Just pointing out to anyone taking the above poster seriously that he's quoting a nazi site. Friatider.se.
Well yeah. It's really hard to sling shit at Sweden and make it stick. Don't know where they found the magic lamp, but the genie hasn't quit working there yet.
For example if the inflation goes to 600%, wouldn't your loan immediately become 600% of the total amount you borrowed in the past?
Most loans do not. "Normal" mortgages, student loans, car loans, and business loans are fixed rate loans. Only credit cards normally have floating interest rates, and they're usually pegged to the prime rate, which may or may not react to inflation. (Depends on what the Fed does. For the last generation or so, the prime rate has been all about inflation, but it goes down when inflation is higher, not up.) Loan amounts never float at all. (With the exception of the loan you got from Guido, which has illegal terms.)
If the interest rate is fixed, the holder of the loan can do nothing to adjust the terms of the loan for inflation. In inflationary times, fixed rate loans are the friend of the buyer. As long as your salary is keeping pace with inflation, you have more money available with which to make payments on your loans, while your loan amount and loan interest rate have not changed. In deflationary times, fixed rate loans are the friend of the seller. Because the cost of living is declining, in currency terms, employers feel justified in reducing wages, but again, neither your loan amount nor your loan interest rate are changing to match the change in your salary, so you have less currency available to make loan payments.
That's the theory, anyway. In practice, we're living in inflationary times, but American salaries have not kept pace with inflation for many years. Your cost of living has been going up, while the dollars you have available to pay for it have not kept pace. But your neither your loan amounts nor your loan rates have changed, so you're not as bad off as you could be.
Get your DMCA-padded mits off my physical property and stop lobbying for restrictions on my computerized devices.
Seriously. My coworker told me all about what you have to do these days to get original source digital audio to play properly from so-called "legitimate" sources. I've never owned a TV or a BlueRay player, so I've never had to deal with all the HDCP bullshit. I was appalled. Why does ANYBODY put up with that shit?
Take away easy and cheap energy and civilization as we know it would collapse. Take away easy access to water and arable land and civilization as we know it would collapse. Both of these are quite likely to happen to some degree over the next century or so.
Both of these things are likely to happen? Where, exactly, is all the land going to go? Where exactly is all the water going to go? I live next to the Mississippi River. I and 2 million of my closest friends couldn't use all the water that flows past my house even if we tried, and the river's bottom lands remain spectacularly fertile. We would have to go nuts with 1960s-style pollution before the potability of that water or the fertility of that land could be degraded, and even Republicans aren't that stupid.
Cheap energy is a little more complicated, but even if we do literally nothing to change anything about our habits, there's enough coal available to power our current consumption for at least 4 centuries. Approximately 480 years, actually. We have that long to figure something else out. Do you really think we can't?
Energy is effectively infinite, but not at a rate that's going to effectively substitute for the 160 exajoules per year currently provided by hydrocarbon energy. While I'm a big fan or renewables, even with a full-on effort at conversion, you're just not going to be able to sustain an interdependent, international supply chain based on *cheap* energy, nor will you feed 7 billion+ humans.
Fortunately we don't have to. When was the last time you bought gasoline for 17 cents a gallon? Probably never in your lifetime. Ok, so the nominal price that was prevalent for nearly 60 years is misleading. When was the last time you bought gasoline for $1.50 a gallon, inflation-adjusted? Some time in 2000. The inflation-adjusted price is double that now, and never in history has it been cheaper, before or since.
People talk a lot about Peak Oil. That was probably it. The price is going up again, so we're already past operating our interdependent, international supply chain on cheapest energy. You could reasonably argue that we're still operating it on cheap energy, but even after doubling the price, we're still running civilization. To judge by most of the rest of the world, we can double it again and we'll still have something that looks very much like our current civilization. Are you going to argue that energy that costs four times as much as it used to cost is still "cheap"? How about 8 times? 16 times? We're going to find out, probably in our lifetimes.
A big fan of renewables you may be, but you haven't really grasped the numbers yet. 160 exajoules annually sounds like a lot, until you see exactly how much power the Sun delivers annually. 3,850,000 exajoules. Year in and year out, that's how much energy we get from the Sun. Or in other words, enough energy to run our civilization for a year is delivered every hour. Hour after hour after hour. The delivery rate is vastly in excess of what we need. We only have to figure out how to capture a tiny fraction of the total available energy every hour to not only sustain our current interdependent, international supply chain, but continue to expand it as well.
The coming population bottleneck can't be avoided. We will, as a species, one day exist on sustainable energy - all of the remaining 300 to 500 million of us, if we're lucky, and we don't throw too many nukes around to celebrate the transition.
Sure it can, and I just showed you how. No one knows what the peak human population will be, but I'm betting it's considerably higher than 500 million. Given the sheer availability of solar energy, I'm betting peak human population on Earth will be considerably higher than 7 billion, and there will be no major population bottleneck induced by economic disruption. The price of hydrocarbon energy will trend upwards, while the price of solar energy trends downward, and the two curves will intersect, then reverse positions. Solar, in its various forms, will pick up where the hydrocarbons left off. There have never been more engineers on Earth than here are right now. Do you really think we're sitting around doing nothing?
Nothing short of a major comet impact is going to induce that population bottleneck, and with just a little more time the engineers of the world will be able to prevent that too.
Most economists would say that Western capitalism requires a growth rate of about 3% per year to keep everyone happy (low unemployment, funding, etc).
Most economists are also idiots chanting a religious mantra. Malthus never ever goes out of style.
Infinite economic growth is unnecessary if the population ceases to expand, and if not for immigration, it would have already done so in the US and western Europe. It already has stopped in Japan. Developed world living conditions ultimately reduce population growth rates. Empirical evidence shows they reduce the rate so far it turns negative. There is speculation as to possible reasons why, but whether or not we understand the reasons, it's happening. I think this nicely sums up why you're jumping at shadows.
We'll have resources forever.!Jesus and Santa Clause and the EIA said so! There's infinite oil and gas! We find more every year RIGHT HERE IN THE USA, don't we?! And we have infinite water! Infinite phosphates! Infinite free money! Golly gosh-a-rootie, the whole ding dang show will just go on *forever* because we have God and TECHNOLOGY on our side!
But we do.
Has the sun stopped shining? Has the wind stopped blowing? Has the rain stopped falling?
No, oil and gas aren't infinite, but energy effectively is, until the sun goes red giant and swallows us all. Likewise water and elements are effectively infinite, because it's all reused. There's less of it lying around doing nothing than there once was, but there's still a helluva lot more that could be put back into circulation before the sheer tonnage of the biosphere equals that of the time of the dinosaurs. And that degree of resource utilization lasted for 100 million years. That's "sustainability" in anyone's book.
We never weren't like animals. There was no mystical period of high society where abstract thinking dominated all of our affairs. We were elephant seals right down through the millenia. If anything, we're less like seals now than we ever were historically. In medieval Europe, ancient Egypt, ancient China, and in pre-Columbian civilizations, the local elephant dominated everyone around him. They were called nobles. That phenomenon is less pronounced than it once was, but it's still visible everywhere.
"You and me baby ain't nothin' but mammals / So let's do it like they do on the Discovery Channel." —Bloodhound Gang
After that? Robots. Before that, apparently, since Foxconn is already deploying assembly robots. Africa may not get the opportunity to become the new China since China will very likely do what the US could have done, and fully automate assembly lines for everything from toasters to smartphones, in advance of rising wages and standards of living.
iPhones will still cost $500, but I predict a $25 Android smartphone in less than a generation, with effectively no compromises in hardware or software capabilities. The only reason we aren't there already is patent royalties. When the patents expire, expect a candybar smartphone to be as trivially cheap and as trivially available as a simple 12 button corded handset once was.
So how many people are capable of building a transistor? Where will those computer things come from after a couple of generations?
You might be surprised. Nothing has to be reinvented from scratch. The earliest versions of modern chip-making processes are now public domain, as the patents have expired. The patents themselves are less than useful as descriptions of what to actually do to make a chip, but they are legitimately a place to start for anybody bootstrapping a foundry. Those patents are old enough that many copies of them exist in printed form, so having a functional computer connected to a functional Internet is not a prerequisite for access.
But I don't see how it's possible to collapse that far any longer. Maybe before the ascendance of ARM chips, you had a good point. There were only two companies in the world making fully capable CPUs (I discount microcontrollers here because they're usually too specialized). Nowadays there's an ARM foundry around every corner. ARM cores may not be cutting edge in performance, but they can do all the scalar operations you need and enough of the vector operations. And they're dirt cheap and a lot of people all around the world know how to make them. The process is cheap and easy and can work in suprisingly primitive conditions. (Where "primitive" is a relative term, of course.) More to the point, there are ARM systems all over the world now. We're not quite to the point where there's a functional ARM system for every human on Earth, but we're very rapidly approaching that point. That kind of ubiquity is hard to lose once it's established. It would take a world wide religious pogrom to do away with sufficient numbers of those pocket computers to actually put a dent in their availability.
And as long as we have those pocket computers, we can hold things together. We have functional processors and data storage so vast that somebody, somewhere, has access to anything you need to know to keep civilization running, right down to how to produce ad hoc power solutions to keep it all working. Making a solar panel in your garage isn't really feasible, but making a multi-kilowatt wind turbine is astonishingly easy, especially when salvaging parts, and you could store complete plans for how to do so in a tiny fraction of your phone's storage device, available for the rest of your life.
Civilization is a lot more robust than many people imagine. Some of that robustness happens specifically because people imagine it isn't, and so they take steps to improve an already remarkably resilient system. If it bothers you, join the crowd. Storage for detailed plans and procedures for making every kind of machine required for at least a modicum of civilization costs less than $100, with room not just for blueprints, but for How To instructional videos for every piece of it. Leave out the video and depend on just detailed textual instructions and that storage can be solid state for the same price.
You can either fight this shake-down and show that none of the income was earned in NY, or just pay $Y.
The state of Colorado does the same thing, as a matter of policy. Fortunately "fight it" is as easy as filling out a one page form and mailing it in and you never hear from them again. Don't know if NY is the same, but I would expect it to be.
While I like the idea of easy to swap chargers, I don't really like the idea of the government mandating it.
They've already mandated the electrical sockets in the walls of your house. Do you have a problem with that? Would you really like to have to replace all your lamp cords, or buy adapters, just because you moved down the street to an iHouse? Oh and you'll have to replace your blowdryer because the circuit breakers in an iHouse only go up to 6 amps, not 15, and they're physically a different shape from the RobotHouse circuit breakers so you can't just buy a RobotHouse breaker and replace the bathroom breaker in the box, and even if you buy a NoName breaker that happens to be the right shape, you still can't use it because it won't authenticate to the iHouse breaker panel....
Libertarian talking points persistently miss the fact that standards backed by jack-booted thugs with guns enable markets. Electrical power in your house works so incredibly well so incredibly cheaply because a government standard forces it to be that way. You can go to Home Depot and buy a new outlet for 79 cents and know that everything you own that plugs into the wall will work with it. It has worked so well for so long that people don't even think about it. Because they don't have to think about it. It Just Works(TM). It's been forgotten why it works, and that's a problem. The alternative is an absolute disaster.
Your Social Security contributions carry no legal promise, guarantee or obligation to be paid back to you. It's a general tax, as far as legal obligations go, and the Federal Government has zero legal requirement to pay you a single dime. It's not a retirement plan at all (because you are not guaranteed some sort of payback); it's simply a vote-buying mechanism.
You've posted that more than once, and so far as I know you're right, but..... I can't think of a surer way to trigger a revolution than to cease all Social Security payments. "My grandma is homeless because of YOU!" *blam* It's a really short conversation.
In other words, there's a reason they call it "mandatory spending." It may not be legally mandated, but even the Great Apathetic People would react to that change. Spy on them 24/7? Sure, no problem. Fight wars all over the world using their children? Sure, no problem. Charge them more for telecommunications than any other country? Sure, no problem. But even greedy imperialist warmongering elitist assholes know better than to touch Social Security.
You say that like it has any force of law. It doesn't. "Calls on Congress" doesn't mean shit, and especially right now when the House is controlled by The Other Party, it really doesn't mean shit.
Your blah blah is blah blah, so I'm fine with you being embarrassed.
The net result of the fed increasing the money supply and inflation, is a tax on everyone who currently owns US dollars, as each of their dollars now purchases fewer real goods.
That's as may be, but the cost of my mortgage next year will be exactly the same as it was every month this year, and that will be true for nearly 15 years. And it's by far the largest percentage of my spending.
Inflation can hurt, especially when income doesn't keep pace with it, but lots of things are pinned, immune to inflation for the duration of their existence. Fixed interest loans being the prime example. Even if my salary doesn't keep pace with inflation, my biggest expense won't budge, inflation or not.
As has been said here on Slashdot more than once, holding currency in inflationary times is bad, but owing currency is good. And have you seen how much the American people collectively owe? For once, the 99% don't get the raw end of the deal. (Unless their salaries are declining.)
Timothy. You claimed that the House originated President Obama's budget proposal. Citation needed please.
It does. The executive proposes the budget as required by the Budget and Accounting Act of 1921. The House turns the proposal into a bill, as required by the Constitution, editing it as it sees fit along the way. The executive can not create a bill. The bill then follows the normal constitutional procedure for introduction into the Senate, passage in both houses, reconciliation of the versions, and submittal to the executive for signature or veto.
The Constitutional requirements are actually very simple. Here they are, verbatim (including the habit of arbitrary capitalization of nouns common at the time):
"All Bills for raising Revenue shall originate in the House of Representatives; but the Senate may propose or concur with Amendments as on other Bills." —US Constitution Article I, section 7, clause 1.
"No money shall be drawn from the Treasury, but in Consequence of Appropriations made by Law; and a regular Statement and Account of Receipts and Expenditures of all public Money shall be published from time to time." —U.S. Constitution Article I, section 9, clause 7.
Reined! REINED GODDAMNIT! As in the reins on a horse. Reigning is what a king does. It's pretty much the exact opposite of the meaning of the idiom. A king does whatever he likes. A reined in horse goes where its rider wants.
It does not collect the content of any communication, nor do the records include names or locations. The NSA only collects the type of information found on a telephone bill: phone numbers of calls placed and received, the time of the calls and duration.
You can tell she's never actually seen her own phone bill. If she had, she'd know they include your name and address—just like the NSA data.
And while we're on the subject, when was the last time you saw an itemized phone bill? It's been at least five or six years since I've seen one. The NSA data has more information than a phone bill.
Here's a visualization of the MCT Heavy Lift Vehicles, to scale with the existing Falcon 9 and the under-construction Falcon 9 Heavy. (Rocket designation is fictional, of course.) The visualization includes possible cargo shrouds.
Yes, this monster will have a larger lift capacity than the Saturn V. Each individual Raptor is less capable than an F-1 engine, but there will be nine of them, rather than five.
I like how you think I'm a nihilist because I think space is empty. But you're not a nihilist because you think our planet is a "rock", and the species is doomed if we don't do what you want us to do?
On the one hand you have me, who advocates stopping wasting time on obvious non-starters, and we have you, who is so lost in imagination and sci-fi you really think you speak for the species.
What's this "we", white man? Nobody asked you to do shit. And you're not doing shit. So quit whining about the shit you're not doing.
On the one hand, we have you, who claims something that has been started and will be continued is an "obvious non-starter", and then we have the rest of us, who don't have a problem watching some guy spend his money.
Slashdot Mirror
"We're not saying anything new here. We're just saying the same things that need to be said again and again with fierce conviction."
Thank you for that. Who said it?
Just pointing out to anyone taking the above poster seriously that he's quoting a nazi site. Friatider.se.
Well yeah. It's really hard to sling shit at Sweden and make it stick. Don't know where they found the magic lamp, but the genie hasn't quit working there yet.
For example if the inflation goes to 600%, wouldn't your loan immediately become 600% of the total amount you borrowed in the past?
Most loans do not. "Normal" mortgages, student loans, car loans, and business loans are fixed rate loans. Only credit cards normally have floating interest rates, and they're usually pegged to the prime rate, which may or may not react to inflation. (Depends on what the Fed does. For the last generation or so, the prime rate has been all about inflation, but it goes down when inflation is higher, not up.) Loan amounts never float at all. (With the exception of the loan you got from Guido, which has illegal terms.)
If the interest rate is fixed, the holder of the loan can do nothing to adjust the terms of the loan for inflation. In inflationary times, fixed rate loans are the friend of the buyer. As long as your salary is keeping pace with inflation, you have more money available with which to make payments on your loans, while your loan amount and loan interest rate have not changed. In deflationary times, fixed rate loans are the friend of the seller. Because the cost of living is declining, in currency terms, employers feel justified in reducing wages, but again, neither your loan amount nor your loan interest rate are changing to match the change in your salary, so you have less currency available to make loan payments.
That's the theory, anyway. In practice, we're living in inflationary times, but American salaries have not kept pace with inflation for many years. Your cost of living has been going up, while the dollars you have available to pay for it have not kept pace. But your neither your loan amounts nor your loan rates have changed, so you're not as bad off as you could be.
Get your DMCA-padded mits off my physical property and stop lobbying for restrictions on my computerized devices.
Seriously. My coworker told me all about what you have to do these days to get original source digital audio to play properly from so-called "legitimate" sources. I've never owned a TV or a BlueRay player, so I've never had to deal with all the HDCP bullshit. I was appalled. Why does ANYBODY put up with that shit?
Take away easy and cheap energy and civilization as we know it would collapse. Take away easy access to water and arable land and civilization as we know it would collapse. Both of these are quite likely to happen to some degree over the next century or so.
Both of these things are likely to happen? Where, exactly, is all the land going to go? Where exactly is all the water going to go? I live next to the Mississippi River. I and 2 million of my closest friends couldn't use all the water that flows past my house even if we tried, and the river's bottom lands remain spectacularly fertile. We would have to go nuts with 1960s-style pollution before the potability of that water or the fertility of that land could be degraded, and even Republicans aren't that stupid.
Cheap energy is a little more complicated, but even if we do literally nothing to change anything about our habits, there's enough coal available to power our current consumption for at least 4 centuries. Approximately 480 years, actually. We have that long to figure something else out. Do you really think we can't?
Energy is effectively infinite, but not at a rate that's going to effectively substitute for the 160 exajoules per year currently provided by hydrocarbon energy. While I'm a big fan or renewables, even with a full-on effort at conversion, you're just not going to be able to sustain an interdependent, international supply chain based on *cheap* energy, nor will you feed 7 billion+ humans.
Fortunately we don't have to. When was the last time you bought gasoline for 17 cents a gallon? Probably never in your lifetime. Ok, so the nominal price that was prevalent for nearly 60 years is misleading. When was the last time you bought gasoline for $1.50 a gallon, inflation-adjusted? Some time in 2000. The inflation-adjusted price is double that now, and never in history has it been cheaper, before or since.
People talk a lot about Peak Oil. That was probably it. The price is going up again, so we're already past operating our interdependent, international supply chain on cheapest energy. You could reasonably argue that we're still operating it on cheap energy, but even after doubling the price, we're still running civilization. To judge by most of the rest of the world, we can double it again and we'll still have something that looks very much like our current civilization. Are you going to argue that energy that costs four times as much as it used to cost is still "cheap"? How about 8 times? 16 times? We're going to find out, probably in our lifetimes.
A big fan of renewables you may be, but you haven't really grasped the numbers yet. 160 exajoules annually sounds like a lot, until you see exactly how much power the Sun delivers annually. 3,850,000 exajoules. Year in and year out, that's how much energy we get from the Sun. Or in other words, enough energy to run our civilization for a year is delivered every hour. Hour after hour after hour. The delivery rate is vastly in excess of what we need. We only have to figure out how to capture a tiny fraction of the total available energy every hour to not only sustain our current interdependent, international supply chain, but continue to expand it as well.
The coming population bottleneck can't be avoided. We will, as a species, one day exist on sustainable energy - all of the remaining 300 to 500 million of us, if we're lucky, and we don't throw too many nukes around to celebrate the transition.
Sure it can, and I just showed you how. No one knows what the peak human population will be, but I'm betting it's considerably higher than 500 million. Given the sheer availability of solar energy, I'm betting peak human population on Earth will be considerably higher than 7 billion, and there will be no major population bottleneck induced by economic disruption. The price of hydrocarbon energy will trend upwards, while the price of solar energy trends downward, and the two curves will intersect, then reverse positions. Solar, in its various forms, will pick up where the hydrocarbons left off. There have never been more engineers on Earth than here are right now. Do you really think we're sitting around doing nothing?
Nothing short of a major comet impact is going to induce that population bottleneck, and with just a little more time the engineers of the world will be able to prevent that too.
So relax and learn to love the bomb.
Most economists would say that Western capitalism requires a growth rate of about 3% per year to keep everyone happy (low unemployment, funding, etc).
Most economists are also idiots chanting a religious mantra. Malthus never ever goes out of style.
Infinite economic growth is unnecessary if the population ceases to expand, and if not for immigration, it would have already done so in the US and western Europe. It already has stopped in Japan. Developed world living conditions ultimately reduce population growth rates. Empirical evidence shows they reduce the rate so far it turns negative. There is speculation as to possible reasons why, but whether or not we understand the reasons, it's happening. I think this nicely sums up why you're jumping at shadows.
So what you're saying is that social activity can give resistance to depression? Does Slashdot count or does one actually need to go outside?
"Social activity" is a euphemism for sex. So yes, you do need to go outside, and no, Slashdot is not sufficient.
We'll have resources forever.!Jesus and Santa Clause and the EIA said so! There's infinite oil and gas! We find more every year RIGHT HERE IN THE USA, don't we?! And we have infinite water! Infinite phosphates! Infinite free money! Golly gosh-a-rootie, the whole ding dang show will just go on *forever* because we have God and TECHNOLOGY on our side!
But we do.
Has the sun stopped shining? Has the wind stopped blowing? Has the rain stopped falling?
No, oil and gas aren't infinite, but energy effectively is, until the sun goes red giant and swallows us all. Likewise water and elements are effectively infinite, because it's all reused. There's less of it lying around doing nothing than there once was, but there's still a helluva lot more that could be put back into circulation before the sheer tonnage of the biosphere equals that of the time of the dinosaurs. And that degree of resource utilization lasted for 100 million years. That's "sustainability" in anyone's book.
We are becoming more like animals.
We never weren't like animals. There was no mystical period of high society where abstract thinking dominated all of our affairs. We were elephant seals right down through the millenia. If anything, we're less like seals now than we ever were historically. In medieval Europe, ancient Egypt, ancient China, and in pre-Columbian civilizations, the local elephant dominated everyone around him. They were called nobles. That phenomenon is less pronounced than it once was, but it's still visible everywhere.
"You and me baby ain't nothin' but mammals / So let's do it like they do on the Discovery Channel." —Bloodhound Gang
After that????
Booom!!!!
After that? Robots. Before that, apparently, since Foxconn is already deploying assembly robots. Africa may not get the opportunity to become the new China since China will very likely do what the US could have done, and fully automate assembly lines for everything from toasters to smartphones, in advance of rising wages and standards of living.
iPhones will still cost $500, but I predict a $25 Android smartphone in less than a generation, with effectively no compromises in hardware or software capabilities. The only reason we aren't there already is patent royalties. When the patents expire, expect a candybar smartphone to be as trivially cheap and as trivially available as a simple 12 button corded handset once was.
So how many people are capable of building a transistor? Where will those computer things come from after a couple of generations?
You might be surprised. Nothing has to be reinvented from scratch. The earliest versions of modern chip-making processes are now public domain, as the patents have expired. The patents themselves are less than useful as descriptions of what to actually do to make a chip, but they are legitimately a place to start for anybody bootstrapping a foundry. Those patents are old enough that many copies of them exist in printed form, so having a functional computer connected to a functional Internet is not a prerequisite for access.
But I don't see how it's possible to collapse that far any longer. Maybe before the ascendance of ARM chips, you had a good point. There were only two companies in the world making fully capable CPUs (I discount microcontrollers here because they're usually too specialized). Nowadays there's an ARM foundry around every corner. ARM cores may not be cutting edge in performance, but they can do all the scalar operations you need and enough of the vector operations. And they're dirt cheap and a lot of people all around the world know how to make them. The process is cheap and easy and can work in suprisingly primitive conditions. (Where "primitive" is a relative term, of course.) More to the point, there are ARM systems all over the world now. We're not quite to the point where there's a functional ARM system for every human on Earth, but we're very rapidly approaching that point. That kind of ubiquity is hard to lose once it's established. It would take a world wide religious pogrom to do away with sufficient numbers of those pocket computers to actually put a dent in their availability.
And as long as we have those pocket computers, we can hold things together. We have functional processors and data storage so vast that somebody, somewhere, has access to anything you need to know to keep civilization running, right down to how to produce ad hoc power solutions to keep it all working. Making a solar panel in your garage isn't really feasible, but making a multi-kilowatt wind turbine is astonishingly easy, especially when salvaging parts, and you could store complete plans for how to do so in a tiny fraction of your phone's storage device, available for the rest of your life.
Civilization is a lot more robust than many people imagine. Some of that robustness happens specifically because people imagine it isn't, and so they take steps to improve an already remarkably resilient system. If it bothers you, join the crowd. Storage for detailed plans and procedures for making every kind of machine required for at least a modicum of civilization costs less than $100, with room not just for blueprints, but for How To instructional videos for every piece of it. Leave out the video and depend on just detailed textual instructions and that storage can be solid state for the same price.
You can either fight this shake-down and show that none of the income was earned in NY, or just pay $Y.
The state of Colorado does the same thing, as a matter of policy. Fortunately "fight it" is as easy as filling out a one page form and mailing it in and you never hear from them again. Don't know if NY is the same, but I would expect it to be.
While I like the idea of easy to swap chargers, I don't really like the idea of the government mandating it.
They've already mandated the electrical sockets in the walls of your house. Do you have a problem with that? Would you really like to have to replace all your lamp cords, or buy adapters, just because you moved down the street to an iHouse? Oh and you'll have to replace your blowdryer because the circuit breakers in an iHouse only go up to 6 amps, not 15, and they're physically a different shape from the RobotHouse circuit breakers so you can't just buy a RobotHouse breaker and replace the bathroom breaker in the box, and even if you buy a NoName breaker that happens to be the right shape, you still can't use it because it won't authenticate to the iHouse breaker panel....
Libertarian talking points persistently miss the fact that standards backed by jack-booted thugs with guns enable markets. Electrical power in your house works so incredibly well so incredibly cheaply because a government standard forces it to be that way. You can go to Home Depot and buy a new outlet for 79 cents and know that everything you own that plugs into the wall will work with it. It has worked so well for so long that people don't even think about it. Because they don't have to think about it. It Just Works(TM). It's been forgotten why it works, and that's a problem. The alternative is an absolute disaster.
http://cheezburger.com/7701692...
Your Social Security contributions carry no legal promise, guarantee or obligation to be paid back to you. It's a general tax, as far as legal obligations go, and the Federal Government has zero legal requirement to pay you a single dime. It's not a retirement plan at all (because you are not guaranteed some sort of payback); it's simply a vote-buying mechanism.
You've posted that more than once, and so far as I know you're right, but..... I can't think of a surer way to trigger a revolution than to cease all Social Security payments. "My grandma is homeless because of YOU!" *blam* It's a really short conversation.
In other words, there's a reason they call it "mandatory spending." It may not be legally mandated, but even the Great Apathetic People would react to that change. Spy on them 24/7? Sure, no problem. Fight wars all over the world using their children? Sure, no problem. Charge them more for telecommunications than any other country? Sure, no problem. But even greedy imperialist warmongering elitist assholes know better than to touch Social Security.
You say that like it has any force of law. It doesn't. "Calls on Congress" doesn't mean shit, and especially right now when the House is controlled by The Other Party, it really doesn't mean shit.
Your blah blah is blah blah, so I'm fine with you being embarrassed.
The net result of the fed increasing the money supply and inflation, is a tax on everyone who currently owns US dollars, as each of their dollars now purchases fewer real goods.
That's as may be, but the cost of my mortgage next year will be exactly the same as it was every month this year, and that will be true for nearly 15 years. And it's by far the largest percentage of my spending.
Inflation can hurt, especially when income doesn't keep pace with it, but lots of things are pinned, immune to inflation for the duration of their existence. Fixed interest loans being the prime example. Even if my salary doesn't keep pace with inflation, my biggest expense won't budge, inflation or not.
As has been said here on Slashdot more than once, holding currency in inflationary times is bad, but owing currency is good. And have you seen how much the American people collectively owe? For once, the 99% don't get the raw end of the deal. (Unless their salaries are declining.)
Everyone knows the real money is in Girl Scout Cookies.
Is that what they're calling it these days...
Timothy. You claimed that the House originated President Obama's budget proposal. Citation needed please.
It does. The executive proposes the budget as required by the Budget and Accounting Act of 1921. The House turns the proposal into a bill, as required by the Constitution, editing it as it sees fit along the way. The executive can not create a bill. The bill then follows the normal constitutional procedure for introduction into the Senate, passage in both houses, reconciliation of the versions, and submittal to the executive for signature or veto.
The Constitutional requirements are actually very simple. Here they are, verbatim (including the habit of arbitrary capitalization of nouns common at the time):
"All Bills for raising Revenue shall originate in the House of Representatives; but the Senate may propose or concur with Amendments as on other Bills." —US Constitution Article I, section 7, clause 1.
"No money shall be drawn from the Treasury, but in Consequence of Appropriations made by Law; and a regular Statement and Account of Receipts and Expenditures of all public Money shall be published from time to time." —U.S. Constitution Article I, section 9, clause 7.
Our elected idiots need to be reigned in.
Reined! REINED GODDAMNIT! As in the reins on a horse. Reigning is what a king does. It's pretty much the exact opposite of the meaning of the idiom. A king does whatever he likes. A reined in horse goes where its rider wants.
Senator Feinstein has significantly less technological prowess than my cat, and has exhibited this on numerous occasions.
Less than a kitten, even.
It does not collect the content of any communication, nor do the records include names or locations. The NSA only collects the type of information found on a telephone bill: phone numbers of calls placed and received, the time of the calls and duration.
You can tell she's never actually seen her own phone bill. If she had, she'd know they include your name and address—just like the NSA data.
And while we're on the subject, when was the last time you saw an itemized phone bill? It's been at least five or six years since I've seen one. The NSA data has more information than a phone bill.
Here's a visualization of the MCT Heavy Lift Vehicles, to scale with the existing Falcon 9 and the under-construction Falcon 9 Heavy. (Rocket designation is fictional, of course.) The visualization includes possible cargo shrouds.
Yes, this monster will have a larger lift capacity than the Saturn V. Each individual Raptor is less capable than an F-1 engine, but there will be nine of them, rather than five.
I like how you think I'm a nihilist because I think space is empty. But you're not a nihilist because you think our planet is a "rock", and the species is doomed if we don't do what you want us to do?
On the one hand you have me, who advocates stopping wasting time on obvious non-starters, and we have you, who is so lost in imagination and sci-fi you really think you speak for the species.
What's this "we", white man? Nobody asked you to do shit. And you're not doing shit. So quit whining about the shit you're not doing.
On the one hand, we have you, who claims something that has been started and will be continued is an "obvious non-starter", and then we have the rest of us, who don't have a problem watching some guy spend his money.
And you just keep posting your drivel...