I think most of the major riots that come to mind in the U.S. have occurred in the projects of major large cities - not quiet suburban enclaves.
Most local services are paid for by property taxes, and those do fall more heavily on the wealthy than the poor, although even the poor are paying them since part of their rent covers those expenses of the property owner. The extortion you speak of, if anything, is at the local level and not the federal level.
But I challenge you to come up with any sane argument that anyone should pay more to the government than anybody else. Everything should be $ for $ equal. Warren Buffet doesn't enjoy any more benefits as a billionaire from the government than I do - probably a lot less. This is true at every level - federal, state, county, and city. Is the local fire department more likely to come to his house to handle a fire than any where else? Are the police in Omaha more likely to have to call on his property? Does the military of the U.S. have to work harder to defend his family than mine? No. Everyone should be billed for government services at the exact same amount.
The biggest problem the country faces is that too many have no cost of government (or worse). At the federal level, they are the majority. We won't change the federal government and start to shrink it as long as it doesn't matter to the majority how much Congress spends. When they start having to pay for their share of government, Congress will stop spending so much. I know that there are federal bills that everybody pays - even if you don't have a tax burden but they are for specific programs that you will - maybe - get something back from some day. This article is about taxes.
And before citing all the companies people like Mr. Buffet own, remember that they each have a large number of employees that receive the same benefit he does from the federal government's activities with them. All business taxes should be abolished anyway as the companies just raise their prices to cover them or go broke.
Should the wealthy contribute to society? Yes. And through history they have. Locally, there are many rich people who have donated money to help the college and town build and expand. The U.S. library system we have was massively aided by donations by one wealthy individual. You could make a really good argument that the Bible suggests everyone contribute to help the needy. But there is no reason it should funnel through a massive federal bureaucracy to accomplish this. If the particular wealthy person doesn't want to - so be it. Wealth redistribution to fit the style of the current poobahs in office (of whatever political persuasion) is just wrong.
I, for one, would be perfectly all right with not being the world's policemen any more. I've felt that way for a long time. That doesn't change the fact that a lot of countries, throughout history, have greatly appreciated the fact that we spend as much on our military forces as we do - even if the people now living there don't. A good number of them wouldn't be countries anymore if we hadn't.
No, pi isn't 3. But it is a lot closer to 3 than to 2 or to 4. I'm willing to give the Bible writers from say 600 to 1000 B.C. measuring an object and giving an inside diameter along with an outside circumference which would have been hard to measure with all the protrusions indicated the benefit of the doubt. They gave an approximate size, which was completely sufficient.
You'd be hard pressed to find in scripture any place it said it did produce a zebra.
Noah probably lived in the area now covered by the Black Sea. The entire world he knew was wiped out when it filled from the Mediterranean. The Black Sea is quite large - if he lived in the middle previously, then for him it was worldwide. There is no requirement that the vessel he built held every animal from the entire earth - solely those in the surrounding area. The time frame roughly matches. God's stated purpose in sending the flood would not have required the destruction of the entire world - only the portion Satan's angels had corrupted.
The other huge flood in the Bible - that which wiped out Lucifer's kingdom and left the world in the state you find described after the first couple of verses in Genesis may well have been the filling of the Mediterranean basin from the Atlantic although there aren't any other records that I know of that would give any more clarity on that subject than the Bible you reject.
I think that the whole - stories taken from other cultures - should instead be considered - events which were of significant enough historical import to be recorded in the histories of many cultures.
Bats? Translation from Hebrew could just as well been "among things which fly".
The census question has received much debate over the couple thousand years since the described events occurred. I won't continue the debate here as it is much better covered in Wikipedia. I have been reading up on Rome over the last few months, and about all I can say for sure is that there wasn't a lot of consistency in Rome itself - regardless of its esteemed mos maiorum - and much less in the provinces.
The rest seems to be too much of a flame bait throw away comment to waste bits on.
Business taxes are an expense item. Assuming they are profitable, they aren't really paying a cent of taxes. They are just collecting money from the end user of their products or services and sending that on to the taxing authority in question and marking up their prices to give them the desired profit margin on sales after all expenses (tax included). In the end, someone somewhere in the world is paying a significantly inflated price for their goods or services due to this overhead and markup. The more steps in the chain, the more the price is inflated. Think airline passenger to the builder of the plane and fuel supplier back to the company producing the rivets or pumping the oil. That's a lot of markup in the system.
We'd be better off eliminating corporate income taxes and credits completely. You can leave the severance taxes, some excise taxes or duties alone since they balance out one time uses of resources by companies, collect revenue for specific purposes like roads or campaigns to try to keep people from smoking, drinking or the like and pay for rehab, and try to balance out trade goods. Other than that, eliminate them and go to a flat tax on every citizen of the U.S. Make it a truly fair share and Congress will drastically cut spending or there will be another Revolution.
We outgrew the number of seats available. First we gave up the sports cars for a van and a SUV because although sports cars have back seats, they are a real pain to deal with using car seats. Then we had to switch off the SUV for a bigger SUV since the van couldn't reliably get us around in deep snow and the first SUV ran out of seats. Then we finally traded the first van off for a bigger van that would hold all 7 of us - plus luggage for a couple of weeks on the road when needed.
The next vehicle we purchase will probably be back in the small and efficient category, but it'll be awhile before we do that I suspect. That will handle commuting better, at least assuming we don't have to transport a cello back and forth to school this year - it's not just the seats that can be issue - it's also the big odd shapes of objects you end up needing to haul. But it still doesn't eliminate the times we all pile in to go someplace so we'll need a vehicle that handles a big family and their friends for several more years to come.
To set h4rr4r's mind at ease, none of our kids have weight issues, and we're in a part of the country where most of the population is more reasonably sized (and drives a disproportionate number of SUVs, pickups, and vans). Station wagons don't have enough ground clearance for winter - sorry to burst your illusions - and even then most won't seat 7 with room for luggage. It's also much nicer to handle groceries for a family of 7 with a van versus a tiny economically friendly car. A gallon of milk a day adds up... and that's just one item. You tend to buy in bulk when you can, and most of those bulk purchases don't fit into a tiny car easily unless you make enough trips to negate it's economic advantages - especially when you might need to take quite a bit of the family along on an errand run to handle all the activities. One of the reasons we don't have weight issues is we rarely eat out and eat at fast food places even less frequently. It's much cheaper to fix meals at home and my wife is a great cook. You don't tend to get as fat if you're eating at home.
Watch out for those buses and delivery trucks. The ones that tend to run through red lights because they know they're going to fast to stop. Even if every other vehicle is a tiny car that it would take 2 of to hold my family that fits fine in my SUV and van, you'd still lose against mass transit vehicles in an accident. Not to mention the 18-wheel or higher semis going 65 mph down the 10-lane beside you.
Um. This is southwestern Montana they're talking about - think Rocky Mountains and not Great Plains. Line of sight is tough and getting physical access and power to repeater sites (on mountains - mostly) in the winter is difficult during large parts of the year.
I relied on a local in-town wireless provider for a while. They lost one of their tower sites when somebody moved and I got switched up to the mountain repeater as it was the only tower my radio could hit. It routinely went down during the winter and took hours to get back up. I eventually moved and was able to hit a different tower, thankfully, but even in towns there are generally enough hills in the Rocky Mountains to make things difficult for wireless.
I agree that satellite may be the only option for lots of rural people. Tall towers aren't that common and there are large portions of most of the less populated states that nobody wants to string anything to from a right of way or ongoing maintenance or certainly profit point of view. The population densities just aren't there - and since the water supply generally isn't either, we'd like to keep it that way.
My comment simply meant that each distribution has successfully gotten to the point of having both 5.6 and 6.0 shipped within weeks of each other (6/21 vs. 7/10). The order they elected to do this was reversed. Centos did 5.6 then 6.0. SL did 6.0 and then 5.6.
CentOS has also announced they will be issuing some updates to advance the 6.0 released code base to 6.1 before an official 6.1 release is rolled out by them.
One thing to consider is that by the dates I read, they made the decision to support their existing 5.x customers by doing 5.6 before 6.0. This decision was based in large part on feedback from the existing "customer base". The Scientific Linux group decided to do 6.0 first and follow that with 5.6. Both have gotten to the same point within a few weeks of each other. Their order was simply opposite. It will be interesting to see when each gets the next 6.1 release.
The interpretation I provided came from notes in a study Bible I have. I don't wish to provide the name as I don't want to be accused of promoting commercial interests. I suspect that searching via Google would provide a reference although I haven't checked. Certainly searching for some of the Hebrew phrases will give you many pages of information about that debate both pro and con. You can study them or read the Bible and form your own judgments. I've never bothered to look for sources of ecclesiastical authority to back up the study notes of that Bible - the extensive commentary on Gen. 1 simply seemed to resonate true to me and were immaterial as far as the overall purpose of the Bible were concerned - leading men back to Christ. If a particular interpretation improves my understanding of the Bible and lines up better with what I see around me, then I accept it until someone clearly shows how it is incorrect and provides a better explanation of the passages involved. I haven't had anyone do that for Gen. 1 yet.
The King of Tyre passage is a dual reference to both a literal king of Tyre and Lucifer. There are portions of the passage which could not apply to any human king. That doesn't mean it is translated improperly - just that it's a passage that has an immediate literal meaning that applied to that specific king, and a second deeper meaning.
As far as studying OT/NT passages in parallel - I guess you either trust the ultimate Author of the book or you don't. If you do, then you can rest assured that barring minor human goofs here and there due to decaying source documents that were used as the originals for modern translations or minor errors that have occurred in particular versions from time to time due to human mistakes, the time frame being covered really is not material and there is nothing to be leery of. If God gave Jeremiah a vision of a destroyed Earth, it could just as easily have been pre-Adam as Noah. Jeremiah doesn't identify his vision as that of Noah. Both times of destruction were certainly before his time. You simply trust that his recording of that vision was true. So if the description doesn't fit Noah's flood, it is incumbent on us to figure out what it is describing.
The whole Bible should have an overall consistency from cover to cover and I believe that as originally given was correct or inerrant. Sometimes, as in Revelation, it may be hard to interpret what might constitute a valid interpretation of that prophecy since it hasn't happened yet, but I suspect that once it has happened you will be able to look back and see how a writer 2,000 years ago might have used those words to describe his vision to us. It is up to each reader to interpret the Bible with whatever resources they can find in the best way they can that makes sense to them. Just don't waste so much time analyzing the corner cases that you miss the important bits that are consistently interpreted across all Christian denominations and groups and are what are really important in His word. This is directed more to other readers who might come across this thread than you.
If you don't trust the ultimate Author, then arguing about what something might mean is pointless.
Short version - First a correction of a misunderstanding of my original post. God did the destroying of the Earth due to Lucifer's rebellion. Lucifer didn't do the trashing himself. Different Hebrew words are used for create in Gen. 1:1 and the remainder of the chapter. This could just be author's preference or perhaps something is meant to be actually different. Isaiah 14 indicates that Lucifer has risen up and attacked God's throne at some point. When that happened, the earth was inhabited and He ruled it. Since that isn't recorded in known human history, it pushes this event back before Adam's history is recorded in the Bible. His ruling the planet also makes man's being given dominion something he wouldn't like, Lucifer's attempts to get it back by making man look bad, and man's fall from grace understandable. When we start reading of man in the Bible, Lucifer and his angels are already fallen from grace which goes against other descriptions in the Bible where at one point he was highly respected and was a music leader in God's kingdom.
Jeremiah 4 is the only other place in the Bible where the Hebrew phase that translates without form and void (tohu va bohu IIRC) in Gen. 1 is used. Jeremiah describes the Earth in a destroyed state - but the description does not match the description of the end results of Noah's flood, confirming Isaiah 14. If you read Jer. 4 in parallel with Gen. 1, it makes much more sense that most of Gen 1. is talking about God restoring the earth to a habitable state as the result of this judgment. 2 Pet. 3 also has a parallel account of this. It again describes a time when the Earth was destroyed, yet the description is clearly that of more total destruction than in Noah's flood. The social order (kosmos) of Noah's time did not perish with that flood. Noah and his family maintained it. It is also entirely possible that the flood of Noah's day refers to the filling of the Black Sea from the Mediterranean . As far as Noah was concerned - had he lived in the middle of it - all of his known world would have been covered with water. It isn't absolutely necessary that the rest of the world got wiped out then as well - it could have been a local judgment due to the wickedness there.
There are many other passages, particularly in Psalms which would point to at least two destructive floods and the Earth being created perfect the first time. The Earth described in Gen. 1 doesn't line up with these descriptions. I realize that this goes against the grain of many traditionally held beliefs of what Gen. 1 says, but it does make the Bible self-consistent where it would not be with the popular interpretation. It also allows science and the Bible to mesh with recorded observations of the age of the Earth. Since I'm not of the opinion that God is a deceiver, that works for me too. In addition, I find it interesting that the fossil record for mankind shows lots of branches which all come to a stop at roughly the same time (geologically speaking) and modern man starts after that point. It provides space for the entire fossil record without having T-Rex's chasing people in modern time without being noted anywhere in the historical record and eliminates a lot of other nonsense.
This interpretation may not be right - study the Word yourself and decide - but it is much more consistent with what we know about the Earth, and it doesn't take anything away from the Bible as far as I can see.
John 1
1 In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.
2 The same was in the beginning with God.
3 All things were made by him; and without him was not any thing made that was made.
Colossians 1
12 Giving thanks unto the Father, which hath made us meet to be partakers of the inheritance of the saints in light:
13 Who hath delivered us from the power of darkness, and hath translated us into the kingdom of his dear Son:
14 In whom we have redemption through his blood, even the forgiveness of sins:
15 Who is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of every creature:
16 For by him were all things created, that are in heaven, and that are in earth, visible and invisible, whether they be thrones, or dominions, or principalities, or powers: all things were created by him, and for him:
17 And he is before all things, and by him all things consist.
The Word, referred to here, is Jesus Christ. All three individuals making up the Trinity had a part in the creation.
All the Bible states for the duration is found in Gen. 1:1. In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. The remainder of the chapter deals with God's restoring the Earth to a second habitable state after the rebellion of Lucifer.
Or load the new product keys into your rpm database yourself, reset your yum repo lists manually to the next release version, and execute the above command.
Usually this requires a small number of package deletions and reinstalls after the upgrade, but some work systems have been upgraded since FC1 without needing to do a new fresh install. In most cases, you can even do them live now and reboot when you're done. Occasionally you need to restart a service before the upgrade is complete, but it usually does pretty well. Be sure to try it on a test box and not a production server though. Just be sure to read the release notes first and handle all the.rpmsave,.rpmnew, and the like configuration file changes where you'd made changes from the defaults.
Still has to be done with each new release every 6 months or so. It will be nice if they ever move to a moving release structure instead that you can just keep updating, but I doubt that will ever happen.
Satan's been working on this for years. The transporters of Star Trek were just the first round. The Wraith beaming technology is the latest. Claiming space aliens did it also helps get one world government off the ground and establish the Antichrist's rule.
The 144,000 are a reference to Jewish people who are marked and protected from God's judgment post rapture. This number has nothing at all to do with how many people are raptured when Christ returns for His church.
How the economy would handle the loss of people is an extremely interesting question. It's likely that the disappearances won't be evenly distributed across the world. We may find some portions are suddenly more dangerous militarily because our own military ranks have thinned. It may also be that a greater portion of farmers and ranchers are taken from food producing countries than other professions, leading to the worldwide food shortages predicted at the start of Revelation. Add in the time to clear roads, train tracks, airports and to a lesser extent ports from the problems due to moving vehicles suddenly becoming driverless and some losses at the last minute to ATC facilities, and the economy will take a hit for sure. As it's already on the ropes, this could be quite serious in parts of the world. Other parts may not notice much of a change at all. The loss of farmers and ranchers will probably be the worst, along with the difficulty of supplying the cities with what food is available. We take our infrastructure (crumbling though it is) for granted. Block significant portions of it so food can't get to cities and there will be rioting. The economy will be the least of the troubles.
Of course, there are those who will make a very good argument that He was actually crucified on a Wednesday, followed by the high holy day of Passover, followed by a normal market day when the women could buy the spices to anoint the body, followed by the normal Friday night to Saturday sabbath, followed by the resurrection at some point after sundown Saturday night, thus fulfilling Christ's own words of being in the ground 3 days and 3 nights. They also make a good argument that it was in 3790 when he was crucified and not 3792 making the whole calculation he made moot.
Then I hope you're not on the freeway during rush hour or on a suddenly pilotless commercial airplane. I might find it difficult to remain calm in such circumstances.
Skimming is always dangerous. The length of the tribulation period is seen in Daniel and will be 3 1/2 years of lesser tribulation and 3 1/2 years of greater tribulation before Christ returns. After the Antichrist's defeat, there's a 1,000 year millennial period while He reigns on earth. That 1,000 year period may not seem much fun and it is clear that the rebellion we see against God doesn't get eradicated even during this time of peaceful reign as God has to put down another uprising at the end of it.
Revelation doesn't say the celestial items are destroyed. It simply says the sun doesn't give as much light. Since the moon appears light due to the sun, if the sun is darker then the moon would also appear darker. If the sun itself isn't changed, it could also be pollution (natural or man made) that increases drastically and simply makes things seem that much dimmer. It is also possible that the object that hits the earth earlier throws up a bunch of dust or causes some other cataclysmic event that increases relative atmospheric pollution to levels that make it seem 1/3 darker and make it impossible to see 1/3 of the other stars. It isn't so much that these other stars are gone as that they can no longer be seen from the ground.
The money corporations pay as taxes comes from part of the cost of the products they sell. If you raise the taxes on corporations, they raise the price for their goods and services to maintain their profit margin and every other company that buys their products at that higher price then raises their cost to ensure they are still making their desired profit margin. It happens from the producers of rivets to the producers of airplanes. It happens from the people who supply equipment to the oil industry to the majors to the distributors and retailers who sell the gas you pump. It is an extremely inefficient method of funding the government.
We'd be better off if the vast majority of corporate taxes, subsidies, and grants were eliminated, along with the volumes of tax code and accountants that try to minimize the taxes paid and let the prices readjust to a lower level. It wouldn't happen immediately, but as companies worked to achieve a competitive advantage over their competition, it would happen.
Tax the rich more? Get serious. There aren't enough of them to fund the federal government for any significant length of time even if you confiscate all their money. I'd be in favor of forcing all compensation for everyone to be in cash rather than in options or other tax favored values both for tax fairness and to make it easier for the rank and file employee to see just how overpaid the CEO was, but balancing the budget isn't going to happen by increasing taxes on the rich.
If you want to balance the budget, start taxing the 50+% of low income people who didn't pay anything but got substantially more government services than the rich did. If you do that, it's possible there will be enough of an uproar to get Congress to finally stop spending money they don't have. Nothing else is likely to change their profligate ways.
Hope you figure out a good way to grow all the food you need in the non-rural areas. Maybe you'll get lucky and find some major coal deposits to generate your electricity nearby as well since you probably don't want any nuclear plants nearby either and solar/wind isn't going to cut it for charging millions of electric cars. If not, you might want to cut us rural folks some slack.
Where I live, it won't shift anyone to electric. There is very limited bus service between cities and virtually none in cities. There is no passenger rail service anywhere. There is no light rail. There are no subways. Taxis are few and far between. The population density doesn't make any of these economical alternatives to the private auto. People are forced to use cars.
The distances between cities are too large for electric vehicles to be safe / possible at the present time - especially in cold weather. Every little hamlet in between the cities is unlikely to get the electrical infrastructure to handle large numbers of vehicles dropping off the interstates to recharge their batteries even if a quick charging mechanism were available.
I've yet to see any electric vehicles that can handle a family and its luggage. Some of the hybrids can, but they're not really what you're talking about. There are other reasons people drive minivans and SUVs than their massive size. Seating and luggage capacity and ground clearance for snow aren't features the builders of the electrics care much about.
Back and forth to work for one person may be a win for electrics, but with our smaller towns we put less miles on cars doing that than most of the people in the big cities do. Our mileage is mostly consumed going between distant cities and electrics just won't make that cut. So regardless of the tax imposed it is unlikely to cause anyone to switch. It'll just irritate us more than usual. It's precisely why this is a matter that should be left up to the states and kept out of the ever growing federal bureaucracy.
People seem to want to get ahead of the curve on this. When electrics get to 30% of the vehicles sold, there will still be time to figure out how to pay for the infrastructure. The best solution would be to add an electrical rate structure anytime a house is outfitted with a circuit for charging cars or as an adder at existing gas stations that have a quick charger. That way the electrical car users make their contribution and the gas / diesel car users make theirs at the pump.
There's been far too much trying to influence people's behavior with legislation as it is.
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I think most of the major riots that come to mind in the U.S. have occurred in the projects of major large cities - not quiet suburban enclaves.
Most local services are paid for by property taxes, and those do fall more heavily on the wealthy than the poor, although even the poor are paying them since part of their rent covers those expenses of the property owner. The extortion you speak of, if anything, is at the local level and not the federal level.
Of course they have to contribute.
But I challenge you to come up with any sane argument that anyone should pay more to the government than anybody else. Everything should be $ for $ equal. Warren Buffet doesn't enjoy any more benefits as a billionaire from the government than I do - probably a lot less. This is true at every level - federal, state, county, and city. Is the local fire department more likely to come to his house to handle a fire than any where else? Are the police in Omaha more likely to have to call on his property? Does the military of the U.S. have to work harder to defend his family than mine? No. Everyone should be billed for government services at the exact same amount.
The biggest problem the country faces is that too many have no cost of government (or worse). At the federal level, they are the majority. We won't change the federal government and start to shrink it as long as it doesn't matter to the majority how much Congress spends. When they start having to pay for their share of government, Congress will stop spending so much. I know that there are federal bills that everybody pays - even if you don't have a tax burden but they are for specific programs that you will - maybe - get something back from some day. This article is about taxes.
And before citing all the companies people like Mr. Buffet own, remember that they each have a large number of employees that receive the same benefit he does from the federal government's activities with them. All business taxes should be abolished anyway as the companies just raise their prices to cover them or go broke.
Should the wealthy contribute to society? Yes. And through history they have. Locally, there are many rich people who have donated money to help the college and town build and expand. The U.S. library system we have was massively aided by donations by one wealthy individual. You could make a really good argument that the Bible suggests everyone contribute to help the needy. But there is no reason it should funnel through a massive federal bureaucracy to accomplish this. If the particular wealthy person doesn't want to - so be it. Wealth redistribution to fit the style of the current poobahs in office (of whatever political persuasion) is just wrong.
I, for one, would be perfectly all right with not being the world's policemen any more. I've felt that way for a long time. That doesn't change the fact that a lot of countries, throughout history, have greatly appreciated the fact that we spend as much on our military forces as we do - even if the people now living there don't. A good number of them wouldn't be countries anymore if we hadn't.
Not at all. It just means we've checked that off the list. Now comes Rev. 6:1-8.
No, pi isn't 3. But it is a lot closer to 3 than to 2 or to 4. I'm willing to give the Bible writers from say 600 to 1000 B.C. measuring an object and giving an inside diameter along with an outside circumference which would have been hard to measure with all the protrusions indicated the benefit of the doubt. They gave an approximate size, which was completely sufficient.
You'd be hard pressed to find in scripture any place it said it did produce a zebra.
Noah probably lived in the area now covered by the Black Sea. The entire world he knew was wiped out when it filled from the Mediterranean. The Black Sea is quite large - if he lived in the middle previously, then for him it was worldwide. There is no requirement that the vessel he built held every animal from the entire earth - solely those in the surrounding area. The time frame roughly matches. God's stated purpose in sending the flood would not have required the destruction of the entire world - only the portion Satan's angels had corrupted.
The other huge flood in the Bible - that which wiped out Lucifer's kingdom and left the world in the state you find described after the first couple of verses in Genesis may well have been the filling of the Mediterranean basin from the Atlantic although there aren't any other records that I know of that would give any more clarity on that subject than the Bible you reject.
I think that the whole - stories taken from other cultures - should instead be considered - events which were of significant enough historical import to be recorded in the histories of many cultures.
Bats? Translation from Hebrew could just as well been "among things which fly".
The census question has received much debate over the couple thousand years since the described events occurred. I won't continue the debate here as it is much better covered in Wikipedia. I have been reading up on Rome over the last few months, and about all I can say for sure is that there wasn't a lot of consistency in Rome itself - regardless of its esteemed mos maiorum - and much less in the provinces.
The rest seems to be too much of a flame bait throw away comment to waste bits on.
The classic rejoinder is 2 + 2 does equal 5 for sufficiently large values of 2. 2.4+2.4=4.8 -> 2 + 2 = 5 when expressed with one significant digit.
Business taxes are an expense item. Assuming they are profitable, they aren't really paying a cent of taxes. They are just collecting money from the end user of their products or services and sending that on to the taxing authority in question and marking up their prices to give them the desired profit margin on sales after all expenses (tax included). In the end, someone somewhere in the world is paying a significantly inflated price for their goods or services due to this overhead and markup. The more steps in the chain, the more the price is inflated. Think airline passenger to the builder of the plane and fuel supplier back to the company producing the rivets or pumping the oil. That's a lot of markup in the system.
We'd be better off eliminating corporate income taxes and credits completely. You can leave the severance taxes, some excise taxes or duties alone since they balance out one time uses of resources by companies, collect revenue for specific purposes like roads or campaigns to try to keep people from smoking, drinking or the like and pay for rehab, and try to balance out trade goods. Other than that, eliminate them and go to a flat tax on every citizen of the U.S. Make it a truly fair share and Congress will drastically cut spending or there will be another Revolution.
We outgrew the number of seats available. First we gave up the sports cars for a van and a SUV because although sports cars have back seats, they are a real pain to deal with using car seats. Then we had to switch off the SUV for a bigger SUV since the van couldn't reliably get us around in deep snow and the first SUV ran out of seats. Then we finally traded the first van off for a bigger van that would hold all 7 of us - plus luggage for a couple of weeks on the road when needed.
The next vehicle we purchase will probably be back in the small and efficient category, but it'll be awhile before we do that I suspect. That will handle commuting better, at least assuming we don't have to transport a cello back and forth to school this year - it's not just the seats that can be issue - it's also the big odd shapes of objects you end up needing to haul. But it still doesn't eliminate the times we all pile in to go someplace so we'll need a vehicle that handles a big family and their friends for several more years to come.
To set h4rr4r's mind at ease, none of our kids have weight issues, and we're in a part of the country where most of the population is more reasonably sized (and drives a disproportionate number of SUVs, pickups, and vans). Station wagons don't have enough ground clearance for winter - sorry to burst your illusions - and even then most won't seat 7 with room for luggage. It's also much nicer to handle groceries for a family of 7 with a van versus a tiny economically friendly car. A gallon of milk a day adds up... and that's just one item. You tend to buy in bulk when you can, and most of those bulk purchases don't fit into a tiny car easily unless you make enough trips to negate it's economic advantages - especially when you might need to take quite a bit of the family along on an errand run to handle all the activities. One of the reasons we don't have weight issues is we rarely eat out and eat at fast food places even less frequently. It's much cheaper to fix meals at home and my wife is a great cook. You don't tend to get as fat if you're eating at home.
Watch out for those buses and delivery trucks. The ones that tend to run through red lights because they know they're going to fast to stop. Even if every other vehicle is a tiny car that it would take 2 of to hold my family that fits fine in my SUV and van, you'd still lose against mass transit vehicles in an accident. Not to mention the 18-wheel or higher semis going 65 mph down the 10-lane beside you.
Um. This is southwestern Montana they're talking about - think Rocky Mountains and not Great Plains. Line of sight is tough and getting physical access and power to repeater sites (on mountains - mostly) in the winter is difficult during large parts of the year.
I relied on a local in-town wireless provider for a while. They lost one of their tower sites when somebody moved and I got switched up to the mountain repeater as it was the only tower my radio could hit. It routinely went down during the winter and took hours to get back up. I eventually moved and was able to hit a different tower, thankfully, but even in towns there are generally enough hills in the Rocky Mountains to make things difficult for wireless.
I agree that satellite may be the only option for lots of rural people. Tall towers aren't that common and there are large portions of most of the less populated states that nobody wants to string anything to from a right of way or ongoing maintenance or certainly profit point of view. The population densities just aren't there - and since the water supply generally isn't either, we'd like to keep it that way.
My comment simply meant that each distribution has successfully gotten to the point of having both 5.6 and 6.0 shipped within weeks of each other (6/21 vs. 7/10). The order they elected to do this was reversed. Centos did 5.6 then 6.0. SL did 6.0 and then 5.6.
CentOS has also announced they will be issuing some updates to advance the 6.0 released code base to 6.1 before an official 6.1 release is rolled out by them.
One thing to consider is that by the dates I read, they made the decision to support their existing 5.x customers by doing 5.6 before 6.0. This decision was based in large part on feedback from the existing "customer base". The Scientific Linux group decided to do 6.0 first and follow that with 5.6. Both have gotten to the same point within a few weeks of each other. Their order was simply opposite. It will be interesting to see when each gets the next 6.1 release.
The interpretation I provided came from notes in a study Bible I have. I don't wish to provide the name as I don't want to be accused of promoting commercial interests. I suspect that searching via Google would provide a reference although I haven't checked. Certainly searching for some of the Hebrew phrases will give you many pages of information about that debate both pro and con. You can study them or read the Bible and form your own judgments. I've never bothered to look for sources of ecclesiastical authority to back up the study notes of that Bible - the extensive commentary on Gen. 1 simply seemed to resonate true to me and were immaterial as far as the overall purpose of the Bible were concerned - leading men back to Christ. If a particular interpretation improves my understanding of the Bible and lines up better with what I see around me, then I accept it until someone clearly shows how it is incorrect and provides a better explanation of the passages involved. I haven't had anyone do that for Gen. 1 yet.
The King of Tyre passage is a dual reference to both a literal king of Tyre and Lucifer. There are portions of the passage which could not apply to any human king. That doesn't mean it is translated improperly - just that it's a passage that has an immediate literal meaning that applied to that specific king, and a second deeper meaning.
As far as studying OT/NT passages in parallel - I guess you either trust the ultimate Author of the book or you don't. If you do, then you can rest assured that barring minor human goofs here and there due to decaying source documents that were used as the originals for modern translations or minor errors that have occurred in particular versions from time to time due to human mistakes, the time frame being covered really is not material and there is nothing to be leery of. If God gave Jeremiah a vision of a destroyed Earth, it could just as easily have been pre-Adam as Noah. Jeremiah doesn't identify his vision as that of Noah. Both times of destruction were certainly before his time. You simply trust that his recording of that vision was true. So if the description doesn't fit Noah's flood, it is incumbent on us to figure out what it is describing.
The whole Bible should have an overall consistency from cover to cover and I believe that as originally given was correct or inerrant. Sometimes, as in Revelation, it may be hard to interpret what might constitute a valid interpretation of that prophecy since it hasn't happened yet, but I suspect that once it has happened you will be able to look back and see how a writer 2,000 years ago might have used those words to describe his vision to us. It is up to each reader to interpret the Bible with whatever resources they can find in the best way they can that makes sense to them. Just don't waste so much time analyzing the corner cases that you miss the important bits that are consistently interpreted across all Christian denominations and groups and are what are really important in His word. This is directed more to other readers who might come across this thread than you.
If you don't trust the ultimate Author, then arguing about what something might mean is pointless.
Short version - First a correction of a misunderstanding of my original post. God did the destroying of the Earth due to Lucifer's rebellion. Lucifer didn't do the trashing himself. Different Hebrew words are used for create in Gen. 1:1 and the remainder of the chapter. This could just be author's preference or perhaps something is meant to be actually different. Isaiah 14 indicates that Lucifer has risen up and attacked God's throne at some point. When that happened, the earth was inhabited and He ruled it. Since that isn't recorded in known human history, it pushes this event back before Adam's history is recorded in the Bible. His ruling the planet also makes man's being given dominion something he wouldn't like, Lucifer's attempts to get it back by making man look bad, and man's fall from grace understandable. When we start reading of man in the Bible, Lucifer and his angels are already fallen from grace which goes against other descriptions in the Bible where at one point he was highly respected and was a music leader in God's kingdom.
Jeremiah 4 is the only other place in the Bible where the Hebrew phase that translates without form and void (tohu va bohu IIRC) in Gen. 1 is used. Jeremiah describes the Earth in a destroyed state - but the description does not match the description of the end results of Noah's flood, confirming Isaiah 14. If you read Jer. 4 in parallel with Gen. 1, it makes much more sense that most of Gen 1. is talking about God restoring the earth to a habitable state as the result of this judgment. 2 Pet. 3 also has a parallel account of this. It again describes a time when the Earth was destroyed, yet the description is clearly that of more total destruction than in Noah's flood. The social order (kosmos) of Noah's time did not perish with that flood. Noah and his family maintained it. It is also entirely possible that the flood of Noah's day refers to the filling of the Black Sea from the Mediterranean . As far as Noah was concerned - had he lived in the middle of it - all of his known world would have been covered with water. It isn't absolutely necessary that the rest of the world got wiped out then as well - it could have been a local judgment due to the wickedness there.
There are many other passages, particularly in Psalms which would point to at least two destructive floods and the Earth being created perfect the first time. The Earth described in Gen. 1 doesn't line up with these descriptions. I realize that this goes against the grain of many traditionally held beliefs of what Gen. 1 says, but it does make the Bible self-consistent where it would not be with the popular interpretation. It also allows science and the Bible to mesh with recorded observations of the age of the Earth. Since I'm not of the opinion that God is a deceiver, that works for me too. In addition, I find it interesting that the fossil record for mankind shows lots of branches which all come to a stop at roughly the same time (geologically speaking) and modern man starts after that point. It provides space for the entire fossil record without having T-Rex's chasing people in modern time without being noted anywhere in the historical record and eliminates a lot of other nonsense.
This interpretation may not be right - study the Word yourself and decide - but it is much more consistent with what we know about the Earth, and it doesn't take anything away from the Bible as far as I can see.
The Word, referred to here, is Jesus Christ. All three individuals making up the Trinity had a part in the creation.
All the Bible states for the duration is found in Gen. 1:1. In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. The remainder of the chapter deals with God's restoring the Earth to a second habitable state after the rebellion of Lucifer.
From the comments on the Fedora Forum, I'd guess hate. I use KDE, so I really don't Kare what Gnome does.
Install the pre-release package and then do
yum upgrade
Or load the new product keys into your rpm database yourself, reset your yum repo lists manually to the next release version, and execute the above command.
Usually this requires a small number of package deletions and reinstalls after the upgrade, but some work systems have been upgraded since FC1 without needing to do a new fresh install. In most cases, you can even do them live now and reboot when you're done. Occasionally you need to restart a service before the upgrade is complete, but it usually does pretty well. Be sure to try it on a test box and not a production server though. Just be sure to read the release notes first and handle all the .rpmsave, .rpmnew, and the like configuration file changes where you'd made changes from the defaults.
Still has to be done with each new release every 6 months or so. It will be nice if they ever move to a moving release structure instead that you can just keep updating, but I doubt that will ever happen.
Satan's been working on this for years. The transporters of Star Trek were just the first round. The Wraith beaming technology is the latest. Claiming space aliens did it also helps get one world government off the ground and establish the Antichrist's rule.
The 144,000 are a reference to Jewish people who are marked and protected from God's judgment post rapture. This number has nothing at all to do with how many people are raptured when Christ returns for His church.
How the economy would handle the loss of people is an extremely interesting question. It's likely that the disappearances won't be evenly distributed across the world. We may find some portions are suddenly more dangerous militarily because our own military ranks have thinned. It may also be that a greater portion of farmers and ranchers are taken from food producing countries than other professions, leading to the worldwide food shortages predicted at the start of Revelation. Add in the time to clear roads, train tracks, airports and to a lesser extent ports from the problems due to moving vehicles suddenly becoming driverless and some losses at the last minute to ATC facilities, and the economy will take a hit for sure. As it's already on the ropes, this could be quite serious in parts of the world. Other parts may not notice much of a change at all. The loss of farmers and ranchers will probably be the worst, along with the difficulty of supplying the cities with what food is available. We take our infrastructure (crumbling though it is) for granted. Block significant portions of it so food can't get to cities and there will be rioting. The economy will be the least of the troubles.
Of course, there are those who will make a very good argument that He was actually crucified on a Wednesday, followed by the high holy day of Passover, followed by a normal market day when the women could buy the spices to anoint the body, followed by the normal Friday night to Saturday sabbath, followed by the resurrection at some point after sundown Saturday night, thus fulfilling Christ's own words of being in the ground 3 days and 3 nights. They also make a good argument that it was in 3790 when he was crucified and not 3792 making the whole calculation he made moot.
Then I hope you're not on the freeway during rush hour or on a suddenly pilotless commercial airplane. I might find it difficult to remain calm in such circumstances.
Skimming is always dangerous. The length of the tribulation period is seen in Daniel and will be 3 1/2 years of lesser tribulation and 3 1/2 years of greater tribulation before Christ returns. After the Antichrist's defeat, there's a 1,000 year millennial period while He reigns on earth. That 1,000 year period may not seem much fun and it is clear that the rebellion we see against God doesn't get eradicated even during this time of peaceful reign as God has to put down another uprising at the end of it.
Revelation doesn't say the celestial items are destroyed. It simply says the sun doesn't give as much light. Since the moon appears light due to the sun, if the sun is darker then the moon would also appear darker. If the sun itself isn't changed, it could also be pollution (natural or man made) that increases drastically and simply makes things seem that much dimmer. It is also possible that the object that hits the earth earlier throws up a bunch of dust or causes some other cataclysmic event that increases relative atmospheric pollution to levels that make it seem 1/3 darker and make it impossible to see 1/3 of the other stars. It isn't so much that these other stars are gone as that they can no longer be seen from the ground.
The money corporations pay as taxes comes from part of the cost of the products they sell. If you raise the taxes on corporations, they raise the price for their goods and services to maintain their profit margin and every other company that buys their products at that higher price then raises their cost to ensure they are still making their desired profit margin. It happens from the producers of rivets to the producers of airplanes. It happens from the people who supply equipment to the oil industry to the majors to the distributors and retailers who sell the gas you pump. It is an extremely inefficient method of funding the government.
We'd be better off if the vast majority of corporate taxes, subsidies, and grants were eliminated, along with the volumes of tax code and accountants that try to minimize the taxes paid and let the prices readjust to a lower level. It wouldn't happen immediately, but as companies worked to achieve a competitive advantage over their competition, it would happen.
Tax the rich more? Get serious. There aren't enough of them to fund the federal government for any significant length of time even if you confiscate all their money. I'd be in favor of forcing all compensation for everyone to be in cash rather than in options or other tax favored values both for tax fairness and to make it easier for the rank and file employee to see just how overpaid the CEO was, but balancing the budget isn't going to happen by increasing taxes on the rich.
If you want to balance the budget, start taxing the 50+% of low income people who didn't pay anything but got substantially more government services than the rich did. If you do that, it's possible there will be enough of an uproar to get Congress to finally stop spending money they don't have. Nothing else is likely to change their profligate ways.
Hope you figure out a good way to grow all the food you need in the non-rural areas. Maybe you'll get lucky and find some major coal deposits to generate your electricity nearby as well since you probably don't want any nuclear plants nearby either and solar/wind isn't going to cut it for charging millions of electric cars. If not, you might want to cut us rural folks some slack.
Where I live, it won't shift anyone to electric. There is very limited bus service between cities and virtually none in cities. There is no passenger rail service anywhere. There is no light rail. There are no subways. Taxis are few and far between. The population density doesn't make any of these economical alternatives to the private auto. People are forced to use cars.
The distances between cities are too large for electric vehicles to be safe / possible at the present time - especially in cold weather. Every little hamlet in between the cities is unlikely to get the electrical infrastructure to handle large numbers of vehicles dropping off the interstates to recharge their batteries even if a quick charging mechanism were available.
I've yet to see any electric vehicles that can handle a family and its luggage. Some of the hybrids can, but they're not really what you're talking about. There are other reasons people drive minivans and SUVs than their massive size. Seating and luggage capacity and ground clearance for snow aren't features the builders of the electrics care much about.
Back and forth to work for one person may be a win for electrics, but with our smaller towns we put less miles on cars doing that than most of the people in the big cities do. Our mileage is mostly consumed going between distant cities and electrics just won't make that cut. So regardless of the tax imposed it is unlikely to cause anyone to switch. It'll just irritate us more than usual. It's precisely why this is a matter that should be left up to the states and kept out of the ever growing federal bureaucracy.
People seem to want to get ahead of the curve on this. When electrics get to 30% of the vehicles sold, there will still be time to figure out how to pay for the infrastructure. The best solution would be to add an electrical rate structure anytime a house is outfitted with a circuit for charging cars or as an adder at existing gas stations that have a quick charger. That way the electrical car users make their contribution and the gas / diesel car users make theirs at the pump.
There's been far too much trying to influence people's behavior with legislation as it is.