louis and do it while offering alternative energy transportation for MOST of your transportation needs that occur within 40 miles round trip of your home. Its the only car that will do that.
When some geniuses finally build the magic battery that will allow electric cars to drive 300 miles on a charge and "refuel" in a reasonable 5 minutes or less, so you can do that DC to St. Louis run without sitting in a charging station for 4 hours, then we can all convert to a car that uses that battery, and happily burn solar-thermal, photo-voltaic, wind, hydro, coal-fired, nuclear, etc. electricity. But we can't do it now, and we won't be able to do it until the geniuses act, and are successful. It may be be this year, or it may take 30 years.
"We can switch to alternative energy sources without anyone suffering at all."
BS. Got anything sitting in your driveway right now that will burn, say, coal, or natural gas, or something-mined-or-drilled here? Not likely. We can't switch until someone figures out a great solution that is worth buying, will fill not only our needs but our wants, and doesn't cost more than we can afford. This is currently vaporware. Chevy Volt comes close - but falls down on "affordable" and "want." I "want" 0-60 in 5 second range, and price in mid-$20Ks'. That's my current Subaru WRX. I'd buy a Volt or lease it except for some $$$ considerations, and if I obtain a 6-month detail at work that involves some travel to dangerous places with commensurate pay, the $$$ consideration will be solved and I'll buy a Volt, if I don't get blown up or shot doing the detail. Then I'll happily enjoy driving past all the local gas stations while "refueling" at home off the grid, for $1.60 / 100 miles instead of $18 / 100 miles like the WRX consumes.
"$1.3 trillion for a personal vendetta in Iraq/Afghanistan"
G I'm tired of you lefty/commie/pinko/fags whining about this.
Sure, we should have just sat back and done nothing about being attacked, having 2 buildings knocked down, and losing approx 3K citizens and others to a direct attack on our country. Can't think of a better way to encourage another one. Oh, BTW, "doing nothing" == "not kicking someone's ass." The bad guys _have_ to get their asses kicked or they will do it again, and again, and again...
My only hope is that all you whiners are at ground zero for the next attack that you are responsible for if we ever do simply discontinue defending ourselves...
And as a possibly interesting fact, we can get these industries back, employ not only those that go to college but those that learn welding & plumbing and "factory" type jobs as well, by getting rid of the income taxes, all of them. Read here:
"Bill Archer, former head of the House Ways and Means Committee, asked Princeton University Econometrics to survey 500 European and Asian companies regarding the effect on their business decisions if the United States enacted the FairTax. 400 of those companies stated they would build their next plant in the United States, and 100 companies said they would move their corporate headquarters to the United States.[61]"
Yes, that's footnoted 61 in the Fair Tax article in Wikipedia. The Fair Tax proposes to completely kill income taxes and replace them with consumption taxes - retail sales taxes. This would let our industries compete with the world.
Just sayin' - I think people need to realize how badly we're shooting ourselves in the foot while using the income taxes to attack the "evil" rich and the "evil" industries. Income taxes are the 2nd biggest mistake this country has ever made, right behind slavery. Do we need another civil war to get rid of income taxes?
Yes, we could also use the spare time, which will have become 100% of our time, to kill each other, with your sociopaths attacking and the billions of average citizens defending. The sociopaths may be severely outnumbered, I think... or maybe not...
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And you are making the assumption that because they don't pay it, it doesn't cost them anything. That is not true. If they don't pay that tax, then that means that they've still spent most of that money on a whole roomful of tax lawyers and accountants that have directed company operations to make sure that it does the most tax deductable thing at every opportunity. Not only are these lawyers and accountants hideously expensive, but the things that they direct to be done to avoid the tax are usually more expensive than the least expensive way to do the same thing, so ALSO cost the company more $$$.
Untax US industry, and say goodbye to this recession overnight. Prosperity would return with a vengence. But if you want to continue to enslave the American workforce, just keep the income taxes, let them do their work, and we will have a Zimbabwe-like economic landscape in another decade or 2.
Don't know any engineers that work 9:00 AM to 2:00 AM here. Maybe there are some game programmers that do that, but not your average engineer. Exaggeration is not helpful.
OTOH, I don't know ANY engineers that approach $190K. None. Haven't heard of any. If that sort of pay scale existed here, we wouldn't have an engineer shortage at all. Pay scales are closer to this:
http://www.payscale.com/best-colleges/degrees.asp
There's graphs for both starting salary and average pay. Petroleum engineers may touch $190K. Dunno. But what's happening here is a race to the bottom in pay scale, as the powers that be have determined that the best way to keep everyone working at all is to make US workers earn less than Indian and Chinese workers. Meanwhile, the 2nd-highest corporate tax rate in the world, here in the US, is the real culprit that is pauperizing the entire society, ever so slowly like boiling a frog, so nobody really notices it as the actual problem.
Greed isn't the problem, its the feature. The playing field simply has to be set up to take advantage of it. That is, we have to make the USA the best place to do business that produces the highest profit. Nevermind the work-for-peanuts drones overseas, the labor cost isn't that big of a component of manufacturing nowdays, not with automation. What _is_ the big component that is royally screwing the USA is the US corporate income tax rate of 35%, when combined with the average state income tax at around 4.5%, makes the US the 2nd-highest corporate income tax nation on the planet. That is what is screwing us.
Pass the Fair Tax, repeal the 16th amendment, never tolerate income taxes again. The income taxes are the 2nd biggest mistake that this country has ever made, right behind slavery. Continue with these job-killing taxes, and watch the USA sink to 3rd-world status. The process is underway right now. It will complete, and we will be screwed, if we don't do the right thing. The right thing is to repeal the income taxes, every last one of them.
...of living in a country founded by Puritans?
We have the drug war because the religious bunch thinks that fun is a sin and anything that shortcuts ways to fun, like drugs, is a sin, and they have the abominable habit attempting to outlaw anything that is a sin.
The solution is to legalize _ALL_ the D drugs, and put these monsters back in a position of looking for work picking tomatoes. What we're doing is insane. And yes, it _is_ our fault.
You attack the one that was shooting at our airplanes every day, had attacked a neighbor in the recent past that required our action to avert that leader's cornering the world market in oil, is a certifiable thug, is quite likely insane, etc.
Natural gas is much greater than that. We are beginning to now mine our landfills for natural gas. The landfills will provide vast quantities of renewable natural gas to augment the near-inexhaustible deposits that have grown several-fold from the newer extraction techniques. And it will certainly last long enough for solar-thermal plants to be built to generate electricity for 100% of our needs. When we get that built, the total electrical energy solution will have arrived, as it is fairly lo-tech, requires no exotic components, and is inexhaustible.
Would almost be worth it to see a Saddam-supplied anthrax attack that took out about a million people on the east coast. No, he didn't have it, but could have, hated our guts, and probably would have made a deal with terrorists to do exactly that. Everyone has 20-20 hindsight, and can easily criticize what really was the safest course of action.
We are "The Saudi Arabia" of natural gas. We can use that. We can use that pretty much exclusively if we want to, but we have vast reservse of coal and oil, too.
As for "the environment", nothing we can do will please the environmentalists, they'll whine about keeping nuclear, they'll whine about building more gas or coal or oil fired electrical generating plants to replace the nukes. So, we have nothing to lose by just doing what is best for our pocketbooks, and buy earplugs for the whining.
Everyone in the US _does_ need to go to college, only some can't afford it, and some aren't smart enough to be able to take advantage of it.
The cure is to bring back manufacturing jobs. A crackerjack welder can make really good money without going to college, as can a good tool and die maker, machinist, electrician, pipefitter, millwright, etc.
But our factories, which create these jobs, are overseas. Why? No, its not high labor rates or unions. It is the 35% Federal income taxes for businesses. Zeroize these taxes, and US manufacturing will take off, make / keep the US as the #1 manufacturer of the planet, and make the US population prosperous again.
How to do this? Pass the Fair Tax. Its that simple. The Fair Tax will create 10 million new jobs in the 1st 2 years, resulting in a 3% unemployment rate. There's no need for this decades-long recession, which is what it's going to be with the current recovery rate of approx 3% GDP growth. One needs a 7% - 8% GDP growth to get out of a recession, but the 3% figure is just status quo.
Hey, I can't explain it, and it might not be logical, but when I sit there and watch, stuff like Crouching piss me off, while stuff like Spiderman and Batman entertain me. I have yet to figure out why I feel that way, but have noticed years ago that I find it easier to forgive nonsense in some movies, but not others. My "reasons" are simply speculation about why this is so, but I don't really know. I only do know that I have yet to find a videogame associated movie that I liked.
And, additionally, this all supports the very, very wrong view, in my opinion, that the USA is evil as a country. Why WOULDN'T Superman want to be associated with the USA, its gov't, its people, etc? That is the thing that really has me steamed, the DC writers are buying into this idea that the USA is generally wrong, is a bully, and should be brought down, or at least that is what a lot of people seem to think, most of them being on the left. I vehemently disagree.
Yeah, the starless good movie is always a possibility, too. See "The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo," which is Swedish with subtitles and everything, unless you get the DVD with the English dub on it, and... it is fantastically engrossing, an excellent story. It is also really, really RAW, with 2 rape scenes and a severe sexual abuse scene in it, as well as other violence, attempted violence, and just plain serious conflict. I loved it, and never had a clue of these actors before.
I didn't like Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon, mostly because of the flying martial artists. Impossible is impossible, and I have to ask myself what I'm doing sitting there watching such nonsense. You know the outcome of any contest / conflict within the movie is not obeying any known framework of rules, so its outcome will be purely what the moviemaker wants it to be, rather than what you can logically conclude from the presented situation that one or the other contestants / combatants was more skillful.
Spiderman and Batman are patently impossible, but the difference is that you know that the moviemakers know that they're dealing in fantasy. The game movies attempt to show heroic exploits of the protagonists, but they then have to violate the rules to allow him to do it. Spiderman - hey, a super-strong guy bitten by a radioactive spider... of course its fantasy, so anything he does that violates more laws of science doesn't bother me so much. Batman... almost believable, a guy that trains physically for maybe 8 hours a day building his muscles and skills, and in possession of incredible military technology from the company he owns - you can go a long way with that and keep it at least somewhat believable.
There's no other way to interpret the Superman thing than as a slap at this Great Nation. And, I'm not sending money towards any group that does that.
No, I know BHO was born in Hawaii, Bill O'Reilly's research department found the birth announcement in 2 Hawaiian newspapers of that era years ago, so it was proven in my mind, no birth certificate required.
Fast 5 is no Academy Award candidate, for sure. But at least things seem to happen ALMOST for real. No, they couldn't do what they did with that train. And ripping a vault out of its concrete mount and dragging it down the road for miles is totally impossible,but using it as a weapon against the cops that are chasing them was just FUN. But they'd have needed a pair of Caterpillar tractors to drag the thing, much more slowly.
But I'm thinking of a video game movie lately, can't remember the name, but was full of zombies, and the whole thing just didn't make sense, at all. And I think I remember some big galoot with a large hammer in the thing, now where the H did that come from? And never mind the zombies that are impossible, as is their continued survival.
Then there's the other stuff in video game movies, where the hero(s) fall or jump some godawful height and land on 1 foot, 1 knee, and 1 hand in a crouch. Naw, they woulda splattered. That kinda stuff. And then in video game movies, things happen not because its a good idea for the story, but because that is a task that the game designer wants the player to have in a subsequent game based on the movie, or that _is_ a task already in a game that the movie is based on.
I just find movies that are associated with a video game more frustrating than anything else.
Silent Hill? I never saw that come thru my local movie theater. I've seen lots of titles in these replies of movies I never saw on the marquee at my local theater. Maybe they came thru during late '07 - early '08, when I was in Iraq? OBTW, I mostly only look at new movies that come thru theaters. Don't rent movies, don't steal 'em off the net either, and mostly can't stand watching anything on commercial TV 'cuz of, well, the commercials. Even on DVR, its generally not worth the annoyance of having to fast foward thru 6 minutes of commercials for every 8 - 9 minutes of story. But hey, I'm ancient at age 63, and enjoy the way things were, once upon a time, I guess.
As a moviegoer that "sees everything that is not too dumb for words" I avoid movies that have anything to do with videogames because, so far, they universally suck. There's nothing remotely believable about the movies, the are all computer video effects and no real story that makes much of any sense. Everything is simply game-play on the screen, and I don't get to have any fun with it.
Coming in a close second is "movies having anything to do with existent toys", which would mean things like the transformer series. Saw a trailer for the upcoming transformers movie last night. Nope, gonna miss that one, too.
Wanna sell me a movie ticket? Tell me a story, preferably with MOVIE STARS in it, not some bozo I've never heard of before that, incidentally, doesn't know squat about acting. Last night's movie for me was Fast Five. At least we have a star or 2, and some fun car chases. Yeah, its terminally stupid, too, but at least fun to look at.
Best movie in the theater at the moment? The Conspirator. Now, THAT tells a story. Water for Elephants, 2nd best, and ditto, tells a story.
Surprisingly, the comic book series have proved very entertaining, although any new movie having anything to do with anything from DC comics is getting a pass as long as the writers think that Superman should somehow be ashamed of being a US citizen, and wishes to renounce that citizenship. They can all go pound sand...
It is the USA itself that is toxic to workers. If anything can be outsourced, it will be, and anything that can be outsourced is a bad career choice. You're better off as "Restauranteur" rather than "Scientist" because people have to eat, and they are here.
The culprit in all this is corporate income taxes. We have the 2nd highest in the world (or by far the highest if the Bush Tax Cuts go away) and a cost of living that drives a demand for high wages too, making manufacturing here a bad idea.
Now, the reason that the furriners can come into the USA and do well is because they don't have the burden of paying for retiree pensions. The Detroit manufacturers have a huge pool of retirees that they have to provide beneifits for. That makes the labor cost Detroit about $78 an hour. Foreign mfgrs labor rates are around $45, while Detroit pays its workers $30 / hr and the foreigners $28.
The taxes? Well, the income tax bite on stuff manufactured here, in the USA, is about 22% of its selling price, and includes everything from the added costs of employing people due to their individual income tax and medicare/SS, to the "matching" medicare/SS and corporate income taxes. If corporate income taxes are recovered, the price of goods manufactured here could fall about 11%. Would that be competititve? Sure. But, as long as people think that taxing corporations is somehow "instead" of taxing them, without realizing that they pay it anyway in higher prices of goods, lower wages to themselves, lower dividend disbursements of the companies which affects their retirement savings, and finally the creation of all those unemployed people when jobs flee the high taxes, then there will still likely be misery and want in the USA.
So how long does it take the big 3 to build a car? About 30 - 33 man-hours. At $78 / hr, that's about $2500 for labor costs. And those taxes? Still 22% of the price, which for a $30,000 car, would be $6,600, which we could lower by about half if the income taxes went away. What sells better, a $25,000 Jeep Liberty, or a $22,250 Jeep Liberty? Yeah, that's right...
All we have to do is kill the income taxes dead... all of them... and we can have prosperity. There are other ways to tax that don't involve making our corporations uncompetitive.
"It worked for Gandhi..."
Ghandhi was willing to risk and lose everything including his life for his cause. We are not willing to risk and lose our country just to avoid kicking their asses, which also works.
"a) What did all those lies about WMDs have to do with 'defence'? How many Taliban terrorist cells were based in Iraq?"
There were no lies, and the defense started in 1991 when the tyrant in question began his quest to corner the middle east market in oil. Had we not acted, he would have invaded Saudi Arabia, etc. and after that, could have had us paying $7 a gallon. The 2003 action was just a continuation of the 1991 action. The fatal flaw was not in 2003, but in 1991 when we didn't finish the job.
BTW, $7 a gallon isn't just an incomvenience, it would wreck us. Just 'cuz the Euros can pay it, and drive around their geographically compact countries that are festooned with alternatives in public transporation doesn't mean we can do it in a country 3000 miles "wide" and about 2000 miles "high" that doesn't have much more than freight rail except for some extremely limited passenger rail that is totally inadequate to service the population in place of even air travel. When the city of Chicago was virtually shut down with snow last winter, I checked the AmTrak train schedules on Sunday and they were sold out thru Friday. We just don't have that sort of service, and won't, because it won't make a buck and would be far too expensive to lay new, non-freight rail to actually make fast trains work. And, people won't ride the slow trains except in dire situations.
Anyway, every major intelligence agency on the planet thought that this kook had WMD, and that he would be at least capable and desrious of having it used in the USA, and would do so if he found the right terrorists delivery methods. Taking him out was unavoidable if we didn't want to live day-to-day under a threat of attack that could kill 100's of thousands, not simply 3K people and a couple buildings.
"b) How often has a war against an ideal ever resulted in victory? Martyrs usually make ideals stronger. Are there more or less Taliban now than in 2001?"
We don't have to be victorious, we just have to remove their capability to attack us.
"Clue: We're not saying you should do nothing. We're saying you're doing it very wrong."
Yes, you are, you are sayng we have to do it without kicking their asses. We absolutely, positively have to kick their asses, or they will simply do it again, and again, over and over until we physically stop them.
I'm sure you want something you consider innocuous, like the Iraqi economic sanctions that killed 100,000 Iraqi children per year it was in effect from basic things like not being able to buy chlorine on the open market, and therefore rendering the Iraqis unable to purify their water so their kids got sick and died, but of course your sort would have kittens if a cluster bomb killed 3 kids while knocking down a couple dozen terrorists. I know where your coming from, and it is not enlightmenment, it is all emotion and gut reaction, and it is wrong.
"Why are we squandering such a resource on fuel? Why are we burning it and wasting it?"
Because... there's exactly 1 way to get a car or truck down a highway right now, that doesn't involve huge up-front expenditure, and that is gasoline. Gasoline is the only way to get a car down a highway and do it all day, day after day, if you want to drive from, say, DC to St. Louis.
You can dream of pie-in-the-sky solutions all day and it won't change a thing until someone with actual scientific understanding and capability INVENTS something that works. The best minds on the planet have so far come up with 1 fairly expensive vehicle, the Chevy Volt, that will do DC to St. Louis and do it while offering alternative energy transportation for MOST of your transportation needs that occur within 40 miles round trip of your home. Its the only car that will do that.
When some geniuses finally build the magic battery that will allow electric cars to drive 300 miles on a charge and "refuel" in a reasonable 5 minutes or less, so you can do that DC to St. Louis run without sitting in a charging station for 4 hours, then we can all convert to a car that uses that battery, and happily burn solar-thermal, photo-voltaic, wind, hydro, coal-fired, nuclear, etc. electricity. But we can't do it now, and we won't be able to do it until the geniuses act, and are successful. It may be be this year, or it may take 30 years.
"We can switch to alternative energy sources without anyone suffering at all."
BS. Got anything sitting in your driveway right now that will burn, say, coal, or natural gas, or something-mined-or-drilled here? Not likely. We can't switch until someone figures out a great solution that is worth buying, will fill not only our needs but our wants, and doesn't cost more than we can afford. This is currently vaporware. Chevy Volt comes close - but falls down on "affordable" and "want." I "want" 0-60 in 5 second range, and price in mid-$20Ks'. That's my current Subaru WRX. I'd buy a Volt or lease it except for some $$$ considerations, and if I obtain a 6-month detail at work that involves some travel to dangerous places with commensurate pay, the $$$ consideration will be solved and I'll buy a Volt, if I don't get blown up or shot doing the detail. Then I'll happily enjoy driving past all the local gas stations while "refueling" at home off the grid, for $1.60 / 100 miles instead of $18 / 100 miles like the WRX consumes.
"$1.3 trillion for a personal vendetta in Iraq/Afghanistan"
G I'm tired of you lefty/commie/pinko/fags whining about this.
Sure, we should have just sat back and done nothing about being attacked, having 2 buildings knocked down, and losing approx 3K citizens and others to a direct attack on our country. Can't think of a better way to encourage another one. Oh, BTW, "doing nothing" == "not kicking someone's ass." The bad guys _have_ to get their asses kicked or they will do it again, and again, and again...
My only hope is that all you whiners are at ground zero for the next attack that you are responsible for if we ever do simply discontinue defending ourselves...
And as a possibly interesting fact, we can get these industries back, employ not only those that go to college but those that learn welding & plumbing and "factory" type jobs as well, by getting rid of the income taxes, all of them. Read here:
"Bill Archer, former head of the House Ways and Means Committee, asked Princeton University Econometrics to survey 500 European and Asian companies regarding the effect on their business decisions if the United States enacted the FairTax. 400 of those companies stated they would build their next plant in the United States, and 100 companies said they would move their corporate headquarters to the United States.[61]"
Yes, that's footnoted 61 in the Fair Tax article in Wikipedia. The Fair Tax proposes to completely kill income taxes and replace them with consumption taxes - retail sales taxes. This would let our industries compete with the world.
Just sayin' - I think people need to realize how badly we're shooting ourselves in the foot while using the income taxes to attack the "evil" rich and the "evil" industries. Income taxes are the 2nd biggest mistake this country has ever made, right behind slavery. Do we need another civil war to get rid of income taxes?
Yes, we could also use the spare time, which will have become 100% of our time, to kill each other, with your sociopaths attacking and the billions of average citizens defending. The sociopaths may be severely outnumbered, I think... or maybe not...