At least Florida isn't currently stupid enough to have an income tax.
Florida taxes tourists. You know, bring money INTO the state instead of running people and businesses OUT of the state with bad tax policy.
A funny thing about taxes. They originally existed to fund the operations of government, in theory the operations that the people actually want. I appreciate how we've all bought into the idea that taxes should be used for social control and to encourage/discourage activities and actions.
These dumb taxes on smoking, types of food, IPOD music, etc. What do they have to do with the funding of government? They are either about petty revenge by appealing to people's baser emotions (I hate smokers...ick!) or envy (Let's tax gourmet coffees, only rich people drink them) or just being mean (Let's tax food that fat people eat, that'll show 'em).
Of course, I don't know why it would be surprising, since most people use government as a weapon against others for the petty emotions, with politicians laughing all the way to the bank with the money YOU supported them into taxing.
New York has been a waste of time, with all do respect, for years. Other than the 9/11 media frenzy, that town was basically on the way our to Detroit anyway.
If your boss is screwing you by making you work long hours you are letting them do so. Take some responsibility for it.
If you don't want to just cowboy up and deal with it to his face, do it the "correct' way. Find out from HR won't the appropriate "working hours" are. Tell your boss you'll be dilligently working the required hours. If there is more work to be done than in the required time, tell him you know a variety of skilled employees that can be hired to make up for their obvious resource issues. Recommend contractors and temp workers. Email his boss and CC him on the email that you know of some more resources that will happily round out the team. Email HR and CC your boss and ask if there are any open positions that can be used to bulk up the team.
The point of this ISN'T to be one of those "talk to HR and sit down and voice your opinions...blah...blah...blah..." The point is to act fully and completely rationally insane. Ignore your boss when he requests you stop emailing people about it. Bring it up in meetings with everyone as well. Not in a whining way, but in the "I want to help our team and increase profits" kind of psychotic way. You know, just like the sperm slurping executives do.
Continue to act like a sociopath in this manner, and the problem will work itself out. Roaches like these bosses tend to scurry away when light is shown on them.
It's not like your boss can actually fire you any longer in any real sized company, and it's doubtful he/she even has the authority to do so if they wanted to.
If that doesn't work, try keeping an issue or two of "Guns & Ammo" on your desk.
When your workers have good pay and benefits, that takes away from profits, and in a plutocracy such as ours the profits always outstrip any consideration for human beings and their needs.
Wow, that's right out of the Mickey Maoist handbook. The plutocracy? Are people still using that term? I'm assuming you'll give examples of where you've given away all your wealth above the poverty line to those who just can't get a break.
At some point you'll learn that, because of the highs and lows in life, you need to build something called a "nest-egg", in order to have a little breathing room from the bumps in the road. In order to do that, you have to spend less than you earn, in essence, having a profit you could put away. I'm sure you don't believe in saving to get through the rough years, so I assume you'll never need to put anything away for a rainy day, as you'll never need profits in order to take care of unexpected issues in life.
You may also learn that a company is not your surrogate parent, who's job it is to care about your every concern in life. They have work they need done, they offer to pay you to do it for them. If you don't have any consideration about the company making money, or your role in achieving that, why the hell should they give a crap about you and your considerations?
If WalMart was unionized, you wouldn't have to pay those taxes that go to food stamps. The poor are REQUIRED to work in the US under TANF (which ended AFDC welfare in 1996), so those food stamps are another government giveaway to the rich, like that 700 billion that went to the banks who still aren't making loans.
The $700 billion isn't for making loans BTW, although politicians are hoping that it will thaw the credit market (apparently back to the levels that they shouldn't have been at before). The credit "freeze" means, "let's not give 100% loans to people who's monetary experience is knowning how much crack costs."
If the poor are required to work, this is the first I've heard about it. I thought they were poor because they weren't working?
Unions are good for everyone except the corporates.
You DO realize that unions are corporations too right? And that unions are created by people because it's a business model that uses "workers" as a sellable commodity don't you? And they can only gain power by blocking out any competition and becoming a monopoly for their product right?
You owe your workers, the generators of your wealth, a living. If your business is sound you owe them a decent living.
You only "owe" them what you've contractually promised them; such as an annual amount of money that's broken up into bi-weekly segments that you pay them with the knowledge that either of you can sever the relationship.
What's a "decent" living? Having a family of four and an Escalade while working at McDonalds? Who determines that? Oh that's right, instead of determining that yourself, giving your power to a union or government to do the thinking for you is the solution. Since you don't mind giving that decision away anyway, you might as well let your employer determine that for you.
Want crime rates down? Raise wages. You'll find that most poor people are far more generous and honest than most rich people (not to say that many rich aren't honest or that all poor folks are).
I've heard drug dealers make "decent" money. I guess our inner cities will be safe any day now. If the poor have more money, do you really think they'll start making good decisions or just blow the money and be right back where they were 6 months later? Take a look at lottery winners someday. I think in the real world you'll find that people that want to get out of their situation in life will actually methodically plan their way out of it rather than bitch about it or just magically stay poor their entire lives.
I see you've had at least 12 years of marxist doctrine shoved at you. Poor people are generous and honest?
This isn't a public health concern, this is a public health solution.
People who take the vaccines probably won't be infected by the various diseases. Those who wish to not take vaccines will be at risk of contracting those diseases.
This isn't like the plague, where if you come into a town you end up destroying everyone. The only people they'll infect are other people like them who have no protection either. The rest of us will be having fun except with less idiots on the roads causing traffic jams.
Personally I encourage those who have conspiracy theories to go with it, and free up valuable parking spaces for the rest of us.
Idiots won't kill themselves for the greater good, but hopefully we can get them to do the job indirectly.
How exactly did someone's death prove there is no afterlife? I can understand not believing in an afterlife, but how did someone you love's dying prove it?/
He postulated his epistemology a priori then pronounced it a posteriori posthumously.
Wouldn't it just be easier to follow the suspect, pull him over, drop a bag of cocaine in his car, then use probable cause to go search his house and copy the hard drive?
I see no reason why we should throw away the excellent techniques used in the past to frame and search suspects with "new-fangled" vapor-ware.
You have to understand that many times there are political agendas behind these studies. I'm not saying that this one is or isn't, but I've noticed trends in these types of studies.
Any union oriented jobs are not going to have this type of study (gender). You don't see this kind of article about auto workers, garbage collectors, education, etc, because they are union oriented "working class" type fields, therefore, these kind of "there-must-be-someone-to-blame" type articles are rarely written about them, even though those types of jobs can bring in six-figures a year.
Technology type fields, being that it makes some degree of higher income but does NOT do it through unionization or have a "working class" smell to it, must be something unfair that discourages "x" to go into it. Even though we have a high number of people working hourly wages or contracts compared to salary positions in the field, we're not "working class" enough.
Of course, this sounds insane and more political-babble-paranoia talk, but it's a common pattern. You don't see articles on not enough of subgroup "x" in movie directing, acting, sports, etc., even though these jobs earn millions, because they all have unions and are politically correct, not from a "we love brutal football" (as sports have that negative stereotype) but from a "they use collective bargaining and strikes so they're ok in our playbook so we won't bust them for hiring practices".
The assumption is that IT, CS, CIS, are mostly dominated by a certain evil sex and color therefore we must be criminals laughing while committing serial killings against certain under represented groups.
Personally, I know more people getting out of the fields than getting into it. Looking back I wouldn't have gone into it and am slowly plotting my way out of it. Maybe in some silicon-valley type firms they treat software engineers with some degree of respect, but for general CS type people, the beurocrats and morons managing general IT departments make it not worth it to stay in. Add that to being treated with less respect than janitorial services and with disgust at the high TCO we are, lowering salaries, using cheap foreign contract labor...
Look at the recent studies about doctors. The number of people going into general medicine is dropping at an alarming rate, and many are leaving the field entirely to pursue other options. The reasons given are the huge amount of paperwork, insurance, government involvement, the field being politically battered about by political parties...why would anyone join now?
Perhaps women, having more than just one career path to choose from when they get a student loan, are seeing the state of the field and are going into hotter fields with less risks and penny-on-the-dollar competition. Maybe they've decided that a whole lot of math, cubicle jobs, incredible job pressures, and minor mistakes that can bring down a whole system isn't as fun as it was in the 80s and 90s when it was overly hyped.
At this point with layoffs, the idea that IT people are geeks or unhip (it wasn't a problem when we were all billionaires), the field being highly complicated and takes a lot of experience to understand, not just book studying, the field being viewed as a service that can easily be offshored I'm surprised anyone is bothering to go into it anymore.
Let me relate an instance of voter fraud from the 2004 election.
The problem with all these new-fangled voting ideas is that voter fraud becomes much easier to do, because like any advanced system it has more points of failure that can be exploited.
In many close elections you see the scene of lawyers and party members from all sides lining up and counting votes, the cameras are looking at the tables, the talking heads on TV are explaining how each vote is counted by three groups of people, how every vote cast is critical, hanging chads, blah blah blah, etc.
This is the misdirection. As any student of basic sleight-of-hand knows, the part that receives the most attention is not the part where the trick is taking place. The point where "anyone" can go count the votes is the part where no fraud is taking place, because it already has taken place.
You can change the outcome of an election by:
Create more votes for yourself.
Get rid of votes for someone else.
Invalidate someone elses votes, making yours worth more.
Creating more votes for yourself is a classic tactic, both legal and illegal. This is usually done with "voter drives" and bussing people to locations, raising registered voters, etc. Illegally this is done by bussing vans of bums or party supporters and paying them to vote at multiple locations, dead people voting, people in jail voting, etc. This is the primary reason some people are opposed to the idea of having voter identification laws passed, because it hampers this ability to create fictional voters.
Destroying other people's votes is difficult, because votes are much more carefully reviewed at this point. Altering the number of votes in the box, or destroying the entire pool of votes is a harder thing to achieve depending on the security measures.
Invalidating other's votes is useful because if their vote disappears or is invalidated, it makes your votes that much stronger. The vote still "exists", but doesn't count for the opponent. A version of this was seen recently where some electronic Obama votes were printing ballots for McCain. Other mechanisms are making it hard to tell which candidates the vote went for.
How this relates to the 2004 voter fraud is how the ballots were being counted in Omaha. The count was being made for overseas/absentee ballots. Those votes were being counted as they were faxed in from some collection point.
Votes, to be counted, have to be validated before they can be counted. A vote is invalid for a variety of reasons one of which is if the person chose more than one candidate for president. A VERY large number of votes were invalid from this pool of faxed in votes.
Now this wasn't a scientific experiment, this is just what was observed. It was noticed that when a ballot appeared to be left leaning for the different things be voted on (all the other usual things one votes for, judges, the legislature, amendments, etc.) both Kerry and Bush were voted for. When the ballot was right leaning, only Bush was voted for.
This was escalated as an interesting grouping of ballot issues to supervisors, however if anything was done I don't know.
To summate, no Bush type voter had any problem filling in their ballot, however Kerry type voters seemed to overwhelmingly vote for both Bush and Kerry, therefore invalidating their ballot.
Now I'm of the opinion that Democrats are politically immature in many of this political beliefs and naive in many things. I do not think, however, that they are incapable of voting nor vote with this level of failure.
Assuming those in charge were correct, that these votes were coming from a legitimate source (rather than a man-in-the-middle fake-fax type thing), I'm of the opinion that as the ballots were being faxed, they were having a mark added to Bush for any ballot that was cast for Kerry, because as they hadn't been counted yet, then the votes hadn't been declared valid/invalid. The number of votes sent was the same as the number of votes received, therefore no voter fraud had taken place, but ballot fraud had taken place.
Perhaps I'm wrong. Perhaps there was just a huge chunk of invalid votes all sent at once.
The fact that government officials are even considering internet voting, e-voting, early voting, or any other changes to voting show how much they want to control people and absolutely remove the concept of a government elected (and deriving it's powers) from the populace via representative government chosen accurately and freely.
We have all sorts of voter fraud, deception, dead people voting, and tampering with a voting system based on paper ballots which could be shoved in a box and counted in front of witnesses, and a solution is to shove MORE of the mechanisms of voting into the shadows? Having the algorithms and technology being used hidden from any eyes and oversight? I'm not talking the "source code" that's shown to people, but what's actually installed on the box. Stuffing 2 paper ballots instead of 1 by a person adds slightly little to the total votes, and to manipulate the vote successfully requires a large number of people, duplicate voters, bussing around people from location to location, etc., which decreases the ability to hide a secret collusion to at least a small degree. To change it so one person can change thousands of votes with a simple UPDATE statement or any other security violation technique required, is a much worse proposition.
This clearly shows to me that both political parties are doing absolutely as much work as possible in order to remove control from the electorate and transfer it to a political class, on the basis that they all support these types of systems and do nothing to secure true votes from the people (with the possibility of it being at the expense of their own power).
I'd like to think that there is a secret altruistic reason for doing this, such as an acknowledgement that when a government falls towards democracy it will inevitably destroy itself and transform into a dictatorship or tiny ruling political class (like an apartheid government). I'd like to think this is a secret attempt to control the voting to a level that would prevent the American republic from falling to a real democracy and mob rule, however this would require me to expect a lot more from the people in government than is possible, including intentions to preserve freedom, altruism, and politicians not spending millions of dollars for a job that pays little and expects bigger quiet "payoffs".
I think the reality is that we've already passed that point, and this is a move straight to a dictatorial style of government, and controlling the vote is, as always, necessary to move to a single party system (to remove any choice by the citizens).
There is no vote-safe electronic/internet voting technology that could be implemented safely and absolutely be correct and not subject to manipulation. Anyone telling you it is possible has an agenda, knows nothing about politics and elections, or is thinking purely in a tiny technology box and not the abuses or security issues of such as system. The only possible way it COULD work would not be electronic voting; it would be electronic creation of the paper ballot for purposes of removing hanging chads, validating that the person didn't vote for two different people for a particular job (which disqualifies a vote currently) , which is printed out and verified by the voter in a human readable form (I voted for "SMITH" for president, yes, that's what I picked), and then submitted to be counted by humans for humans.
No alien civilization is expending the mammoth amount of resources needed to traverse the vast distances of interstellar space just to stick a probe up your ass. Deal with it.
You know nothing of government, alien or domestic.
Of COURSE they'd spend the time and expense for something that stupid. Don't we have a couple gajillion dollar remote control cars running around Mars right now? And all they're doing is acting like tourists taking pictures and collecting pretty rocks. For the price we've shelled out for these things we had better have a probe on there in case we run into an blue-necked aliens.
You see, on a blue green planet they're red-necks, on a red planet they're blue-green....nevermind...
If a civilization is more technologically advanced than ours and coming here, then most likely they've gone through a progression like ours (war, controlling the citizenry,unifying a world government, installing involuntary marxism, etc.) Once they've seized control, then spending $700 billion $pace-credits to prop up the "probe" industry (affected by global cooling of course) is not only likely, but complete guaranteed.
Not only do I welcome our new Martian totalitarian overlords, but on Soviet Mars, the government probes you!
Determining worth is like determining how much a screw driver is worth. It isn't the screw driver; the person who knows when to use it, how to use it, and more importantly, whether or not and WHY you should use it is the important part.
The person who knows how to use linux (or Windows for that matter) is the important part. Do they know the aspects of low level configuration, security, software engineering and optimization? Or are they still pulling the values of text boxes from the internet and concantenating them to the end of a SQL statement?
I think a better measure would be:
What is the average cost to hire/contract linux administrators and developers at an organization? How does this relate to a similar Windows situation in terms of TCO and ROI? Is it a better cost per hour? Bang for the buck?
Liberals are "messy" as they say because they don't feel constrained by boundries, old social taboos based on archaic religions, and feel there exists an ideal future that can be reached for where everyone is equal and free and personkind cna evolve socially out of our tribalism and medieval mentality..
Of course, the way to achieve this enlightenment is to create a totalitarian single-party government that controls all aspects of personkind's lives and is economically fascist. When the freedoms have been attained there will, of course, no longer be need for such a governmental system and those in control of it will naturally give up power.
By the time these kids are ready for their careers IT will be somehow even worse than it is now. You might as well talk them into janitorial services or lawn care. There are other people from other countries more than willing to sell their services for peanuts, while criminal contracting firms explain to a moronic manager how sending complete control over their systems to foreign countries is better than keeping it local.
Tell them you work in IT but you're really saving lives as a nurse or something.
Tell the girls to become nurses so than they can marry rich doctors.
Tell the boys to become nurses because they will get $100,000 signing bonuses and be able to loot the aged baby-boomer bank accounts when the bubble passes through because their kids got bored with their "XTreme Granny" and her snowboarding and never visit anymore. Ideally they should be encouraged to go into old age health, taking care of rich patients who've lost their minds but not their penmanship on their checkbooks.
My family has been distilling for generations, and finding ways to "age" things has been around forever. "Aging" is a nice ancient technique to make up for not having advanced technology at their disposal.
As far as cask aging, which I saw a few posts on, it has nothing to do with evaporating heavier alcohols (where would they go, and, there's is only one alcohol, ethanol).
Many distilleries use white oak casks, which receive a 1200 degree firing of the interior to charcoal the insides before the product is added. This is one of the causes of the "brown" color of those liquors that use this method as well as the "smoke" flavor, and is used to basically create an activated charcoal filter that the product lives in for "years".
When the barrel is fired (and then extinguished with steam blasted in) the char has all these nice little pathways and tiny cracks whose job is to grab all these taste screwing large molecules that give a harsh taste to the product. Just like activated charcoal is used in a water filter for drinking water, the same technique mellows the flavor of the liquor. The "aging" is the act of, as summers and winters went by, the casks would "breath" due to the contraction and expansion of the cask due to temperature variation which would circulate the product in a fashion to get the filtering going with pressure changes. The more that occurs, the more it is filtered, the cleaner the taste.
These molecules that we're trying to get rid of are some of the products of the distillation. When you distill your mash or beer, you have a variety of products separated from the water, the heads (where the majority of your flavors come from), the ethanol, and the tails (fuseoils, which are the disgusting taste). When distilling you carefully test the product coming out and separate it into the various products (if using reflux distillation with plates). The heads are high volatility and the tails are high weight. The tails are smelly and screw up your taste so you have to be careful distilling to get the correct balance of the middle of the distillate, but not losing the flavoring agents of the heads or tails from the heart of the product.
If you distill and filter over and over, you get "pure" ethanol or the basis of vodka. The ethanol purity is only about 95.6% as the distillate reaches azetrope, meaning you can't really separate it from what it's being boiled off of. There are methods to get beyond this such as vaccuum distillation to separate your distillates or post distillation methods (steam blasting through oeatmeal for example or even using gasoline) to use adsorption to remove the last remaining bits of stuff you don't want. Of course, if you leave a bottle of 100% ethanol out, it'll go back to 95.6% as it exchanges water from the air.
Aging has no real meaning these days. The point of aging is to use activated charcoal to remove things you don't want. You don't want the big molecules that cause bad taste, you want it filtered from the product. You do want to keep some though, which are in the "heads" because they have the specific flavors you want to distinguish your liquor. You can't use a perfectly pure vodka base, because then you've gotten rid of all those
Today, as part of your distillation process, after the product has gone through fractional (reflux) distillation through your column, it is common to "force" it through several packs of activated charcoal, in order to quick filter it. This is used to get the purest base ethanol in vodka creation, and why you see different marketing of "triple filtered" or "6 filtered" vodka, claiming how many filter processes it goes through to remove taste impurities.
It's just another in a long line of laws that America has created where seizing private property is the response.
Before you just, you know, paid a fine, went to jail, and recovered property was returned to the owners when some crime was committed. Now the myriad of crimes have punishments that cover:
Any property that "may" have been used in the crime.
Any property that may have been purchased due to the crime unless you can magically prove that THESE dollar bills bought that but THOSE dollar bills didn't.
Any other property, which the government can legally seize, and you have to spend years fighting to get it back.
I doubt this is the America that people envisioned hundreds of years ago, but what really disturbs me is that I don't think this was the kind of America when I was a kid. It is actually really bothering me these days.
The amount of growing government power to just seize anyone and everything for any amount of time with massive legal hassles to get it or you out of seizure is insane. The concept of government punishment is growing far beyond the crime (share 1000 mp3s with your friends for crap music you would never have bought in the first place) to destroying and shattering peoples live forever.
The laws are being created to circumvent the judicial system. It used to be that the police could be ignored in many cases, because arresting someone really means very little, it was the prosecution that mattered. You might spend a bit of time in jail pre-trial, but prosecution was something you could avoid with the right lawyers.
Realizing this, the laws are being set up now, so the punishment isn't just some "jail time", now you have to spend years recovering even your basic possessions for the laws which now are designed to benefit the agencies itself. Whether prosecuted or not, getting your property back is a very very difficult task.
I just don't see it getting better, but getting worse. Mix laws where people and property can be taken without recourse with the wrong executive body governing the application of those laws and there will be some real problems coming.
But hey, at least I know that when I write some music and sign a song I'll have royalty protection for my music label and I'll get my 5 cents on the dollar.
If the US resumes that path, and there's no evidence they will right now, it'll lead to a fundamental change is the perceived "special relationship" between Canada and the US. Americans would be surprised at the change in attitude that would result.
Does this mean I'll finally be able to buy magazines without seeing one price for US Dollars and a separate price for Canadian Pesos or Backlavas or whatever funny colored monopoly bum-wad that's used up there?
Besides, if a chunk of the artic falls off, Cananda can go glue it back on if it's that "critical" to the fragile national pride.
Also, and since my military-industrial-erection is in full political swing, I'd hate to see the missle defense shield around Canada flip around and become an offensive missle blockade ring via the power of the AllSpark.
I use fake information and pay cash for medical care, so this problem doesn't affect me.
I tried to explain this methodology to my friends who all say I'm a paranoid moron, but then I guess they really believe laws protect you before the problem happens, rather than just theoretically "punish" the offender later.
I started several years ago being secretive of my medical procedures and using an alternative to the "health insurance" or "national healthcare" scams being pulled on Americans. It is obvious that, at some point, those who demand someone else pay for their health issues will have enough voting power to force a national healthcare agenda, which will immediately lead to rationing or denial of care, because it simply isn't affordable.
As I have no interest in paying insurance companies for nothing, nor having insurance companies or a government medical bureaucracy denying me care because of something that happened 15 years earlier that lowers my "score" of who should get care or not.
Of course I'm Mr. Paranoid because that would NEVER OCCUR.
I've always hated insurance companies. Basically they take advantage of how scared you are, take your premiums, invest it for big profits, and deny you as much as they can or give you some crap level of care. This, of course, is all based on the idea that if you don't have insurance, you will immediately get killed by a rabid ebola virus with AIDS and Down's syndrome which can only be cured with Lorenzo's Oil which, of course, they don't cover, but your heirs will find that out for themselves.
My method was pretty simple.
I analyzed about what I wanted to spend per year on glasses, dentistry, checkups, etc. I increased this amount by 50% should something above and beyond occur, such as a cavity, broken arm, etc.
I divided that amount by my income increments (paychecks, etc).
Every paycheck increment, I would have that portion directed into Treasury Notes or I Bonds, accessible for free at http://treasurydirect.gov/
If I need medical care, and it costs more than I have on hand (which it rarely does), I simply withdrawl the appropriate amount
When getting medical care, I always pay cash, and I don't use real information. I request a random number for the social security information citing "identity theft" as a reason. The rare time they have a problem with me not giving them tons of identification for health care, I just go somewhere else, as it's not as if I HAVE to go to an IN NETWORK doctor. I've found most doctors not only love that I pay in actual cash, but I get a much higher level of care, at a cheaper cost, than "insured" patients.
If I don't have any bizarre medical care requirements for a given year, which like most people I don't, I keep all the money, not end up losing it all to the insurance company. That gives me that much more building my "insurance" for health care. If I desperately need the money for something else, it's all mine, and has been generating investment interest.
By putting away a little bit of a paycheck each time, I now have thousands of dollars for whatever level of health care I want, and it covers ANYTHING I want. Cat needs a sex change? Here's the money. Need hooker massage therapy in Thailand? Here's your money honey. Me insure you long time.
But you go ahead and put your faith in government, insurance companies, and employer plans that drain your potential paycheck. That's a MUCH better option. Why make medical decisions between yourself and your doctor? A politician pandering to you will make the best medical choice. An insurance company interested in it's own stock price will certainly know which medications you require. Give into your fears that a healthy 20-something needs alzheimers and smoking cessation treatment programs whether you want to pay for it or not through the health plan that they decide you need.
Keep filling our the forms listing every known or suspected medical problem you have, because future employers, politicians, and beurocrats would never use that info against you in any way as part of your "permanent record" and "Health Score".
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At least Florida isn't currently stupid enough to have an income tax.
Florida taxes tourists. You know, bring money INTO the state instead of running people and businesses OUT of the state with bad tax policy.
A funny thing about taxes. They originally existed to fund the operations of government, in theory the operations that the people actually want. I appreciate how we've all bought into the idea that taxes should be used for social control and to encourage/discourage activities and actions.
These dumb taxes on smoking, types of food, IPOD music, etc. What do they have to do with the funding of government? They are either about petty revenge by appealing to people's baser emotions (I hate smokers...ick!) or envy (Let's tax gourmet coffees, only rich people drink them) or just being mean (Let's tax food that fat people eat, that'll show 'em).
Of course, I don't know why it would be surprising, since most people use government as a weapon against others for the petty emotions, with politicians laughing all the way to the bank with the money YOU supported them into taxing.
New York has been a waste of time, with all do respect, for years. Other than the 9/11 media frenzy, that town was basically on the way our to Detroit anyway.
If your boss is screwing you by making you work long hours you are letting them do so. Take some responsibility for it.
If you don't want to just cowboy up and deal with it to his face, do it the "correct' way. Find out from HR won't the appropriate "working hours" are. Tell your boss you'll be dilligently working the required hours. If there is more work to be done than in the required time, tell him you know a variety of skilled employees that can be hired to make up for their obvious resource issues. Recommend contractors and temp workers. Email his boss and CC him on the email that you know of some more resources that will happily round out the team. Email HR and CC your boss and ask if there are any open positions that can be used to bulk up the team.
The point of this ISN'T to be one of those "talk to HR and sit down and voice your opinions...blah...blah...blah..." The point is to act fully and completely rationally insane. Ignore your boss when he requests you stop emailing people about it. Bring it up in meetings with everyone as well. Not in a whining way, but in the "I want to help our team and increase profits" kind of psychotic way. You know, just like the sperm slurping executives do.
Continue to act like a sociopath in this manner, and the problem will work itself out. Roaches like these bosses tend to scurry away when light is shown on them.
It's not like your boss can actually fire you any longer in any real sized company, and it's doubtful he/she even has the authority to do so if they wanted to.
If that doesn't work, try keeping an issue or two of "Guns & Ammo" on your desk.
When your workers have good pay and benefits, that takes away from profits, and in a plutocracy such as ours the profits always outstrip any consideration for human beings and their needs.
Wow, that's right out of the Mickey Maoist handbook. The plutocracy? Are people still using that term? I'm assuming you'll give examples of where you've given away all your wealth above the poverty line to those who just can't get a break.
At some point you'll learn that, because of the highs and lows in life, you need to build something called a "nest-egg", in order to have a little breathing room from the bumps in the road. In order to do that, you have to spend less than you earn, in essence, having a profit you could put away. I'm sure you don't believe in saving to get through the rough years, so I assume you'll never need to put anything away for a rainy day, as you'll never need profits in order to take care of unexpected issues in life.
You may also learn that a company is not your surrogate parent, who's job it is to care about your every concern in life. They have work they need done, they offer to pay you to do it for them. If you don't have any consideration about the company making money, or your role in achieving that, why the hell should they give a crap about you and your considerations?
If WalMart was unionized, you wouldn't have to pay those taxes that go to food stamps. The poor are REQUIRED to work in the US under TANF (which ended AFDC welfare in 1996), so those food stamps are another government giveaway to the rich, like that 700 billion that went to the banks who still aren't making loans.
The $700 billion isn't for making loans BTW, although politicians are hoping that it will thaw the credit market (apparently back to the levels that they shouldn't have been at before). The credit "freeze" means, "let's not give 100% loans to people who's monetary experience is knowning how much crack costs."
If the poor are required to work, this is the first I've heard about it. I thought they were poor because they weren't working?
Unions are good for everyone except the corporates.
You DO realize that unions are corporations too right? And that unions are created by people because it's a business model that uses "workers" as a sellable commodity don't you? And they can only gain power by blocking out any competition and becoming a monopoly for their product right?
You owe your workers, the generators of your wealth, a living. If your business is sound you owe them a decent living.
You only "owe" them what you've contractually promised them; such as an annual amount of money that's broken up into bi-weekly segments that you pay them with the knowledge that either of you can sever the relationship.
What's a "decent" living? Having a family of four and an Escalade while working at McDonalds? Who determines that? Oh that's right, instead of determining that yourself, giving your power to a union or government to do the thinking for you is the solution. Since you don't mind giving that decision away anyway, you might as well let your employer determine that for you.
Want crime rates down? Raise wages. You'll find that most poor people are far more generous and honest than most rich people (not to say that many rich aren't honest or that all poor folks are).
I've heard drug dealers make "decent" money. I guess our inner cities will be safe any day now. If the poor have more money, do you really think they'll start making good decisions or just blow the money and be right back where they were 6 months later? Take a look at lottery winners someday. I think in the real world you'll find that people that want to get out of their situation in life will actually methodically plan their way out of it rather than bitch about it or just magically stay poor their entire lives.
I see you've had at least 12 years of marxist doctrine shoved at you. Poor people are generous and honest?
We're rejoicing over an input device?
No keyboard monument? Or was it overshadowed by the typewriter?
This isn't a public health concern, this is a public health solution.
People who take the vaccines probably won't be infected by the various diseases. Those who wish to not take vaccines will be at risk of contracting those diseases.
This isn't like the plague, where if you come into a town you end up destroying everyone. The only people they'll infect are other people like them who have no protection either. The rest of us will be having fun except with less idiots on the roads causing traffic jams.
Personally I encourage those who have conspiracy theories to go with it, and free up valuable parking spaces for the rest of us.
Idiots won't kill themselves for the greater good, but hopefully we can get them to do the job indirectly.
How exactly did someone's death prove there is no afterlife? I can understand not believing in an afterlife, but how did someone you love's dying prove it?/
He postulated his epistemology a priori then pronounced it a posteriori posthumously.
Probably.
...I see dead people.
Wouldn't it just be easier to follow the suspect, pull him over, drop a bag of cocaine in his car, then use probable cause to go search his house and copy the hard drive?
I see no reason why we should throw away the excellent techniques used in the past to frame and search suspects with "new-fangled" vapor-ware.
That's funny. I tend to keep my highly illegal terrorism-and-kiddie-porn related files on disconnected usb drives.
I'd say don't bother with blocking cell phones, let the inmates have as many as they want.
Just make it a death penalty to be caught in possession of a charger.
You have to understand that many times there are political agendas behind these studies. I'm not saying that this one is or isn't, but I've noticed trends in these types of studies.
Any union oriented jobs are not going to have this type of study (gender). You don't see this kind of article about auto workers, garbage collectors, education, etc, because they are union oriented "working class" type fields, therefore, these kind of "there-must-be-someone-to-blame" type articles are rarely written about them, even though those types of jobs can bring in six-figures a year.
Technology type fields, being that it makes some degree of higher income but does NOT do it through unionization or have a "working class" smell to it, must be something unfair that discourages "x" to go into it. Even though we have a high number of people working hourly wages or contracts compared to salary positions in the field, we're not "working class" enough.
Of course, this sounds insane and more political-babble-paranoia talk, but it's a common pattern. You don't see articles on not enough of subgroup "x" in movie directing, acting, sports, etc., even though these jobs earn millions, because they all have unions and are politically correct, not from a "we love brutal football" (as sports have that negative stereotype) but from a "they use collective bargaining and strikes so they're ok in our playbook so we won't bust them for hiring practices".
The assumption is that IT, CS, CIS, are mostly dominated by a certain evil sex and color therefore we must be criminals laughing while committing serial killings against certain under represented groups.
Personally, I know more people getting out of the fields than getting into it. Looking back I wouldn't have gone into it and am slowly plotting my way out of it. Maybe in some silicon-valley type firms they treat software engineers with some degree of respect, but for general CS type people, the beurocrats and morons managing general IT departments make it not worth it to stay in. Add that to being treated with less respect than janitorial services and with disgust at the high TCO we are, lowering salaries, using cheap foreign contract labor...
Look at the recent studies about doctors. The number of people going into general medicine is dropping at an alarming rate, and many are leaving the field entirely to pursue other options. The reasons given are the huge amount of paperwork, insurance, government involvement, the field being politically battered about by political parties...why would anyone join now?
Perhaps women, having more than just one career path to choose from when they get a student loan, are seeing the state of the field and are going into hotter fields with less risks and penny-on-the-dollar competition. Maybe they've decided that a whole lot of math, cubicle jobs, incredible job pressures, and minor mistakes that can bring down a whole system isn't as fun as it was in the 80s and 90s when it was overly hyped.
At this point with layoffs, the idea that IT people are geeks or unhip (it wasn't a problem when we were all billionaires), the field being highly complicated and takes a lot of experience to understand, not just book studying, the field being viewed as a service that can easily be offshored I'm surprised anyone is bothering to go into it anymore.
MTV became irrelevent when the VJs stopped doing drugs and started running commercials about drugs being bad.
When was that. '84?
Let me relate an instance of voter fraud from the 2004 election.
The problem with all these new-fangled voting ideas is that voter fraud becomes much easier to do, because like any advanced system it has more points of failure that can be exploited.
In many close elections you see the scene of lawyers and party members from all sides lining up and counting votes, the cameras are looking at the tables, the talking heads on TV are explaining how each vote is counted by three groups of people, how every vote cast is critical, hanging chads, blah blah blah, etc.
This is the misdirection. As any student of basic sleight-of-hand knows, the part that receives the most attention is not the part where the trick is taking place. The point where "anyone" can go count the votes is the part where no fraud is taking place, because it already has taken place.
You can change the outcome of an election by:
Creating more votes for yourself is a classic tactic, both legal and illegal. This is usually done with "voter drives" and bussing people to locations, raising registered voters, etc. Illegally this is done by bussing vans of bums or party supporters and paying them to vote at multiple locations, dead people voting, people in jail voting, etc. This is the primary reason some people are opposed to the idea of having voter identification laws passed, because it hampers this ability to create fictional voters.
Destroying other people's votes is difficult, because votes are much more carefully reviewed at this point. Altering the number of votes in the box, or destroying the entire pool of votes is a harder thing to achieve depending on the security measures.
Invalidating other's votes is useful because if their vote disappears or is invalidated, it makes your votes that much stronger. The vote still "exists", but doesn't count for the opponent. A version of this was seen recently where some electronic Obama votes were printing ballots for McCain. Other mechanisms are making it hard to tell which candidates the vote went for.
How this relates to the 2004 voter fraud is how the ballots were being counted in Omaha. The count was being made for overseas/absentee ballots. Those votes were being counted as they were faxed in from some collection point.
Votes, to be counted, have to be validated before they can be counted. A vote is invalid for a variety of reasons one of which is if the person chose more than one candidate for president. A VERY large number of votes were invalid from this pool of faxed in votes.
Now this wasn't a scientific experiment, this is just what was observed. It was noticed that when a ballot appeared to be left leaning for the different things be voted on (all the other usual things one votes for, judges, the legislature, amendments, etc.) both Kerry and Bush were voted for. When the ballot was right leaning, only Bush was voted for.
This was escalated as an interesting grouping of ballot issues to supervisors, however if anything was done I don't know.
To summate, no Bush type voter had any problem filling in their ballot, however Kerry type voters seemed to overwhelmingly vote for both Bush and Kerry, therefore invalidating their ballot.
Now I'm of the opinion that Democrats are politically immature in many of this political beliefs and naive in many things. I do not think, however, that they are incapable of voting nor vote with this level of failure.
Assuming those in charge were correct, that these votes were coming from a legitimate source (rather than a man-in-the-middle fake-fax type thing), I'm of the opinion that as the ballots were being faxed, they were having a mark added to Bush for any ballot that was cast for Kerry, because as they hadn't been counted yet, then the votes hadn't been declared valid/invalid. The number of votes sent was the same as the number of votes received, therefore no voter fraud had taken place, but ballot fraud had taken place.
Perhaps I'm wrong. Perhaps there was just a huge chunk of invalid votes all sent at once.
Mars welcomes their new American overlords.
The fact that government officials are even considering internet voting, e-voting, early voting, or any other changes to voting show how much they want to control people and absolutely remove the concept of a government elected (and deriving it's powers) from the populace via representative government chosen accurately and freely.
We have all sorts of voter fraud, deception, dead people voting, and tampering with a voting system based on paper ballots which could be shoved in a box and counted in front of witnesses, and a solution is to shove MORE of the mechanisms of voting into the shadows? Having the algorithms and technology being used hidden from any eyes and oversight? I'm not talking the "source code" that's shown to people, but what's actually installed on the box. Stuffing 2 paper ballots instead of 1 by a person adds slightly little to the total votes, and to manipulate the vote successfully requires a large number of people, duplicate voters, bussing around people from location to location, etc., which decreases the ability to hide a secret collusion to at least a small degree. To change it so one person can change thousands of votes with a simple UPDATE statement or any other security violation technique required, is a much worse proposition.
This clearly shows to me that both political parties are doing absolutely as much work as possible in order to remove control from the electorate and transfer it to a political class, on the basis that they all support these types of systems and do nothing to secure true votes from the people (with the possibility of it being at the expense of their own power).
I'd like to think that there is a secret altruistic reason for doing this, such as an acknowledgement that when a government falls towards democracy it will inevitably destroy itself and transform into a dictatorship or tiny ruling political class (like an apartheid government). I'd like to think this is a secret attempt to control the voting to a level that would prevent the American republic from falling to a real democracy and mob rule, however this would require me to expect a lot more from the people in government than is possible, including intentions to preserve freedom, altruism, and politicians not spending millions of dollars for a job that pays little and expects bigger quiet "payoffs".
I think the reality is that we've already passed that point, and this is a move straight to a dictatorial style of government, and controlling the vote is, as always, necessary to move to a single party system (to remove any choice by the citizens).
There is no vote-safe electronic/internet voting technology that could be implemented safely and absolutely be correct and not subject to manipulation. Anyone telling you it is possible has an agenda, knows nothing about politics and elections, or is thinking purely in a tiny technology box and not the abuses or security issues of such as system. The only possible way it COULD work would not be electronic voting; it would be electronic creation of the paper ballot for purposes of removing hanging chads, validating that the person didn't vote for two different people for a particular job (which disqualifies a vote currently) , which is printed out and verified by the voter in a human readable form (I voted for "SMITH" for president, yes, that's what I picked), and then submitted to be counted by humans for humans.
No alien civilization is expending the mammoth amount of resources needed to traverse the vast distances of interstellar space just to stick a probe up your ass. Deal with it.
You know nothing of government, alien or domestic.
Of COURSE they'd spend the time and expense for something that stupid. Don't we have a couple gajillion dollar remote control cars running around Mars right now? And all they're doing is acting like tourists taking pictures and collecting pretty rocks. For the price we've shelled out for these things we had better have a probe on there in case we run into an blue-necked aliens.
You see, on a blue green planet they're red-necks, on a red planet they're blue-green....nevermind...
If a civilization is more technologically advanced than ours and coming here, then most likely they've gone through a progression like ours (war, controlling the citizenry,unifying a world government, installing involuntary marxism, etc.) Once they've seized control, then spending $700 billion $pace-credits to prop up the "probe" industry (affected by global cooling of course) is not only likely, but complete guaranteed.
Not only do I welcome our new Martian totalitarian overlords, but on Soviet Mars, the government probes you!
Linux is worth what you pay for it.
Determining worth is like determining how much a screw driver is worth. It isn't the screw driver; the person who knows when to use it, how to use it, and more importantly, whether or not and WHY you should use it is the important part.
The person who knows how to use linux (or Windows for that matter) is the important part. Do they know the aspects of low level configuration, security, software engineering and optimization? Or are they still pulling the values of text boxes from the internet and concantenating them to the end of a SQL statement?
I think a better measure would be:
What is the average cost to hire/contract linux administrators and developers at an organization? How does this relate to a similar Windows situation in terms of TCO and ROI? Is it a better cost per hour? Bang for the buck?
Liberals are "messy" as they say because they don't feel constrained by boundries, old social taboos based on archaic religions, and feel there exists an ideal future that can be reached for where everyone is equal and free and personkind cna evolve socially out of our tribalism and medieval mentality..
Of course, the way to achieve this enlightenment is to create a totalitarian single-party government that controls all aspects of personkind's lives and is economically fascist. When the freedoms have been attained there will, of course, no longer be need for such a governmental system and those in control of it will naturally give up power.
You do know the phrase is "For all intents and purposes" right?
Internships are one way to go, although lying on your resume is a time tested technique.
If they find out you lied, do you really want to work somewhere that actually performs background checks on you?
By the time these kids are ready for their careers IT will be somehow even worse than it is now. You might as well talk them into janitorial services or lawn care. There are other people from other countries more than willing to sell their services for peanuts, while criminal contracting firms explain to a moronic manager how sending complete control over their systems to foreign countries is better than keeping it local.
Tell them you work in IT but you're really saving lives as a nurse or something.
Tell the girls to become nurses so than they can marry rich doctors.
Tell the boys to become nurses because they will get $100,000 signing bonuses and be able to loot the aged baby-boomer bank accounts when the bubble passes through because their kids got bored with their "XTreme Granny" and her snowboarding and never visit anymore. Ideally they should be encouraged to go into old age health, taking care of rich patients who've lost their minds but not their penmanship on their checkbooks.
My family has been distilling for generations, and finding ways to "age" things has been around forever. "Aging" is a nice ancient technique to make up for not having advanced technology at their disposal.
As far as cask aging, which I saw a few posts on, it has nothing to do with evaporating heavier alcohols (where would they go, and, there's is only one alcohol, ethanol).
Many distilleries use white oak casks, which receive a 1200 degree firing of the interior to charcoal the insides before the product is added. This is one of the causes of the "brown" color of those liquors that use this method as well as the "smoke" flavor, and is used to basically create an activated charcoal filter that the product lives in for "years".
When the barrel is fired (and then extinguished with steam blasted in) the char has all these nice little pathways and tiny cracks whose job is to grab all these taste screwing large molecules that give a harsh taste to the product. Just like activated charcoal is used in a water filter for drinking water, the same technique mellows the flavor of the liquor. The "aging" is the act of, as summers and winters went by, the casks would "breath" due to the contraction and expansion of the cask due to temperature variation which would circulate the product in a fashion to get the filtering going with pressure changes. The more that occurs, the more it is filtered, the cleaner the taste.
These molecules that we're trying to get rid of are some of the products of the distillation. When you distill your mash or beer, you have a variety of products separated from the water, the heads (where the majority of your flavors come from), the ethanol, and the tails (fuseoils, which are the disgusting taste). When distilling you carefully test the product coming out and separate it into the various products (if using reflux distillation with plates). The heads are high volatility and the tails are high weight. The tails are smelly and screw up your taste so you have to be careful distilling to get the correct balance of the middle of the distillate, but not losing the flavoring agents of the heads or tails from the heart of the product.
If you distill and filter over and over, you get "pure" ethanol or the basis of vodka. The ethanol purity is only about 95.6% as the distillate reaches azetrope, meaning you can't really separate it from what it's being boiled off of. There are methods to get beyond this such as vaccuum distillation to separate your distillates or post distillation methods (steam blasting through oeatmeal for example or even using gasoline) to use adsorption to remove the last remaining bits of stuff you don't want. Of course, if you leave a bottle of 100% ethanol out, it'll go back to 95.6% as it exchanges water from the air.
Aging has no real meaning these days. The point of aging is to use activated charcoal to remove things you don't want. You don't want the big molecules that cause bad taste, you want it filtered from the product. You do want to keep some though, which are in the "heads" because they have the specific flavors you want to distinguish your liquor. You can't use a perfectly pure vodka base, because then you've gotten rid of all those
Today, as part of your distillation process, after the product has gone through fractional (reflux) distillation through your column, it is common to "force" it through several packs of activated charcoal, in order to quick filter it. This is used to get the purest base ethanol in vodka creation, and why you see different marketing of "triple filtered" or "6 filtered" vodka, claiming how many filter processes it goes through to remove taste impurities.
It's just another in a long line of laws that America has created where seizing private property is the response.
Before you just, you know, paid a fine, went to jail, and recovered property was returned to the owners when some crime was committed. Now the myriad of crimes have punishments that cover:
I doubt this is the America that people envisioned hundreds of years ago, but what really disturbs me is that I don't think this was the kind of America when I was a kid. It is actually really bothering me these days.
The amount of growing government power to just seize anyone and everything for any amount of time with massive legal hassles to get it or you out of seizure is insane. The concept of government punishment is growing far beyond the crime (share 1000 mp3s with your friends for crap music you would never have bought in the first place) to destroying and shattering peoples live forever.
The laws are being created to circumvent the judicial system. It used to be that the police could be ignored in many cases, because arresting someone really means very little, it was the prosecution that mattered. You might spend a bit of time in jail pre-trial, but prosecution was something you could avoid with the right lawyers.
Realizing this, the laws are being set up now, so the punishment isn't just some "jail time", now you have to spend years recovering even your basic possessions for the laws which now are designed to benefit the agencies itself. Whether prosecuted or not, getting your property back is a very very difficult task.
I just don't see it getting better, but getting worse. Mix laws where people and property can be taken without recourse with the wrong executive body governing the application of those laws and there will be some real problems coming.
But hey, at least I know that when I write some music and sign a song I'll have royalty protection for my music label and I'll get my 5 cents on the dollar.
If the US resumes that path, and there's no evidence they will right now, it'll lead to a fundamental change is the perceived "special relationship" between Canada and the US. Americans would be surprised at the change in attitude that would result.
Does this mean I'll finally be able to buy magazines without seeing one price for US Dollars and a separate price for Canadian Pesos or Backlavas or whatever funny colored monopoly bum-wad that's used up there?
Besides, if a chunk of the artic falls off, Cananda can go glue it back on if it's that "critical" to the fragile national pride.
Also, and since my military-industrial-erection is in full political swing, I'd hate to see the missle defense shield around Canada flip around and become an offensive missle blockade ring via the power of the AllSpark.
I use fake information and pay cash for medical care, so this problem doesn't affect me.
I tried to explain this methodology to my friends who all say I'm a paranoid moron, but then I guess they really believe laws protect you before the problem happens, rather than just theoretically "punish" the offender later.
I started several years ago being secretive of my medical procedures and using an alternative to the "health insurance" or "national healthcare" scams being pulled on Americans. It is obvious that, at some point, those who demand someone else pay for their health issues will have enough voting power to force a national healthcare agenda, which will immediately lead to rationing or denial of care, because it simply isn't affordable.
As I have no interest in paying insurance companies for nothing, nor having insurance companies or a government medical bureaucracy denying me care because of something that happened 15 years earlier that lowers my "score" of who should get care or not.
Of course I'm Mr. Paranoid because that would NEVER OCCUR.
I've always hated insurance companies. Basically they take advantage of how scared you are, take your premiums, invest it for big profits, and deny you as much as they can or give you some crap level of care. This, of course, is all based on the idea that if you don't have insurance, you will immediately get killed by a rabid ebola virus with AIDS and Down's syndrome which can only be cured with Lorenzo's Oil which, of course, they don't cover, but your heirs will find that out for themselves.
My method was pretty simple.
I analyzed about what I wanted to spend per year on glasses, dentistry, checkups, etc. I increased this amount by 50% should something above and beyond occur, such as a cavity, broken arm, etc.
I divided that amount by my income increments (paychecks, etc).
Every paycheck increment, I would have that portion directed into Treasury Notes or I Bonds, accessible for free at http://treasurydirect.gov/
If I need medical care, and it costs more than I have on hand (which it rarely does), I simply withdrawl the appropriate amount
When getting medical care, I always pay cash, and I don't use real information. I request a random number for the social security information citing "identity theft" as a reason. The rare time they have a problem with me not giving them tons of identification for health care, I just go somewhere else, as it's not as if I HAVE to go to an IN NETWORK doctor. I've found most doctors not only love that I pay in actual cash, but I get a much higher level of care, at a cheaper cost, than "insured" patients.
If I don't have any bizarre medical care requirements for a given year, which like most people I don't, I keep all the money, not end up losing it all to the insurance company. That gives me that much more building my "insurance" for health care. If I desperately need the money for something else, it's all mine, and has been generating investment interest.
By putting away a little bit of a paycheck each time, I now have thousands of dollars for whatever level of health care I want, and it covers ANYTHING I want. Cat needs a sex change? Here's the money. Need hooker massage therapy in Thailand? Here's your money honey. Me insure you long time.
But you go ahead and put your faith in government, insurance companies, and employer plans that drain your potential paycheck. That's a MUCH better option. Why make medical decisions between yourself and your doctor? A politician pandering to you will make the best medical choice. An insurance company interested in it's own stock price will certainly know which medications you require. Give into your fears that a healthy 20-something needs alzheimers and smoking cessation treatment programs whether you want to pay for it or not through the health plan that they decide you need.
Keep filling our the forms listing every known or suspected medical problem you have, because future employers, politicians, and beurocrats would never use that info against you in any way as part of your "permanent record" and "Health Score".